It is close to half a century since Horst Fascher was the flyweight boxing champion of Germany, a gold medal prospect in the 1960 Rome Olympics and a young man who knew his way around this wealthy, rough-and-ready port city.
Then one night, as Fascher tells the story, he got into a street fight with a sailor ("I was bloody strong," he recalled, "and quick.") The sailor shoved him and when Fascher hit back the sailor went down, hit his head and a few hours later was dead. Fascher spent six months in jail, and was banned from boxing forever.
"I thought my life was over," he said. "From one moment to the other, all my dreams were gone."
Leaving behind the abstemious, early-to-bed life of a boxer in training, Fascher threw himself into the city's always raucous and racy nightlife, especially the music clubs, the first in Germany to play the latest tunes from overseas.
That is what led Fascher, who is now a graying but fit 70-year-old and a kind of living artifact of this city's long history, to emerge at the center of what became Hamburg's moment of glory in the world of pop music.
As manager of the brand new Star Club, he brought the Beatles to Hamburg in 1962, when the group was on the cusp of global fame, but the Beatles were not the only ones.
"Except for Elvis," Fascher said, "we had everybody: Ray Charles, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Brenda Lee, Chubby Checker, Fats Domino."
Fascher has now published a memoir in German, and a book titled Let the Good Times Roll in English, full of anecdotes about his adventures and misadventures with some of the legends of the music business.
The book has come out just at a moment when Hamburg itself, having disappeared from the pop music scene decades ago, is in a mood to commemorate the moment when it was probably the most important Continental outpost of British and American pop music, the place where, John Lennon said, he grew up.
The city will build a new Beatles Platz to mark the time when they made Hamburg their home away from home. Fascher is clearly a part of the story, one reason why his book went into three printings in just its first month of publication.
But Fascher's picaresque tale, which involves a good deal of sex and rock 'n' roll but also more than a fair dose of lacerating tragedy, seems of far more than local interest. He is a figure at the very center of the 1960s, not only in Hamburg but even in Vietnam, where, after the Star Club, he spent two years managing tours for performers entertaining American troops.
Fascher was born poor in 1936 in Hamburg. His mother was a cleaning lady, his father a seaman who fought in World War II and was held as a prisoner of war in the Soviet Union until 1951.
Luckily for Fascher, when his promising boxing career came to an end, Hamburg was well on the way to restoring itself as a lively, sinful port, a place where British and US troops provided an audience for the new music clubs springing up amid the strip clubs and brothels.
Fascher used to get the latest records from a seaman friend who traveled back and forth from New York to Hamburg. "I started listening to Elvis in 1956 or '57," he said. "I was very up to date."
The music scene was on a street called Grosse Freiheit, or Great Freedom, a place of dissenting churches in the 17th and 18th centuries. Today, it is a domain of garishly lit pornography emporiums and lap-dance joints standing shoulder to shoulder with music clubs, which have been making a comeback. The former Star Club, at 39 Grosse Freiheit, is now a nightclub called Rasputin.
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