Golden Pudel Club

A shed against the cranes

The stairs of Park Fiction descend toward a sawtooth-roofed shed attached to the St. Pauli Fischmarkt: there beats the Golden Pudel Club, closer to the harbor cranes than to the tourist mile. The building, a smuggler's prison in the 19th century, became the living room of a counterculture that never wanted to look like a designer nightclub. Outside, people dance on the bleachers; inside, the dance floor is the size of a room and the DJ is an inch away from the audience.

From the Hamburger Schule to electronic underground

The Pudel Club was born in 1988 and in 1994 it settled in St. Pauli Fischmarkt 27 at the hands of Rocko Schamoni, Schorsch Kamerun, and Norbert Karl. First, it was the headquarters of the Hamburger Schule; in the mid-nineties, when Ralf Köster and Tim Lorenz brought the MFOC nights there, the cabin became a laboratory for electronics, dub, house, and forms that did not fit into the commercial circuit. Helena Hauff, Nika Son, or RVDS grew up in that room, and Move D, DJ Stingray, Ben UFO, or Shackleton returned. The Pudel Produkte label and compilations like Operation Pudel documented that scene. Kamerun called it anti-optimization: low capacity, low prices, and a program that gives a platform to underrepresented music.

Ashes, foundation, and three sawtooths

On the night of February 14, 2016, a fire—investigated as arson—destroyed much of the house. The auction was avoided when the Mara and Holger Cassens Stiftung bought the disputed part. The ground floor reopened in August 2017 with money from the city, the Altona district, and a donation campaign by the Pudel Verein für Gegenkultur. In December 2018, the Golden Pudel Stiftung took the property off the market; in July 2019, the upper floor returned, by day for readings, concerts, and community cooking. The reconstructed volume, by Jesko Fezer and Thorsten Liehmann, preserves the cabin scale and shows a fragmented facade toward the Elbe.

The smallest dance floor in the city

There is still only one room, wood, bar, cloakroom, and a garden-terrace that in summer gets fuller than the interior. The official program maintains themed nights almost all week: Die Welt ist eine Pudel, Braindance, or Das Ohr zum Sonntag. The door is governed by a code of respect and an awareness team; filming is prohibited in the club and garden. The Pudel does not want to be the Elbphilharmonie: it wants to continue being the Gallic village of the port.