Hamburg Trivia
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57 free Hamburg trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Hamburg trivia quiz covers Germany's second city from the Hammaburg of 808 to the Elbphilharmonie: the Elbe and the port, Barbarossa's charter, the Hanseatic League, the Great Fire of 1842, the cholera of 1892, Operation Gomorrah, the 1962 flood and the two chancellors born here. It also takes in the Speicherstadt and Chilehaus, the Reeperbahn and the Beatles' Hamburg clubs, Brahms and power metal, Miniatur Wunderland, Hagenbeck's zoo, the Old Elbe Tunnel, HSV's 1983 European Cup, St. Pauli's skull and crossbones, and the city's food — Franzbrötchen, Labskaus, Aalsuppe and the Frikadelle that may have fathered the hamburger. Questions run from easy to expert with the difficulty shown on each one. Every answer has been checked against a primary reference and each question carries its citation. Enjoy this one? Try our Germany and Berlin quizzes next.
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Q 01As of 2024, where does Hamburg rank among German cities by population?
Second
Second, behind only Berlin: a 1937 law merged the neighbouring cities of Altona, Wandsbek and Harburg-Wilhelmsburg into Hamburg, adding half a million people at a stroke.
Q 02Which luxury pen maker has had its home in Hamburg for more than a century?
Montblanc
Montblanc is named after the highest peak in the Alps, whose height in metres, 4810, is engraved on its nibs, yet it has been based since its first years in a port city at sea level.
Q 03Which two other German cities share Hamburg's status as a city-state?
Berlin and Bremen
Berlin and Bremen: like them, Hamburg is a city and a federal state at once, so its mayor ranks as a state premier and the city casts its own three votes in the Bundesrat.
Q 04In 2024, only Rotterdam and which other European port handled more containers than Hamburg?
Antwerp
Antwerp, now run jointly with Zeebrugge as Antwerp-Bruges, has pulled far ahead: Hamburg handled 7.8 million containers in 2024, well short of the 9.7 million it moved a decade earlier.
Q 05By long tradition, which emperor is credited with founding the castle that gave Hamburg its name?
Charlemagne
Charlemagne is the founder of tradition, but digs on the cathedral square showed that the first Hammaburg was a Saxon stronghold of the 700s, levelled around 800 and rebuilt about 820.
Q 06Which missionary, honoured as Hamburg's first bishop, is known as the Apostle of the North?
Ansgar
Ansgar, a Frankish monk, earned the title through his missions to Scandinavia, whose patron saint he now is. By church tradition, Emperor Louis the Pious made him Hamburg's first bishop.
Q 07Which raiders sailed a fleet up the river in 845 and sacked the young settlement of Hamburg?
Vikings
Vikings struck as the Frankish empire was breaking apart. The bishop's biographer wrote that they burned his church and its books, and that he barely escaped.
Q 08Which emperor is credited with the 1189 charter that freed Hamburg's ships from tolls down to the North Sea?
Frederick Barbarossa
Frederick Barbarossa gets the credit, and 7 May 1189 is still celebrated as the port's birthday. The surviving charter, though, was drawn up decades later and is widely judged a forgery.
Q 09Hamburg's 1241 alliance with which city is seen as founding the Hanseatic League?
Lübeck
Lübeck and Hamburg made their 1241 pact to fight together against the robbers who preyed on the road between the two cities.
Q 10Which Hamburg senate tradition, first held in 1356, is billed as the world's oldest of its kind still celebrated?
A ceremonial feast
A ceremonial feast, the Matthiae-Mahl, carries that billing even though it lapsed from 1724 to 1956. The banquet is tied to 24 February, St Matthias's Day, which the Middle Ages counted as the first day of spring.
Q 11Which building did Hamburg blow up during the Great Fire of 1842 to try to stop the flames?
The town hall
The town hall was blown up at the last minute to make a firebreak, once its records had been carried out, but the flames spread anyway. The brand-new stock exchange, ringed by fire, survived.
Q 12Where did the Great Fire of 1842 start?
A cigar factory on Deichstraße
A cigar factory on Deichstraße, Eduard Cohen's, caught fire around 1 a.m. on 5 May. The weather had been unusually dry and the wind kept shifting, so the blaze burned for three days.
Q 13Which epidemic killed about 8,600 people in Hamburg in 1892?
Cholera
Q 21Hamburg's Chilehaus office building, finished in 1924, is famously shaped like what?
An ocean liner
An ocean liner, with a sharp eastern corner that rises like a prow. Its owner, the magnate Henry Sloman, named it for the country where he made his fortune trading saltpetre.
Q 22What does the name Reeperbahn literally mean?
Ropewalk
Ropewalk, from Low German Reep, rope. Twisting ships' cables needed a long, straight track, so in the 1620s the rope-makers moved outside the crowded walled city.
Q 23A 1664 decree of Hamburg's senate made it a crime to harm or even insult which birds on the Alster?
Swans
Swans were a privilege of kings and dukes, so keeping them on the Alster advertised the city's independence. Hamburg has employed a keeper, the Schwanenvater or swan father, since 1674.
Cholera spread through drinking water that Hamburg still pumped unfiltered from its river, because its leaders had argued for decades over paying for sand filters.
Q 14What was the RAF codename for the July 1943 firebombing of Hamburg?
Operation Gomorrah
Operation Gomorrah borrowed the name of a biblical city destroyed by fire. On its first night the RAF dropped clouds of foil strips, code-named Window, for the first time to blind German radar.
Q 15Which occupying power's zone included Hamburg after its surrender on 3 May 1945?
Britain
Britain's 7th Armoured Division drove into the ruined city on the afternoon of 3 May, the same day General Alwin Wolz signed its surrender. Hamburg then sat in the British occupation zone.
Q 16Which disaster killed 315 people in Hamburg on the night of 16 February 1962?
A storm-surge flood
A storm-surge flood burst the dikes and swamped the low-lying district of Wilhelmsburg. The city's police senator overstepped the constitution to call in the army and NATO helicopters.
Q 17Which two future German chancellors were born in Hamburg?
Helmut Schmidt and Angela Merkel
Helmut Schmidt and Angela Merkel were both born in Hamburg, but Merkel left as a baby when her pastor father took a parish in East Germany. Olaf Scholz, later the city's mayor, was born in Osnabrück.
Q 18Which Hamburg concert hall, opened in 2017, sits like a glass sail on an old warehouse?
The Elbphilharmonie
The Elbphilharmonie, nicknamed Elphi, rests on the brick shell of a 1960s harbour warehouse. Due in 2010, it opened years late, after its bill had climbed to about €866 million.
Q 19Which piano maker has built its instruments for the European market in Hamburg since 1880?
Steinway
Steinway, founded in New York by a German immigrant, opened a Hamburg plant in 1880 to get round Europe's import duties. It still supplies every market outside the Americas.
Q 20Hamburg's red-brick Speicherstadt warehouses stand on foundations made of what?
Timber piles
Timber piles driven into the river mud carry the whole district, built from 1883 as a customs-free zone. Clearing the site meant moving some 20,000 residents out of their homes.
Q 24Which Beatle was deported from Hamburg in November 1960 for being too young to work in its nightclubs?
George Harrison
George Harrison was 17, too young to play a nightclub after midnight, and was sent home on 21 November. The band's first Hamburg residency, begun that August at the little Indra club, collapsed within days.
Q 25Which Hamburg photographer, engaged to the Beatles' first bassist, is often credited with their mop-top haircut?
Astrid Kirchherr
Astrid Kirchherr cut Stuart Sutcliffe's hair in the style her art-school friends wore, and his bandmates later copied it. She herself dismissed the credit as 'rubbish'.
Q 26Which famous St. Pauli music venue opened on Friday 13 April 1962 with the Beatles on the bill?
Star-Club
The Star-Club brought the Beatles back twice more that year. A home tape of their final nights there came out as a live album in 1977, after the band tried and failed to block it.
Q 27Which composer was born in Hamburg's cramped Gängeviertel quarter in 1833?
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms hoped to lead Hamburg's Philharmonic concerts, but in 1862 the post went to a singer, Julius Stockhausen. Deeply hurt, he made his career in Vienna instead.
Q 28Which musical's 1986 German premiere began Hamburg's unbroken run of musical theatre?
Cats
Cats opened at the Operettenhaus on the Reeperbahn on 18 April 1986 and stayed for 15 years. Its success led the producers to build another Hamburg theatre, opened in 1990, for their next show.
Q 29Which subgenre did Hamburg bands like Helloween and Gamma Ray help establish?
Power metal
Power metal took its fast, melodic shape on the two albums Helloween released in 1987 and 1988. Guitarist Kai Hansen then quit the band and founded Gamma Ray in the same city.
Q 30Order an Alsterwasser in a Hamburg bar and you get which mixed drink?
Beer with lemonade
Beer with lemonade, the northern name for what southern Germany calls a Radler. In some regions the two names mean different mixes, one with lemon soda and one with orange, and which is which changes from place to place.