Tag Archives: Hamburger Dom

This article originally appeared in Issue 4 of the new TEATLES magazine, published October 2024, and was written by Dan Rivkin (me, They May Be Parted) and Dianne Ketler (@wouldride on IG). Check in with Teatles Huw if you have interest in a copy.

There’s a story behind every important photo of the Beatles. This is a story – a mystery – about what’s literally behind the Beatles in one of those photos.

The Fab Five — John, Paul, George, Pete and Stu – enliven the foreground, leather-clad and handling their tools of the trade. After more than 60 years, there’s not a lot new to say about Astrid Kirchherr’s photos of the band posing in Hamburg for the definitive portrayals of the savage young Beatles. Only thing is, one photo also has a roller coaster in the background.

I married a roller-coaster person, and the same enthusiasm a Teatles reader has for the Beatles a coaster enthusiast has for the ride. A coaster isn’t just a coaster, it’s one of the last three remaining Arrow shuttle loopers in the world, or it’s an RMC hyper-hybrid, or an out-and-back Gravity Group woodie that runs PTC trains (for instance). I get it. We could come up with a thousand descriptors for John or Paul that aren’t merely “guitarist” or “songwriter.”

So when a conversation between me and my wife naturally turned to the Beatles and amusement parks – did they ride, are there any photos of them on a coaster? – I was able once again to prove there is a Beatles connection to anything.

Even roller coasters. We know Astrid took this iconic photo in November 1960 at the Hamburger Dom “Fun Fair” as part of what amounted to the Beatles’ initial photo shoot during the first of several formative Hamburg residencies. It may not even be obvious they were standing in front of a roller coaster, but the uncropped photo makes it clear.

Studying the photo, my wife was able to determine it was a “side-friction” coaster – an early model that used side-friction wheels in addition to weight-bearing wheels under the trains, allowing the coaster to navigate curved track with more ease. There is one remaining side-friction coaster of the figure-8 variety in the world, which is also the planet’s oldest operating coaster: 1902’s “Leap the Dips,” located at Lakemont Park in Altoona, Pennsylvania, which, sadly, did not open for the 2024 season and whose future is unknown. In the early 20th century, however, the model was much more common.

So the Beatles stood in front of a roller coaster. But what was that ride called? Coaster people don’t have a definitive answer. The enthusiast’s online guide of record, Roller Coaster Database (RCDB), references a side-friction ride at Hugo Haase Park (“H.H. Park”), which operated from 1914-1922 in Stellingen, a Hamburg neighborhood. But we’re looking for a ride in 1960 in a different part of Hamburg, so RCDB doesn’t hold our answer. Beatle people justifiably can’t deliver an answer either.

Our growing interest in the photo dovetailed with our first trip to Liverpool, and the image followed us around town.

Astrid’s photo of the Beatles and the coaster hung framed on the wall at John’s childhood home, Mendips – and if a house can have a name, certainly this roller coaster must, too. A life-size image of Astrid’s photo was on display at the outstanding Liverpool Beatles Museum. The same photo appeared on T-shirts (we bought one) and 8x10s autographed by Pete at the incomparable Casbah Coffee Club.

But everyone we asked – the National Trust guide at Mendips, museum employees and Roag Best Jr. at the Casbah – offered the same answer when we asked if they knew the coaster’s name: “I don’t know.” Dave Bedford, who brilliantly led us around Liverpool and wrote a section of a book on the Beatles’ Hamburg, didn’t have a name either.

A clue to the coaster’s provenance could be the railcar the boys are sitting on, emblazoned with HUGO HAASE – HANNOVER. Haase, the German showman and “Karussellkönig” (“Carousel King”) of Lower Saxony, made his name building carousels and other rides, including the first transportable roller coaster – perfect for building at a fair for people to enjoy, then dismantling to move to the next town in a historic tradition of German traveling fairs and showmen that continues to this day.

Haase built “Roller Coaster,” which still operates at Great Yarmouth Pleasure Beach in Norfolk. That ride debuted in Paris and was subsequently moved to the UK; Madness fans will remember it from the 1982 “House of Fun” video. (Haase’s remarkably beautiful 1907 three-step “El Dorado” carousel, ridden by Theodore Roosevelt, made its way to Coney Island in 1910 and then to Tokyo in 1969, where it operated until 2020.)

Haase pioneered a figure-8 track, which the coaster behind the Beatles strongly resembles. His “Figur-8 Bahn” and “Deep to Deep” models made their way onto colorful and artistic period advertisements, postage stamps and postcards, one of which lists Figur-8 Bahn’s location as “Altona – Hamburg Lurup.” Altona, which is not far from the Heiligengeistfeld where the Dom is held, was also where Astrid and her mother lived and, in a stunning coincidence, might have influenced the naming of the town of Altoona – the present-day home of “Leap the Dips.” A photograph of Haase’s Figur-8 Bahn can be seen on the Hamburger Dom’s website in 2024. Case closed, right?

Sort of. The question is, would a Hugo Haase side-friction transportable figure-8 coaster from the 1920s or ‘30s still be making its way around Germany near the end of 1960? Though Haase died in 1933, his heirs operated his company until 1967. And the Beatles are sitting on the Hugo Haase railcar in November, strongly implying that the coaster had been brought in recently and constructed for the Winterdom, traditionally held from mid-November to mid-December. It is certainly not unusual for a transportable coaster to move around Germany for decades – the modern-day Schwarzkopf “Olympia Looping” coaster is proof of that. “Olympia Looping” has crisscrossed the European fair scene since 1989, and coaster nerds follow it annually. So my wife suspected the coaster behind the Beatles was a Haase Figur-8 Bahn.

Another of Astrid’s photos from that day – this one of George alone – features the same roller coaster and wagon in the background from a different angle. A partial contact sheet of the shot is featured in the 2011 Living in the Material World book. But there’s no new visible information, and it only seemed to reinforce our belief it was a Figur-8 Bahn.

Back home, our pursuit continued. We reached out to the Hamburg tourism bureau with no luck.

Aiming higher, we were able to get a hold of a former Hamburg resident named Klaus Voormann.

In good news, he was kind and replied in an instant.  Here’s the bad news, by email:

We tracked down a cultural anthropologist in Hamburg, Dr. Darijana Hahn, who wrote “the first and only monograph” on Haase, published in 2007. She replied with some incredible information, including several archival photographs of the coaster from different angles, and two German-language pieces which call out Astrid’s photo for its impact in cementing Haase’s legacy – the Beatles doing more to ensure the showman’s place in history than his transportable and ephemeral coasters could.

She thinks the coaster was called “Schlangenbahn” or “Die Schlange,” a ride built in 1934 by the Hugo Haase company that was very similar to the Figur-8 Bahn but resembled a snake (“schlange” translates to “snake” in English). So while Dr. Hahn ultimately held the answer, she had never asked the question of which specific coaster stood behind the lads. Given her status as the most prominent (only?) Haase researcher in the world, it was eye-opening to read her message that she is keenly interested in our work on this topic. And it did much to reinforce the coaster bonafides in this household to learn that my wife had nearly gotten it right by identifying the coaster as a Figur-8 Bahn.

At last, we had a name, and a new word we can tie to the Beatles: Schlangenbahn. A traveling coaster hiding behind a traveling band trying to make a name for themselves.

But did the Beatles care enough to have a ticket to ride it?

We didn’t have to go to Liverpool or Hamburg for our last, and potentially best lead to find out.

As in Pete Best, who was slated to perform less than 10 miles away from our home on a four-date U.S. tour nearly two months after we returned from Liverpool.

Given the opportunity to talk to a Beatle before the show, we only had one question: Do you know anything about that roller coaster that was behind you?

“I have no idea. No idea at all. [The park] was closed, and we went. Astrid took us to a good location to shoot. And it became one of the most famous rock and roll shots in the world ever since then.”

He’s right! But did he or the other Beatles ever go in and blow off steam at the Dom?

“Pffft. No. We had better things to do than ride roller coasters.”

***

Dianne Ketler has lived most of her life in the shadow of Cedar Point. She has ridden 110 roller coasters, 21 of them in the UK. You can follow her @wouldride on Facebook, Instagram and X.