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The Beatles’ Hamburg period is important for the group’s early career in particular, and is among the most rewritten periods, not least after the group split in 1970. The aim of this article is to identify the original British Hamburg narrative from the 1960s, both its sources and changes in the stories during the decade. For this purpose, a broad review has been made of existing media material from the period. The result shows the existence of extensive 1960s source material and several contemporary narratives of the period, divided here into three categories: the ‘Liverpool narrative’, the ‘national narrative’ and the ‘official narratives’. The most primary is the Liverpool material; the most diverse is the national material; and the one with the greatest impact both in the 1960s and later is the official publications. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.

This article explores the Beat music scene in Hamburg, West Germany, in the early 1960s. This scene became famous for its role in incubating the Beatles, who played over 250 nights there in 1960–62, but this article focuses on the prominent role of fans in this scene. Here fans were welcomed by bands and club owners as cocreators of a scene that offered respite from the prevailing conformism of West Germany during the Economic Miracle. This scene, born at the confluence of commercial and subcultural impulses, was also instrumental in transforming rock and roll from a working-class niche product to a cross-class lingua franca for youth. It was also a key element in West Germany's broader processes of democratization during the 1960s, opening up social space in which the meanings of authority, respectability, and democracy itself could be questioned and reworked.