Spielbudenplatz

This guide to Spielbudenplatz in Hamburg opens in 1879, when Friedrich Hermann Faerber built one of Germany's first wax figure cabinets on this square, lining convicted murderers beside kings and giants for visitors who had no photograph to tell them what a killer looked like. It traces the square's own history as a show-booth quarter dating to the seventeenth century, and the 1943 bombing that tore through the museum and left only a handful of figures standing. The Faerber family rebuilt on this same spot rather than move elsewhere, in the low postwar building facing you now.