slicepack wrote:"2000 Hamburg 4"
I am aware of the canonical interpretation of this, but I like to think that the original line was the football score "Leeds nil - Hamburg 4" which was just too funny to put on the final version.
It was a postal code, as has been noted. West Germany used to have four-digit number for postal codes. Large cities would have ones ending in three 0's (Berlin was 1000, Hamburg 2000, etc.) Smaller cities would end in two 0's, like Kassel (my old stomping ground, about 210,000 inhabitants - good size place which few people know) which had 3500. In general, the smaller the locality, the fewer 0's at the end of the postal code. Postbauer-Heng probably did not have many, for example. (Where? you ask. That is my point.) (In Franconia [Franken], if you really wan to know.) (8439 may have been the Postleitzahl.)
The four digit number came before the city name, i.e. 1000 Berlin. The postal code may have been shortened to reduce the 0's (1 Berlin, 35 Kassel, etc.). Also, I remember seeing the postal code stick out of the address block, at least in older letters. By that, I mean that the person's name, street, and town/city all lined up top to bottom, but the postal code was a few spaces to the left to highight it. No idea if that was standard or just personal prefernece.
If a large city was divided into further areas, that number would follow the city name, i.e. 1000 Berlin 36. That is how we get 2000 Hamburg 4. (Sometimes the intra-city area number was not used. In Kassel, I rarely saw them, although there was, as far as I know, at least a 3500 Kassel 2.)
In 1995, Germany revised its postal codes to be five-digit. Often a locality in (West) Germany had the same postal code of a town in former East Germany. After unification in 1990, the Deutsche Post got around this for a few years by having people write W (West) or O (Ost) before the postal code. When the new five digit numbers came into use, the W and O were no longer necessary.
So, in 1990 during the release of Vision Thing, there was a 2000 Hamburg 4. Today it is something else, and as far as I have figured, the new postal codes do not necessarily follow the internal city division. I am not sure of what St. Pauli's PLZ is/are now, but I am sure that someone in myhearltland from Northern Germany can offer a suggestion.
Man, did I really just write all that on postal codes which are no longer in use?
Martin
