In Struensee’s day, Altona was the second-largest city in the Danish kingdom. Its proximity to Hamburg, and the fact that its citizens did not have to belong to guilds, boosted economic growth and created a tolerant intellectual climate.
Struensee’s rented lodgings in Altona became a venue for sociable get-togethers and enlightened conversations. Struensee would invite people to lunch, laying out a modest meal. His guests included progressive doctors, scholars, well-educated military men, merchants, artists and actors – people who had broadened their horizons through travel and life experience, and who exchanged stimulating critiques and new ideas with each other.
The building that housed the customs office, the stock exchange, the concert hall and the meeting hall in Hamburg’s new town was a convivial meeting place with a view of the harbour. This picture depicts Herder, Lessing and Klopstock. Struensee met friends here too – to talk and to play chess.
Reimarus, a distinguished Hamburg professor of Oriental studies and religious philosophy, and director of the Johanneum, was secretly working on a controversial text that was critical of the Bible. As a close friend of his son, Struensee was one of the few people allowed to look at it.
The son of the Hamburg scholar studied medicine in Göttingen, London and Leiden, and developed a modern understanding of medicine and the natural sciences. He introduced the smallpox vaccination to Hamburg, and his published works helped propagate new developments, such as the lightning rod from England.
In the Jewish cemetery in Hamburg-Ohlsdorf is the grave of Struensee’s friend Georg Hartog Gerson, of whom no known portrait exists. Georg Hartog Gerson was a Jewish doctor for the poor. He conducted research on vaccination methods and the infection transmission routes of different diseases.
The Hamburg theologian, educator and writer was removed from his post as a professor at Denmark’s Sorø Academy because of his critical publications. He was then transferred to the Christianeum secondary school in Altona. His progressive views on pedagogy have shaped education and didactics to this day.
This important writer in the Enlightenment era joined the newly founded Hamburg National Theatre on Gänsemarkt as a literary adviser in 1767. The theatre was funded by wealthy burghers rather than the nobility. Struensee and Lessing (who had started out as a medical student) discussed not only theatre but also the spread of disease.
Another of Struensee’s guests was the officer and Holstein landowner Schack Carl zu Rantzau, whose wife Struensee had successfully treated for smallpox. Rantzau lived a very adventurous life, changing jobs and political allegiances frequently. He helped Struensee get his post at the Copenhagen court – but later joined the conspiracy against him.