Hamburg's literary self-portrait is the brick-red, Hanseatic and mercantile north — long winters, cargo manifests, formal dinners. Three writers in particular give the place a useful shape.
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann (1901) is not technically set in Hamburg but in lightly disguised Lübeck, ninety minutes up the coast — but its world of merchant houses, Christmas teas and slow decline is the one in which Hamburg's older generation grew up, and reading it is essential context for understanding the Hanseatic spirit you still meet in the city.
Germany: A Winter's Tale by Heinrich Heine (1844) is the great mocking poem of mid-19th-century German nationalism. Heine, banned from Germany for his politics, returned briefly through Hamburg in 1843 and the central chapters describe the city's bourgeois life, its Jewish community, his publisher Julius Campe (still in business today) and the gritty side of the harbour. Short and very funny.
Crabwalk by Günter Grass (2002) deals with the sinking of the refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, told from the perspective of a Hamburg-based journalist looking into the family stories his mother won't talk about. Grass himself spent his last decades north of the city, and the book has a careful, sober attention to north-German memory of the war.
The Pearl Diver by Jeff Talarigo is a less obvious choice but worth mentioning — a quiet novel about a young woman from Japan who ends up working on a Hamburg container ship in the 1970s. It captures the harbour's culture from the inside in a way the German-language books rarely do.