By NICHOLAS KULISH


HAMBURG, Germany - Asking for a copy of the St.Pauli Nachrichten at a newsstand in this North German port city is a bit of a gamble. You may get a flashy new publication with tips on where to find fashionable V.I.P. lounges, but you are more likely to be handed a pornographic magazine with an unusually august pedigree.

The rather generic name St.Pauli Nachrichten, which means St.Pauli News, is both hallowed and debased in the history of German media. It is a tale of one historic neighborhood , two magazines with the same title and the long shadow of the original version.

Founded in 1968, the first St.Pauli Nachrichten was a provocative mix of satire, sex and left-wing politics. It was representative of the anything-goes attitude in the infamous red-light district that sprang up outside the old city walls here, which still draws tourists and locals alike to its strip clubs and soccer pubs by the tens of thousands each weekend to the Reeperbahn.

Yet by the same token, the St.Pauli Nachrichten’s recent reincarnation as a lifestyle magazine - the first issue was published in November - is just the latest sign of a neighborhood rapidly going upscale, a phenomenon that local activists say is driving out working-class families and aging revolutionaries.

The original publication became legendary for biting articles by Stefan Aust, who went on to become the top editor of Germany’s leading newsmagazine, Der Spiegel. At its peak, the St.Pauli Nachrichten sold more than a million copies per issue. It was that heritage - and success - that Jens de Buhr, publisher of the new version, said he wanted to build upon when he founded his magazine.

The only problem was that the old version had not disappeared, it had just devolved into an erotic magazine with service advertisements aimed at lonely gentlemen and none of the original political commentary or satire. But instead of looking for another title, Mr.de Buhr agreed to pay the old magazine $355 per issue to let him also use the name. The girlie magazine simply added the words “the original’’to the cover and kept publishing crude photographs.

At a St.Pauli Italian restaurant called Cuneo, where late-night planning meetings for the new magazine had taken place, Mr.de Buhr, 45, said that people in the industry were placing bets as to how spectacular the magazine’s failure would be in a difficult economy that had seen several big German magazines fold.

Mr.de Buhr pushed ahead anyway, printing 100,000 copies of the first issue as a trial balloon.

The magazine sold out.

In the past, soldiers and sailors spread the names St.Pauli and Reeperbahn far and wide, while music fans remember it as the place where the Beatles worked on their sound at establishments like the Star Club, now defunct, on the famous street Grosse Freiheit, whose name means great freedom.

On a recent Saturday night, the streets were packed with revelers spilling out of bars and nightclubs. Prostitutes worked the street corners.

It is out of this mix of the sordid and the swanky that the new magazine has made its identity.“Most lifestyle magazines have no home, they’re just synthetic,’’said Mr.de Buhr, the publisher of the new St.Pauli Nachrichten.“We say very strongly that we have a home port, where you find the erotically dressed bartender who you can go out to the bar and meet afterward.’’