Pirate:
Bandit qui parcourait les mers pour piller les navires de commerce.

Corsaire:
Navire rapide armé par des particuliers ayant l’autorisation de leur gouvernement de faire la chasse aux navires marchands ennemis.

Störtebeker today

“ He's like Che Guevara, a freedom fighter, but also like Robin Hood, because he fights the rich in the name of the poor ... We need someone like him these days, with all the terrible things happening to workers. ”

— Philipp Benz, Stralsund resident, 2008

Long after his death, Störtebeker would become a figure of legend and political propaganda. Leftists made him a hero of medieval class struggle against the capitalistic Hanseatic League and right-wingers turned him into a Germanic Francis Drake.[citation needed] A statue depicting him stands in Hamburg. He is main hero of Willi Bredel's story (Die Vitalienbrüder ?).

Störtebeker was portrayed on television by Ken Duken in Störtebeker, a 2006 miniseries based very loosely on his life. He was also the subject of a 2007 documentary and of the feature-length movie 13 Paces Without a Head, currently in production.[4]


Popular culture

The German punk band Slime wrote and recorded a song about the exploits of Störtebeker on their album Alle gegen alle. There is also a song by the heavy metal band Running Wild about Störtebeker's life in their album Death or Glory. Another German artist who made a song about Störtebeker is Achim Reichel, who recorded Das Störtebekerlied, which can be found on his album Klabautermann. Störtebeker is also a brewery in Stralsund, whose slogan means, Beer of the Righteous. There is also a punk venue bearing his name in a former squat of Hafenstrasse, in Hamburg.