Suggestions for Frankfurt Summer Reading
from FFM Aktuell

26.06.2018 | 17:35 Clock | Culture

Photo: Societäts Verlag

(ffm) Summertime, travel time - time for discoveries, which of course can be made not only in faraway countries but also at home, perhaps even right around the corner. A number of new publications make you want to go on expeditions to your own city, offer background information - or simply reading pleasure.

50 exciting stories

Why does the roof of the Nikolaikirche have a hole? What is a phallus doing in the cloister and why is a lion eating a knight at the cathedral while the heraldic eagle on the Römer is looking in the wrong direction? With the help of Frankfurt connoisseurs, including Lord Mayor Feldmann, the authors reveal these and other Frankfurt secrets that some people have already walked past umpteen times, and encourage you to take a closer look next time. Among them are, of course, well-known stories such as the trial of Goethe's Gretchen model Susanna Margareta Brandt or the murder of the high-class prostitute Rosemarie Nitribitt. Frankfurt's long-time city treasurer Ernst Gerhardt remembers the Reich Pogrom Night as a contemporary witness. All destinations can be reached during a stroll through the city centre, whereby a general map with markings as well as the numerous illustrations provide helpful services.

Only a quarter of an hour

A kaleidoscope of very different, but always short texts around well-known Frankfurtensia from apple wine, skyscrapers, bridges including "Briggegickel" to the main station offers the anthology, whose ten chapters you can indeed read in a quarter of an hour. The authors include crime writer Daniel Holbe, in whose short story Frankfurt's best-known son at least appears by name, and cabaret artist Henni Nachtsheim, who encounters fairies in trouser suits, while HR presenter Holger Weinert philosophises in his essay about Frankfurt's post-war development, and weatherman Tim Frühling imagines counterfactually how the Federal Republic would have developed with Frankfurt as its capital. In an atmospherically dense short story, novelist Christiane Gref imagines the pangs of conscience of Frankfurt's city leader Karl Fellner during the Prussian invasion of 1866, which ended with his suicide. Thoughtful, amusing, a little quirky, tragic, but always varied and often surprising, the volume offers itself to the newcomer to the multi-layered Main metropolis as well as to anyone who wants to look at their city and its society from a different angle for once.

A quarter with many facets

For over a century Frankfurt's most dynamic, urbane, but also most controversial district: In no other city quarter does such a changeful, dense and diverse history and present crowd together as in the Bahnhofsviertel - like in a burning glass, the development and contrasts of the Main metropolis are concentrated here in a very small space. After the construction of the main railway station as a sophisticated gateway to the city and with over fifty hotels at the same time its central offer to its guests, all that remained in 1945 was a landscape of ruins. Land speculation, entertainment venues, prostitution and organised crime drove many inhabitants away and ruined not only the reputation of the district, but also that of the entire city. Since the turn of the millennium, the successful "Wohnen und Leben im Bahnhofsviertel" (Living in the Station Quarter) programme has triggered a considerable revaluation; the annual "Bahnhofsviertel Night" - this year on 16 August - attracts thousands of visitors. The quarter has become trendy, without all the problems having been solved. Anyone who wants to delve deeper into this multi-layered architectural and social history, as well as into individual aspects such as nightlife, the drug scene, economic structure, art and culture, will find an ideal companion in the richly illustrated volume accompanying the current exhibition of the same name at the Institute for Urban History.

Women from four centuries

.In addition to localities, however, there are also people to be discovered in Frankfurt's past and present, such as the women who took unusual or specifically Frankfurt special paths, crossing borders to lead lives that were not envisaged in their time - under these sections, this volume brings together portraits of female figures from the past four centuries. Among them are well-known personalities from the city's history, such as the SPD politician and resistance fighter Toni Sender or Elisabeth Schwarzhaupt, the first German federal minister under Konrad Adenauer. But there are also lesser-known members of Frankfurt's urban society, such as two members of the Gontard family of entrepreneurs, whose political salon in the 19th century was a place of exchange with many of the political and cultural greats of their time, or Maria Kunkel, whose divorce proceedings, unheard of at the time, kept the Imperial Court in Vienna and the Imperial Chamber Court in Wetzlar busy a century earlier. This article is not the only proof that many a surprise still awaits Frankfurt's researchers and readers in the archives. Recent research findings also shed new light on per se well-known personalities such as Marie Brentano and the bourgeois society of her time.

An almost forgotten man

It was not until the construction of the Museum Embankment that the Main metropolis offered visionary cultural politicians the means and opportunities to launch new and forward-looking concepts and projects. Only art historians are still familiar with him - a street on the Riedberg campus has only commemorated him for a few years now - is Fritz Wichert, who for a round decade from 1923 to 1933 pointed the way for the city's cultural policy as founding director of the Frankfurt School of Art, with additional duties in other institutions and committees. After he had proven his competence as an art historian and organizer as the founding director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle, as a networker in diplomatic missions during World War I, and as a brilliant feature writer and art educator, Lord Mayor Ludwig Landmann, who knew him from Mannheim, won him over to the project of merging the Städelschule and the Kunstgewerbeschule into one art school. Wichert designed pedagogical concepts, recruited outstanding teachers, and developed teaching content oriented toward modernism; in terms of his basic ideas, Wichert followed a line reminiscent of Hilmar Hoffmann's later postulate of "Culture for All. It is no coincidence that the end of his work coincided with the Nazi seizure of power. His projects, too, fell victim to the Nazis' systematic attack on modern art, since Wichert had hired personalities such as the painter Max Beckmann, who was hated by the Nazis, as teachers at the art school. One small error should be pointed out at this point: Like Wichert, Max Beckmann was disliked by the Nazis as an exponent of artistic modernism, but he was not of Jewish descent (p. 298). Like him, the like-minded Wichert had to withdraw from the art world and spent the remaining years of his life on the island of Sylt, a popular meeting place for the art scene at the time. This book, the result of a dissertation, focuses on a period in which Frankfurt played a pioneering role in culture, urban planning and architecture, which has left its mark on the cityscape and urban society to this day.

Look behind the (high-rise) facades

A novel puts the spotlight on a breed of people who, especially in the last decade, rose to become one of the equally formative and controversial figures of Frankfurt's urban society: The author, himself long active in the financial industry, makes an investment banker his protagonist, who goes about his business in Frankfurt's glass towers in a near, not precisely determined future. Professionally extremely successful, Viktor's doubts about the sense of what he is doing increase. When he sees the previous mechanisms and strategies of his bank, which specializes in corporate acquisitions and mergers, drifting into a dead end, he plans nothing less than a political revolution that will reconnect the art world of money houses to reality and redeem himself from the emptiness of his existence.

Not so much the concise plot as the main character's dialogues and reflections are the focus of the book. They provide critical, at times sarcastic insights into the sometimes brutal world behind the skyscraper facades and into the minds of a professional group shown in a world of their own making, which has little to do with the vast majority of people around them, but whose strategies and transactions shape and control their lives in many ways.