Day Trip: The Three Towers of Frankfurt

On a bright, June Sunday,  my friend, Katharina and her partner, Marcel, took me to see Frankfurt.

While I had been in and out of the Frankfurt airport half a dozen times–and I had transferred at a Frankfurt train station even more–I had never actually toured the city itself. It had lodged in my mind as a cluster of distant skyscrapers on the horizon as I ventured through Germany.

Turns out I had missed a real gem. I’ll relate my time in Frankfurt by telling of three towers.

Tower 1: Main Tower

Our first stop, after a fine German breakfast of scrambled eggs and Brotchen, was Frankfurt’s Main Tower, a glass and steel cylinder that dominates the skyline.

The elevator zipped us up to the observation deck. A dial at the door tracked our speed and elevation. The doors opened at 190 meters. A couple more flights of stairs took us to the observation deck, closer to 200 meters. 

Frankfurt is the financial hub of Germany–and it vies with London for the most significant financial center in Europe. Viewing the skyline from high above, many of the other skyscrapers featured the logos of financial firms like Deutsche Bank and UBS. Not far from downtown, my hosts pointed out the European Central Bank, and the Deutsche Borse stock exchange, while not a skyscraper, per se, stood out among the buildings below.

But other features of the Frankfurt landscape stood out from my perch atop the Main Tower: the smaller towers of the city Rathaus appeared among the church steeples and distinct rooftops of the historic quarter, restored in the 1980s after many decades of rebuilding after the city was flattened during the second world war.

The huge, central train station dominated a whole side of the city, sending tracks off in all directions throughout the country. Marcel noted that he liked to follow the track and road lines as they left the city and cut through the hills in the far distance.

I found the Main River and tried to trace it all the way to its junction with the Rhine, across from which lies Mainz. Even from this high vantage point, it was Mainz that was a collection of distant skyscrapers, not Frankfurt.

Tower 2: St. Paul’s Church

From the Main Tower, I had picked out St. Paul’s Church, with its separate bell tower and bronze-green roof. It had been an especial goal of mine to visit this sight, the womb of German liberty.

Today, Germany is a federal republic (Bundesrepublik). It wasn’t always a republic–heck, for most of its history it wasn’t even “Germany.” The road of the German people from being subjects to a series of empires or Reichs to being free citizens of a republic was long and rocky. One of its waymarks was here in Frankfurt.

For a brief time after Napoleon’s defeat of Austria (at Austerlitz, 1805) and Prussia (at Jena-Auerstadt, 1806), the Germans of the Rhineland and Hessia found themselves free. Councils were elected. The Rights of Man were celebrated, but in 1809 (???) Napoleon declared himself L’Emperor, the west bank of the Rhine was occupied by France, and Germans found themselves once again subjects, and under foreign occupation, no less!

Napoleon’s defeat–at the hands of Britain and Prussia in 1814 and again in 1815–didn’t improve things. The Congress of Vienna (1815) put back together many of the Ancien Regimes that had predated the French Revolution and Prussia was granted territories in western Germany. The Industrial Revolution transformed a society that was still oriented toward the nobility.

Into this tinderbox came the revolutions of 1848, which began in France–a country that had also reverted to monarchy–and spread throughout Europe. In March of that year, nobles from throghout the petty monarchies of western Germany, were thrown out of office, and delegates were elected for a parliament that would represent all German people. For their flag, they chose the black, red, and yellow-striped banner that had been the symbol of a united Germany since 1831.

They came to Frankfurt for their first meeting, but when the first meeting place was rejected as being too small, St. Paul’s Church, became the meeting point for these patriots. Change was in the air. Heinrich Hoffman von Fallersleben’s poem, “Lied der Deutschen/Song of the Germans,” captured the spirit of the time: “Germany, Germany above all, above all else in the world.” Philipp Veit’s painting, “Germania,” capured the beauty and hope of a blossoming republic.

I imagined St. Paul’s Church as the German equivalent to Philadelphia’s Independence Hall in my country, the place where liberty was born. 

The church’s ground floor, had an exhibition on the Frankfurt Assembly, which met from 1848-49 (I won’t lengthen this post by describing its sad end). In the church proper, the scene was spare. The walls were all painted white, and the chairs seemed set out for meetings–or, perhaps, divine service. The one sign of the church’s importance in German history were the long, banners that hung around the back, one for each of the German Länder/states.

As we left St. Paul’s Church, Marcel admitted to me that he had learned about his country’s history here. Patriotism is a taboo topic since the Third Reich crushed the 2nd German republic that had arisen from the ashes of World War 1. “Germany above all” became associated with militarism and racism. The third German republic that rose after World War 2 would use Fallersleben’s third verse as its anthem, which is used to this very day: “Unity, justice, freedom for the German Fatherland.”

I think the Frankfurt Assembly would approve.

Tower 3: Johan Wolfgang von Goethe

We toured the historic city, particularly the festive Römerberg Square, ringed with cafes and souvenir stores. With many singers and living statues beckoning the crowds for spare change. We relaxed in the shade of a cafe for a glass of wine.

Then we made our way to Goethe Haus. I don’t know about others in America, but I earned a college degree (in English with a minor in German) without really learning much about the man, who is a titan of German–well, European–letters. I may have read a stray quote here and there, but despite reading his break-out novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and reading up on him, there is still much to learn, and Goethe Haus is a great place to learn.

The museum is divided into two sections. In the “Haus” part, you visit the four stories of his childhood home. He was the son of a prominent lawyer in Frankfurt, and the size of the 18th-century house attests to the family’s wealth. A self-guided tour explains key elements of each room and gives even those with a light background on Goethe reasons to appreciate his influences.

A separate museum outside the house chronicles the Romantic Era of the late 18th- and early 19th-centuries, which Goethe did so much to shape, along with other German writers like Friedrich Schiller and Johan von Herder. I remember studying the English romantics in college–Wordsworth, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge–and exploring their connections to American writers. But I had never really studied the genesis of the romantic movement in Germany, from which the English writers developed.

For a college English major and self-styled Romantic, I found the German Romantic Museum to be the highlight of the visit. It covered the German romantics from Goethe to Grimm, while introducing a number of romantics from Goethe to Grimm (the term is based on the German word for novel, Roman, and it should invoke idealism, imagination, and the pre-Christian Supernatural, not candlelit dinners). 

The museum is also multimedia, so you can listen to Liszt and Rober Schumann while watching the words of the poems that inspired them float across a screen. In boxes scattered throughout the exhibit you can read drafts of famous poems in the handwriting of their writers.

There is no tower in the Goethe-Haus. The tower is Goethe himself, and Frankfurt was his foundation. As an English major, it’s hard for me to compare him to anyone in the English language: he broke out with a hit novel, he wrote a drama about Faust as well as several books of poetry. But later in his life, he associated himself with other Enlightenment-era scientists and philosophers, writing on the nature of color, and responding to the scientific discoveries of that amazing age. If I had to compare him to another writer, it might be Aristotle.

That evening, it seemed like a good share of Frankfurt’s 750,000 residents were on the banks of the Main River, enjoying the warm, summer evening. Marcel took me to an outdoor restaurant, where we completed our day with apple wine and fried potatoes with green sauce.

Frankfurt really left an impression on me: Germany’s past, present and future welded together in one busy, amazing city.