The Last Return 22

[Top photos of Richard Hess’ David v Goliath statue at the Zeil in Frankfurt/M, and free, public apple trees espaliered outside the Kleinmarkthalle. Bottom photos of premodern-modern-postmodern One World on the Roemerplatz. ]

Friday 17^th May

I’m back staying with M. and C. in Frankfurt-Escherheim. I am going to have lunch with E. in Frankfurt and decide to head into town early for a slow, fairly aimless walk around the centre of ‘my’ old city for about sixteen years in the 1970-80s, wherever it takes me.

I get out at Hauptwache with its old Katherinenkirche, an old originally Baroque protestant church (Telemann was its musical director) heavily damaged in the war and rebuilt in a simpler style afterwards. I’m pleased to see that Richard Hess’ bronze statue of David resting on Goliath’s decapitated head is still there injecting a little beauty and reflection to the start of the Zeil, the usual wide and monotonous pedestrian zone dominated by huge department stores but in summer at least shaded by quite a few over-pollarded plane trees.

This statue, which I remember being erected in 1983, has for me always represented Frankfurt’s old, progressive, protest-and-dissent tradition of which we students were a decisive part in the late 60s-early 70s. The tradition still seems alive and kicking: I’m pleased to read in the current ‘Journal Frankfurt-am-Main’ that Frankfurt is still the ‘protest capital’ of Germany, and that in 2018 there were 1741 registered protest events (23.3 per 10,000 inhabitants), most focussed on demonstrations for refugees and against the far-right, anti-racism, the climate emergency and high rents.

The Katherinenkirche is closed, so I head down a side-street towards the Kleinmarkthalle, Frankfurt’s  venerable old covered fruit and produce market. On the way there I see an ‘Australien-Laden’ (shop) selling all the usual stuff plus Australian souvenir clichés, and suddenly there is an upmarket café wall proudly sporting the words ‘You Sexy Motherfucker’, a form of apparently German-mainstreamed, pseudo-‘hipster-cool’ not yet quite possible in an anglophone country.

Outside the Kleinmarkthalle I’m happy to see a row of six well-pruned and espaliered apple trees, doubtless with a few free apples in season. They speak to an old permacultural desire of mine: I’d love to see free fruit and nut trees everywhere in public spaces, edible landscapes, urban food-growing… as a necessary, life-enhancing part of a communal transition to an ecologically and socially sustainable post-carbon utopia. The building itself is of the usual non-descript, post-war kind; like most of the city, the magnificent original nineteenth-century building was destroyed by allied bombing raids.

Inside, it’s the usual delightful sensory riot of local, Italian, Spanish, Persian fresh food produce, the premodern visual, auditory and olfactory experience of the open market that you can of course never get in a sterile modern supermarket; there is also a stand selling offal (something unknown in Australia), a gardening section selling plants and seeds, and, down a small flight of stairs, a fish-monger with a tank teeming with fearfully swirling fish, one of which, as I watch with a sudden spasm of Aristotelian ‘fear and pity’, tragically almost manages to actually jump out onto the wet concrete. It’s almost enough to make me a vegan.   

I move on to the cathedral, the Dom. A large photo inside shows that, miraculously, the Dom was left unscathed while all around it was absolutely flattened by allied terror-bombing in 1944. Outside at the entrance door, two policemen are standing by an elderly homeless man they have told to move on; as he is packs up his few things, I again feel that familiar sense of helpless pity, irritation, shame, embarrassment. Is he being removed for the ‘benefit’ of tourists and sightseers like myself, to ‘clean up’ the city image, to remove any sense of discomfort that might impact our ‘city experience’ or unaesthetically intrude on our instagrammable selfies?

Inside a service is in progress, and a closed iron gate policed by a stern warden blocks the entrance to us camera-clinching tourists. The warden, gesticulating and hissing through the gate, unsuccessfully tries to get a man standing among us to remove his baseball cap. Service over, our eager crowd is let in. A not too impressive red-brick affair, all too many people. I wander around and before a sculpture of the Pieta hidden away in a corner I see a young woman silently, fervently, ritualistically touching and stroking it, apparently in a certain sequence: first Jesus’ lance wound itself, then Mary’s hand around Jesus, then Jesus’ arm.

From the Dom I first head towards the nearby oxymoronic Neue Altstadt (New Old Town) and Römerplatz. The former is the reproduction of the Old Town done in the 2000s amid much public debate and controversy around notions of ‘authenticity’ and ‘fakeness’. I feel ambivalent: of course one can see that the ‘old’ is brand-spanking new and thus ‘fake’, and yet on the whole it both seems to work in terms of fitting in with what’s there (itself largely post-war façade) and is probably better than just another self-conscious postmodern architectural attempt that would stick out like a sore thumb. To remake, and thus fake, the old is of course a quite postmodern action in itself. There seem to be some residential buildings and if there are, it doesn’t feel like it’s a vibrant neighbourhood; only for the rich, or simply too close to the busy tourist drawcards perhaps?

The Römerplatz is centred on the Justitia statue and fountain in the middle of the square (aptly, often a central place of political demonstrations and speech-making on all matters of social and ethical justice). Dominant on one side is the Römer itself, the medieval town council building and later coronation site (Kaisersaal) of some German emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. The Römer’s old façade is all that was left of the original building after its bombing in the second world war.

Otherwise, it’s our postmodern, not-yet-self-conscious One World milling here on the large premodern-postmodern square, courtesy of mass tourism and our artificially cheap flights: hordes of mainly Asian tourists, some in guided tour groups, the ubiquitous reign of the selfie, a presumably South Korean wedding couple (white dress and veil) posing before the medieval Römer, a frozen-statue man in medieval clothes all in dark metallic-grey who doesn’t seem to get much money in his hat, two Russians with an accordion and in Cossack costumes singing Russian songs and posing for photos with tourists who don’t donate for the privilege.

~ by Peter Lach-Newinsky on August 29, 2021.