Frankfurt

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Another friend in Germany that I have is Herbert, who is actually the father of one of my dad’s co-workers. Their family comes out of Frankfurt and her father still lives there now, so I made a trip this weekend over to visit him. We did not do much the first day, but it was still great fun because we spent basically the whole evening talking about German and European history and language and all sorts of things. His daughter, who lives in Frankfurt and is studying there also came over. She is really cool too, only a few years older than myself and definitely someone I can relate too. She is learning Czech at the moment from some Czech friends she made while playing World of Warcraft. How funny is that!

Saturday however, Herbert and I made a plan and set off to do everything possible in Frankfurt. We started off with the old town, of which very little remains. Frankfurt was almost entirely destroyed in the war and unlike a lot of other German cities, most of the major buildings were not rebuilt. There is only a very small part of town that is re-built in the old style, though it is very beautiful. We also looked inside the Cathedral, which although not super large, is fairly nice and very historically important. For several hundred years during the time of the Holy Roman Empire, every German Emperor was crowned here. It is also unique in this way because it was one of the very few (if not only) cathedrals that was built but that is not the seat of a bishop. I could not really figure out why though. There were also some old Roman baths in Frankfurt, right in front of the cathedral. The Romans actually got up this far and built a wall stretching across most of Europe that is not far from Frankfurt. Anyway, the inside of the cathedral was really nice, though nothing compared with the cathedral in Prague, which will remain in my mind as one of the most amazing buildings in Europe.

Outside the cathedral, we stumbled upon a museum dedicated to the German Children’s book Sruwelpeter (which roughly translates to: Slovenly Peter). I was thoroughly interested in this museum because it was actually one of the books we read for my German class last year and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a book of little poems teaching children about the importance of good hygene, manners, and obeying their parents. However, it is done in a very 19th century style, which I think probably gave the children more nightmares than taught them to be neat! For example, one story is about how a child sucked his thumbs too much. So, to teach him not to do so, the tailor came in and cut both of his thumbs off! The stories are also rather graphically illustrated, which adds to the hilarity and weirdness of these books. Nevertheless, they are quite well loved and they had translations in this museum of almost every language imaginable. Also, there were models and paintings inspired by it. It was pretty funny.

Next we did some walking around the rest of Frankfurt through some of the newer parts. We saw the Opera house, which was quite impressive (in typical opera-house style) and we also saw some protests in front of the opera house. It was not quite clear what they were protesting, but they were quite loud. Herbert, thought that they were probably protesting a proposal to raise the cost of college education in Germany by €500. Given that the present cost of college education in germany is €0, I would not mind too much either way! However, apparently the fear is that if you raise it a little bit, then all of a sudden it will go up to American amounts! However, the cost of free education here is pretty high. Students get all sorts of benefits and discounts, so people try to remain students as long as they possibly can, sometimes for 20 or more years, just taking one or two classes a semeester, or even in some cases, signing up for classes and then dropping them or never coming, but retaining their student status. Herbert told me he thinks the loss to the economy through these discounts that so many people get and through the costs of having so many students is quite high and that a small cost would not be a bad thing because it would be an incentive to go out and earn money rather than staying in school.

We crossed the river then and went to a huge flea market that Frankfurt has every Saturday. There was just about everything you could imagine there and it was fun to just walk around for a bit. We also stopped by a museum on architecture that was across the street. That was pretty cool, though not very large. The best part was an exhibition they had to the Austrian architect/painter Hundertwasser, who designed one of my most favorite buildings in the world: the Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna. His architecture is all colorful and bright, with bright primary colors and gold onion domes and lots of green plantings on the roofs and from the walls. They had models of many of his important works, which were just amazing to see.

Since it was getting late in the day, we then went over to one of Frankfurt’s tallest buildings to take an elevator ride to the top and see the view before it got dark. It was a little foggy, but nevertheless, we got a really good view of Frankfurt and could see the old city as well as the new. Actually, you mainly can see the new because there really is not much old city left. Rather than rebuild the city after WWII, like many German towns did, Frankfurt simply built anew, using the architecture of the day, with lots of modern skyscrapers and sleek modern buildings. It feels very much like an American city, with lots of densly packed skyscrapers in the city center and then low-lying parts around it. Almost every other European city I have visited is the opposite, with the city center (the oldest part) low-lying and windy, retaining a lot of its historical character, and then the high, new buildings being located more on the outskirts of the city where newer development has been. It is interesting to see the contrast, and visiting a city like Frankfurt that is more like the American city, really heightened the contrast.

One of the buildings that was rebuilt was the Goethe house, which is where the famous German poet Goethe was born and lived the first 20 years or so of his life before going off to school and fame. The house has been rebuilt and furnished the way and upper-middle class family would have lived in the time. We got a tour of the building and walked around for a bit. I really would like to read some Goethe. He was really the founder of the Romanticism movement, which is some of my favorite literature, and he is considered the Shakespeare of German literature and I would really like to read him.

After Goethe house, we went home and made a nice dinner. It was so nice to be in a warm house and eat real food and just rest after such a long day. It was really cold and windy that day and it was wonderful to just hang out. Herbert’s daughter came over again and we had another long three-way conversation about everything from language to the world to travelling to politics to video games and computers. It was really fun. I really enjoyed my stay in Frankfurt. It is so nice when travelling to see familiar faces again, even if I did not know them that well to begin with. It is also nice to get to know people better and here I got to do both.

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