Martin Mosebach

MY DREAMT-UP AND REAL FRANKFURT

It is part of my peculiar relationship to my birthplace, Frankfurt, that I experience it as one of the most disfigured and ugly of Germany’s cities, and yet my imagination and my mental image of the city would have it as one of the most beautiful cities I know. In me, a dreamt-up Frankfurt and the real Frankfurt live in close quarters and rub shoulders and even overlap sometimes; the imaginary Frankfurt is made of many real elements and the real one has blackly fantastical features. Let me start my sketch of my ideal Frankfurt with a view of the city from a distance, seen by me as a child and later considerably touched up in my memory. Even in times when one could still talk of Frankfurt’s beauty – and as it happens rarely did, Frankfurt before its destruction was obviously not felt by anybody to be particularly beautiful – eternal spring did not reign in the city, as it does in the Frankfurt I picture to myself. Nevertheless, my Frankfurt lies in a spring landscape, where blissfully cool winds full of the scent of blossoms waft towards the city from the slopes of the Taunus massif.

I was still a small child when I saw Frankfurt consciously for the first time. I was led through a sparse wood, the high beech trunks that surround the ruins of the castle at Falkenstein. Thick roots criss-crossed the dirt paths. My attention was held by things close by: black beetles, orange snails, lemon yellow butterflies. At the end of a path as overgrown as a pergola and hence not offering a view, we found a little iron temple to look out from. Here, naked rock jutted out of the earth. And, as if by an explosion, all boundaries were suddenly thrown apart. Below us, a plain spread out immeasurably into the distance. In wide gentle swathes, like a Baroque flight of steps with ample landings decorated with obelisks and towers, the high hill descended into the valley. Fortified little towns lay on its slopes, surrounded by wreaths of gardens and apple orchards. The rows of apple trees covered the slopes in a rib-like pattern. In the far distance the end of the plain could be guessed, more than clearly seen; a sketchily blue hill was Melibocus, I was told. The curious name impressed itself on my mind. On this extraordinarily beautiful day even the Main could be soon, which I have never again managed to see from this viewpoint. A leaden, dark ground that stretched through the landscape, apparently arching like a fish’s belly, that was repeatedly concealed and then would re-appear in a frankly creepy way, like a giant life-form at rest. And the city, pushing in front of the river and absorbing it, collected in the bottom of the basin. Just as people’s gazes wandered downwards, and as the springs bubbled down into the valley, or like the rows of trees forming processions heading downwards, it was as if the city were formed of stones that had rolled down to the river. And the river, that unexpectedly flashed like mercury and that had now retreated to its channel, had filled the whole plain before there was a city here. A thousand tangled arms, of which it was impossible to see which of them formed a separate stream or river and only flowed into the Main, and which were actually part of the Main.

Frankfurt had grown out of endless tracts of marshland, on gentle hills that rose like sandbanks above the wide flat watery plain. My father described it to me, and it felt to me as if the floods of water had only just withdrawn. The exhaust fumes from the city gave that evening a particularly deep red sunset; the smoky haze filled up with a glowing light and floated like a cloud of fire above the city. The streetlamps came on. In the past the inhabitants of the Taunus had a word for Frankfurt as it sparkled at night, they called it ‘the Jew’s brooch’. More than an allusion to the wealthy Jews of Frankfurt, it concealed a general feeling of what was different. Frankfurt, a metropolis in a rural area, an implant in the patchwork of lands belonging to knights, bishops and minor princes, that throughout its history has been crowded with people from other places.

Dense settlement started well before the gates of the city. Frankfurt was certainly connected to the whole world as a trading city, but it also fed on its immediate surroundings. Country estates lay in a broad ring around the city. They belonged to the city’s burghers, who lived there in the summers, but who also ran them as agricultural businesses. Frankfurt is a wine-growing area. Few forms of agriculture have more impact on a landscape than wine-growing. It seems to us to be a higher form of agriculture, the sign of a Western culture influenced by the Romans, nearer to the mainsprings from which Western civilization developed. But the other fruits typical of the region also play a part in forming its character, and give even the stone city a little pinch of their luxurious scents: the strawberries from Eschborn, the asparagus from Mörfelden, the chestnuts from Neuenhain, and the apples and cherries from Niederhöchstadt.

In early summer when I was a boy, so I recall anyway, we were always heading off to the villages at the city limits, to come back home laden with these delicious fruits. Many people had a garden at the edge of the city, and by no means just an allotment. When the weekend came, they would leave for the garden with their equipment and handcart. To me, the city and its rural surroundings were always intertwined. When I heard of the long journeys on foot taken by the young Goethe through Frankfurt’s city forest to Darmstadt or by unfortunate Hölderlin from Bad Homburg to the Adlerflycht Hof estate where his beloved Susette lived, the sense of Frankfurt rounded out to include the gardens around it. A cobalt-blue sky arched over the city, entering my imagined Frankfurt from the Frankfurt cityscapes by Domenico Quaglio. Beyond the city gates the white of the apple blossom foamed, in the city the white and red candelabras were out on the chestnuts, while in every front garden magnolias shone splendidly in unreal profusions of porcelain flowers.

My experience of Frankfurt as surrounded by gardens, rather than by woods, meadows or parks, made a great difference to how I saw the city. People work in gardens, a landscape of gardens is formed by the work of individuals behind a multitude of fences. The human hand can be seen everywhere. The heads of lettuce and the dahlias grow in beds as straight as the city blocks aligned between streets. Harvesting is accompanied by selling; at each crop’s harvest, a good many villages around Frankfurt resembled large markets. Beside the narrow fields rows of stalls sprung up under sunshades. And these strawberry and asparagus growers are a different breed to potato and root vegetable growers. The poem that in my eyes best epitomises this fruit-, vegetable- and wine-growing countryside’s atmosphere, with its bustle of market gardening activity aiming to attract the good-living city dwellers and their purses, is the poem that the choir speaks in Faust Part II when Euphorion tries to leave his parents: ‘Would you not gently / dwell amid wood and peak? / Let us contently / Vine arbours seek, / Grape-rows the hillocks bound, / Fig-green, and apple-gold, / Fast to the lovely ground, / Lovely one, hold!’ In Frankfurt even figs ripen in hot summers by sheltering walls. The young Goethe tore himself free from just this blessed abundance.

I found that the stone out of which Frankfurt’s most important buildings were built complemented its trees and plants. The red Main sandstone was another crop that the region yielded up. Its soft, bluish red was the city’s ground colour. Combined with the grainy texture of the stone, it reminded one of dark medieval cities. Hamburg’s classical white, Munich’s folkloristic pastels or Cologne’s black and yellow sandstone were all foreign to Frankfurt. Frankfurt’s porous stone looks as though it has soaked up old Bordeaux wine to saturation point.

That is really how I imagined it, and such images still surface in me when I have been away from Frankfurt for any length of time, something that fortunately is often the case. These images are proof of a disturbingly flimsy grasp on reality. But is not the whole youthful ability for self-delusion and fantasy what is needed if one is to imagine something diametrically opposed to reality? For a long time it has been impossible to see Frankfurt as a coherent, tightly woven object that contrasts with its surroundings. Today Frankfurt begins near Wiesbaden and does not even end beyond Hanau.

Frankfurt? No, a nameless patchwork of houses that long ago also consumed the identity of the ancient little towns and villages, once so full of character, that are dotted along the Main valley and at the edge of the Taunus massif. Hattersheim, Flörsheim, Hofheim, Kelkheim, Eschborn – today they are synonyms for horror, neither city nor country, a culture of building new little family homes and giant petrol stations, of logistics yards and concrete pavements, all of that in a fatally loose arrangement that neither creates spaces nor any openness. I can no longer find a viewpoint from which I can see the city. One approaches Frankfurt on the wide concrete ribbons that from above compete with the river, dividing the landscape just as sharply, and one is already deep in a mush of settlements when Frankfurt’s own San Gimignano looms: the bunched towers of the banking district, that now look like some urban mirage, a stage set for the city, the city’s quid pro quo.

In the city itself the tall buildings have a deadly effect. Wind whistles around them, they create a cordon around a barren wasteland. The city stops where they start. They are just craters in a city, even though they tower up so high. But from a distance they pretend to be the city. Above the mush of little family houses, the famous silhouette rises up, no longer defined by church spires, as used to be the case with such circumscribed ensembles, but still reminding one of the form cities once took. The gazes of those approaching the city sweep past the surrounding mess of less tall buildings and an old European instinct tells them: ‘Here is the city’. But it is just an optical illusion, because where the skyscrapers stand, the city isn’t present. Nevertheless, one has to admit that they are the only view that remains of the city of Frankfurt.

And so again it turns out that what we see as the city, our ideal of a city, by which we unconsciously judge each city’s qualities, is a very old concept. Walls make a city, originally no doubt for practical and military reasons, but already in earliest times they were also as an aesthetic sign. Just think of the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelations with its city walls and gates inlaid with jewels, the ‘eternal city’, whose fortifications certainly had no further defensive function. One could imagine that the portrayal of a blissful heavenly world would include the fall of the walls, but the opposite is true, the walls shine in greater beauty. And on one of the earliest European frescos, on which the city is identical to the state, Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘Allegory of Good Government’ in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, the dream of good government is not imagined as the fall of the city walls.

When everything is functioning as it should, there is no need to stay behind the walls, the city gates can be opened, people can stroll on the meadows outside and throw parties there, but the city is still defined predominantly through its walls. There are certainly few obvious advantages to be found in the late GDR’s socialism, certainly nothing from a town-planning perspective – except for the Berlin Wall. I do not mean the wall of concrete that divided Berlin’s inner city, but the deadly strip of land that surrounded the western part of the city. If you head south out of Berlin nowadays, you are suddenly in green fields. A border divides city and countryside that could have been drawn with a ruler; the city wore a steel corset for so long that it still has not spread out beyond it.

Aesthetic attitudes have political consequences. The miracle of the European city is not the product of our democratic, liberally individualistic age. Art historians like to talk of the ‘discovery of landscape’, and tend to place it in the Romantic era. The true discoverers of the landscape were the people who founded cities in times immemorial. They understood the landscape, like a good butcher his meat: its lines, its natural divisions, the direction its fibres run. Placing Frankfurt in this plain, by the river and near to the gentle slopes of the Taunus, was a work of art, a collective achievement arising from an infallible sense of beauty. The capability of establishing cities in this way, which both goes against nature – for the city is nature’s opposite – and at the same time grows out of nature’s spirit and laws, is something that European people lost early on. Just as true European aristocracy can be determined by whether the family took part in the Crusades (any title awarded later not counting for much), so a central European city of any calibre must be at least a thousand years old, and if possible should have Roman foundations, for the Romans possessed a genius for founding cities. They managed what no-one else did: that a military outpost, a fake town in a way, could take root and grow into a wonderfully natural creation that could continue to exist in conditions very different to the original Roman ones. Everything that a European city has by way of charm and secret strength it owes to such gifted founders. A city is indeed what is found, what cannot be made but instead must first of all be understood. In marked contrast to the madness of a whole century of planned urban destruction, cities demand a cautious respect, since they cannot be made but, like an ancient olive tree, need a thousand years to develop their characters. Admittedly, such respect does seem to be a ludicrously tame and superfluous motto, and has been repeatedly torn to shreds and trampled on by the virtues of greed and stupidity promoted in the industrial planning of recent times. The city is not a fruit of democracy, and democrats would do well to remember that. Democrats are sometimes loath to concede that important collective achievements were possible before democracy, that the history of the world did not start with democracy and certainly won’t end with it.

Cities are wonders that develop continually, whatever the current political system. Paris displays ensembles built under feudalism, absolutism, bourgeois liberalism and the early and high industrial mass state, and yet together they form a harmonious whole. All the different eras’ buildings are of the same stone and same height, never planned against the city’s basic principles yet for all their contradictions and radical differences created from a greater historical unity. This unity has not admitted winners and losers, but produced a simultaneity of all the nation’s historical phenomena that rises above day-to-day politics. Admittedly, even Paris has not been able to afford to remain harmoniously embedded in the landscape since its city walls fell. The banlieues are just as full of deadly and shadowy no-man’s lands as the metastatic ring around Frankfurt. Nor is the only successfully founded democratic city an example to the contrary: Manhattan owes its beauty to a rather medieval limitation: the ship-shaped peninsula between the arms of the Hudson River and the sea, on which all the towers are squeezed.

I am no politician and so can allow myself a lack of moderation in what I praise and damn. I love my imaginary Frankfurt, and I hate the actual, dishevelled Frankfurt. Or rather, I am dumbfounded at its ugliness. I will not concern myself with the puny measures – puny in relation to the massive mistakes – that could still prevent the very worst from happening or even heal open wounds. Politics is the art of what is possible, and as the devastation that has turned the fertile Main valley into a steppe of small houses would hardly show any sign of repair after even a hundred years of our best efforts, I do not intend to waste my time with the plans and proposals to such ends. Everything that I really loved has already been destroyed. There are of course enough spots of a minor beauty around, all of them endangered, but let them disappear too, I often think. I admit, this is a childishly irresponsible attitude. The proposal to establish a green belt around Frankfurt that will not be nibbled away at, as the green areas where our city defences once stood have been, in spite of the ancient decree to protect them, is touching and fills me with respect and regret. How will anyone manage to awaken a feeling in Frankfurt’s citizens for such a sacred grove, for an almost religiously respected taboo zone? Only a higher protection, if possible a supernatural one, could guard such a large region from the many forces coveting it.

Then, when some time in the future the civilizing process starts to falter, loses its power, stops and even slides backwards, the sacrosanct green zones could let the landscape reclaim its land. In a besieged Sarajevo, which was a warning for the future of Western urban culture, the rows of cracked high-rise blocks were inhabited by scattered families, similarly to the goatherds who dwelled in the Roman ruins of Piranesi’s etchings. The green areas that in socialist Bosnia just as in capitalist Frankfurt represented a low point of landscape gardening had been turned into fields of potato and cabbage. From them the besieged could supplement their poor and unbalanced diet with some fresh vegetables. Often the most luxuriant bush requires the least care. Thickets of brambles with their tender little flowers can cover a whole abandoned building in a few years. Wild roses can tangle up electricity lines, blades of grass can make the thickest concrete break, and rain and ice can turn metal towers to flaking rust. The river that was dredged to make it deeper will silt up one day, becoming shallower and bursting the banks of its channel. The little rivers that have been forced underground will surface again, none sooner than the Braubach. The plain will no doubt fill with a network of watery veins and return to marshland. The city will by then have disintegrated, as has happened to many more important cities before it.