Five-finger cookies
The five-finger cookie was a small square in the old town of Frankfurt am Main , which was formed by the meeting of five narrow streets. It was east of the east line of the Römerberg , south of the market , west of the Langen Schirn and north of the Bendergasse . The popular postcard motif and tourist destination was destroyed in an air raid on March 22, 1944 . Instead of a possible rebuilding, the city decided after the war to clear the rubble. The area was only built over with the so-called Höckerzone in the early 1970s , which disappeared again with the construction of the Römerberg-Ostzeile 1981 to 1983 and the Schirn Kunsthalle from 1984 to 1986. The western entrance to the Schirn rotunda is located at the site of the former five-finger square.
Origin, History and Destruction
The appearance of the five-finger cookie was unique for Frankfurt as well as in comparison with other medieval half-timbered towns:
From west to east, the Schwertfegergässchen , the Drachengässchen and the Goldhutgasse met the Flößergasse running across them , which stretched from the Schwarzer Stern house (address: Römerberg 6 ) on the Römerberg to the east as far as the rear building at Bendergasse 14.
Rapunzelgässchen , which runs directly behind the buildings on Saturday Mountain (now also known as Römerberg-Ostzeile), met Flößergasse shortly before the entrance to the square. From the square all streets led north to the market. The name came from the fact that from a bird's eye view the very narrow old town passages or rows of buildings merged like the fingers of a hand.
With regard to the natural urban development origin, two different theories are in balance: one is based on the assumption that the northern gate of the Merovingian Palatinate was on the site of the Fünffingerplätzchen . Similar to what was customary in urban development later in the Baroque era , the streets were laid out radially towards the gate and were simply built over in the following centuries while maintaining this ground plan. The other theory says that another large market square similar to the Römerberg was located on the site of the alleys. In the early Middle Ages it was built over because of a lack of space and as a result of the market activities that were already shifting.
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In the middle of the 14th century, as the descriptions of the time show, another passage called Löhergasse ran east of Goldhutgasse from Flößergasse towards Markt. Subsequent overbuilding turned the southern part of the former Löhergasse into a backyard of the surrounding houses on Markt, Langen Schirn and Bendergasse. The house Kleines Paradies (address: Markt 27 ) could still be seen in the 20th century through its conspicuously bent front (see picture) that about half of it was built on an original street entrance.
On the earliest surviving topographical representations of Frankfurt, such as the plan by Conrad Faber von Creuznach from 1552 or the famous bird 's eye view plan by Matthäus Merians the Elder from 1628, Löhergasse is already overbuilt and the five-finger cookie is almost as it was which it came to the 20th century. Correspondingly, in the course of the constant lack of building land, the overbuilding can at least roughly be limited to the period between 1350 and 1552. Due to the exposed, transitional framework in the gable, the shape of the Little Paradise allows it to be dated between 1470 and 1550.
The place has remained largely unchanged for centuries. It was not until the advent of tourism at the end of the 19th century that it rediscovered and quickly made it a popular travel destination and a frequent photo and postcard motif. In addition to other classic old Frankfurt views such as the Kannengießergasse or the Roseneck on the corner of Garkücheplatz and Große Fischergasse , within a few years it had the highest representative status for the beauty and type of Frankfurt's old town.
On the other hand, in the second half of the 19th century (between 1862 and 1877) the rather small houses with the address Goldhutgasse 1 and 3 were torn down for reasons that were not clear; Most likely, as is so often the case at this time, the reason is to be found in disrepair. Because despite some representatively spruced up corners, the building fabric of the old town was in a catastrophic condition at the turn of the century. The unplastered and therefore unsightly fire wall of the adjoining house at Drachengasse 5 shaped the place until the 1930s. It does not appear on most postcards from that period or is only slightly trimmed.
At the end of the 1930s, a large-scale old town renovation was carried out in Frankfurt am Main. In contrast to the historicist redevelopments at the turn of the century, which often destroyed more of the substance than redeveloped, and the only superficial measures taken by the Association of Friends of the Old Town in the 1920s, it largely took place under modern aspects of monument preservation.
In 1936, the houses on Fünffingerplätze were also completely renovated, exposing numerous half-timbered structures, the fire wall of the house at Drachengasse 5 was converted into a real facade with windows and a completely new space was created east of Goldhutgasse by means of a coreing measure with the Handwerkerhöfchen (see plan).
During the air raid on March 22, 1944, a devastating firestorm developed in this part of the old town , because there were all half-timbered houses here. Many of them were made entirely of wood down to floor level and burned down completely. Only stone walls on the ground floors of individual houses remained. Although at least some of the destroyed old town houses could have been rebuilt, the city imposed a construction freeze in 1946 and had the rubble cleared by 1950. The butcher's fountain had survived the war badly damaged and for some time still loomed up from the heap of rubble in the old town, until it was dismantled and initially disappeared in a municipal depot. In 1968 it was restored by the Frankfurt sculptor Georg Krämer and was given a new location in Grosse Rittergasse in Sachsenhausen next to the cowherd tower . In 2006 the fountain was removed and stored after the reconstructed putto figure had meanwhile been lost. As part of the Dom-Römer project , the city council has submitted an application to set up the butcher's fountain on the square in front of the reconstructed house on the Golden Scale .
After the rubble was removed, the five-finger cookie remained part of a parking lot until the early 1970s. During the construction of the Dom / Römer underground station and the Technical Town Hall , the so-called hump zone was created from concrete blocks in this part of the old town, which were intended as a foundation for later development.
Only since the reconstruction of the Römerberg-Ostzeile at the beginning of the 1980s can one again feel a touch of the old town narrowness with a lot of imagination in the Rapunzelgässchen behind it, which was once seen from the five-finger cookie with a view of the narrow streets leading to the market. On the other hand, it has since become impossible to restore the square, even in the long term, as the Schirn Kunsthalle is now building over large parts of the original parceling.
Description and topography
The Fünffingerplatz was not so much a place as a crossing of several alleys, since it was not bordered by any closed house fronts except to the south. The impression of a small square was nevertheless created by the winding arrangement of the houses and the curved course of the alleys. Anyone standing at the intersection of the alleys could not look out, although two of the most important hubs in the old town, the market with the chicken market and the Römerberg , were only a few meters away.
The plots on the square were unusually small and had not, as on the surrounding main streets of the old town, been pulled together over the centuries for larger building projects. In order to achieve a maximum floor area despite the small footprint , each upper floor cantilevered considerably compared to the one below. For stabilization, the upper floors rested on strong lugs , as could be seen everywhere along Goldhutgasse (see picture).
The impression of space was reinforced by the butcher's or raftsman's fountain. The pump well , built around 1800, consisted of a simple, ornamentless stele made of Main sandstone , on which stood a boy who leaned against a richly decorated stone water jug; the name of the fountain was reminiscent of the nearby Haus zum Fleischer (house address at that time: Römerberg 14 ), which was demolished in 1873 because it was dilapidated (see picture).
The street names and their etymology
The names of the alleyways at Fünffingerplätze always had a reference to handicraft in their earliest mentions . It can therefore be assumed that, according to the medieval understanding of guildhood , mainly craftsmen were based here, separated by alleyways:
The Goldhutgasse (see picture.), Previously under the wooden shoemakers simply Schuhgasse called, had its modern name from the millinery in the house for the Golden Hut on the corner of Market / Goldhutgasse (Street address: Markt 31 ).
The Löhergasse , which once ran east of Goldhutgasse , also got its name from the craft, when tree bark used for tanning was referred to as Lohe , still common in Old and Middle High German as Lö with umlaut .
In Schwertfeger streets the sword was formerly wrought craft resident. The name of the dragon narrow calle - earlier after working here craft flax weber alley - not clarified completely, possibly encouraged the medieval legends associated with the without the presence of artificial light, almost all day dark and very narrow street the imagination of urbanites.
The name Rapunzelgässchen goes back to the 18th century and testifies to the herb market taking place around this time at the northern exit of the alley to the market. Previously it was also called Seilergässchen after a medieval craft . The name of the rafters alley explained as the same fountain from 1873 demolished house to the butcher - mundartlich also Flösser called.
There was no direct road connection to Bendergasse , but there was a footpath through the cellar of Goldhutgasse 14 / Bendergasse 26, which was popularly known as Stinkgasse - a descriptive name for the hygienic conditions prevailing here.
The houses at the five-finger cookie
All the houses around the square belonged to one of the alleys connecting here. In the south it was the rear buildings of Bendergasse 26 and 24 with the address Goldhutgasse 14 and 12, called Pesthaus and Haus zum Hasen. In the east between Flößer- and Goldhutgasse stood the very narrow house to Widder (address: Goldhutgasse 16 ). After the demolition of the houses at Goldhutgasse 1 and 3, the front building between Goldhutgasse and Drachengasse in the northeast was formed by the Haus zur wilden Frau (house address: Goldhutgasse 7 ). In the northwest, the house at Drachengasse 5 and in the west the Kleine Römer (house address: Römerberg 12 ) and the small cookshop (house address: Römerberg 14 ), which in turn were the rear buildings of the house Großer Laubenberg (house address: Römerberg 16 ).
The houses with one side facing Schwertfeger- or Drachengässchen did not have a corresponding address; they were either on Goldhutgasse or on the market.
Other houses in the vicinity were called, among others, to the harbor , to the Hadderkatze , to the Gleismund or to the golden under cranes . Many of them were designed as restaurants and pubs for the numerous tourists and the active Frankfurt nightlife.
Plague house
The most famous attraction of the little place was the so-called Pesthaus, basically just a rear building of the house with the address Bendergasse 26 (house address for the five-finger biscuit: Goldhutgasse 14). According to tradition, the plague first appeared here in Frankfurt in 1349 .
However, it is questionable that the three-storey, plastered half-timbered house that you can see was actually still a building from the Gothic era: the lack of cantilevers, the rather large-scale dimensions and the ridge tilting expressed by a huge dwarf house rather refer to the 18th century Century than to the Middle Ages.
When the Frankfurt wholesale merchant Johannes Georg Kipp had his parents' house restored in 1924, he called on the Offenbach painter Heinrich Holz , who nonetheless oriented himself towards the traditional historical role of the building in designing the facade and decorated it thematically and with inscriptions that said:
- Pain and delight revolve
- same as the earth and the sun
- but God delivers in his time
The painting below the windows on the 1st floor represented the suffering caused by the plague - crouching figures fighting snakes, while the painting below the 2nd and 3rd floors showed people dancing as a sign of gratitude for the end of dying. Between July 22, 1349 and February 2, 1350, the Black Death claimed over 2,000 people in the city, around a fifth of the population at the time.
At the end of the 1930s, as part of the renovation of the old town, the half-timbered building was exposed, which fell victim to the painting that had only been applied around 10 years earlier. With simple St. Andrew's crosses and diamonds , the result showed a building that was originally designed to look at, but by no means elaborate decorative shapes or even carvings and thus only confirms the thesis that the original plague house was replaced by a new building after the end of the Middle Ages.
House to the rabbit
The neighboring Haus zum Hasen was, at least outwardly, almost completely identical to the neighboring plague house and therefore should also be treated in the same way with regard to the time it was built. It is no longer possible to take a closer look at the history of the building, as the building's half-timbering had been plastered since at least the early 19th century and was never documented in drawings or photographs. In 1924 it was painted by Heinrich Holz like the plague house and given an inscription by Rudolf Kilb :
- From this house five streets lead to pleasure and pain
- How often have they been able to grasp drunken bliss
- The benders tied a tight band around the heart of the wine
- but the cheeky jokes of youth found a bunghole for intoxication
- So let us be so happy fellows every day
- and like the hares put a hook on misery and pain
House to ram
The house, which as a head building between Goldhut- and Flössergasse and with only the northern firewall, was not free, was named Zum Widder . Due to its extremely small parcel, which was less than two meters on the narrowest side facing the square, but on the other side extended over a total of three cantilevered floors and ended with a very pointed roof, it was not only an attractive sight, but often has also been named as the epitome of the Gothic house.
The uncovering of the half-timbered buildings brought to light a progressive construction that was no longer really medieval in any detail. This was made clear by two fully trained man figures in the half-timbered structure, which can only be detected in the half-timbered construction in the second half of the 16th century at the earliest. Due to the conservative citizenship and the associated very long end of the late Gothic period in Frankfurt am Main, the construction can be dated to at least the first half of the 17th century with great certainty.
On the other hand, the ground floor showed some abnormalities: it was not massive, but largely, apart from a roughly knee-high stone plinth, still entirely made of wood. The dowel ceiling between the ground floor and the first floor, visible from the outside, is a further indication that a new building from the 17th century only extended to the upper floors and retained a ground floor that was located at least in the first half of the 15th century.
Overall, the house was an interesting hybrid of medieval and modern carpentry. From an engineering point of view, its loss during the war is highly regrettable, as modern research methods would certainly have provided valuable information about the specific development of half-timbered buildings in old Frankfurt.
Home to the wild woman
The corner house between Drachengässchen and Goldhutgasse was called Zur wilden Frau and was painted thematically, reminiscent of a dragon . Towards the place it hardly had a bigger side than the neighboring house to the Widder, but in the depth it took up almost half of the house block that extended to the market.
Apart from the narrow side, the house with its mansard roof and baroque windows looked like a product of the late 17th or 18th centuries, but here too the uncovering of the 1930s brought unexpected details to light. They exposed massive Gothic corner posts on the ground floor, so that here, too, it can be assumed that the building was a core structure of the late Middle Ages that was only changed in Baroque style.
However, as photos from the early 1940s show, the decision was made against exposing the original framework, probably because, as is so often the case, it had been completely spoiled by the later changes.
Bernem five-finger cookies
In the Bornheim district of Frankfurt today, there is the Bernemer Fünffingerplätze at the intersection between Berger Strasse , which crosses the square, and Heidestrasse, Rendeler Strasse, Löwengasse and Ringelstrasse. His name is an allusion to the meeting of these five streets and at the same time is reminiscent of the five-finger cookie in Frankfurt's old town that was destroyed in World War II. Several times a year, the small Bornheim five-finger cookie is the venue for local celebrations such as the Bornheim Wine Festival and the Bernemer Curb . There is a Christmas tree sale here in the run-up to Christmas .
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- ↑ this and all following address details according to the Frankfurt address book of 1943
- ↑ Johann Georg Battonn took up the subject in his main work ( Local description of the city of Frankfurt am Main . Association for history and antiquity in Frankfurt am Main , Frankfurt am Main 1864), later also Heinrich Voelcker in: Die Altstadt in Frankfurt am Main inside the Hohenstaufen wall . Frankfurt am Main 1937, Moritz Diesterweg publishing house
- ↑ The most important city description of this time is the Liber censuum , written by the Canon of the Bartholomäus-Stiftes , Baldemar von Peterweil , in 1350 , last known print in: Verein für Geschichte und Altertumskunde (Ed.): Archive for Frankfurt's History and Art . Third episode. Fifth volume . K. Th. Völcker's Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1896, pp. 1-54
- ↑ The two houses are still listed in the Ravenstein plan from 1862 (see picture), but they no longer have an entry in the Frankfurt address book from 1877
- ↑ Fleischerbrunnen 1945. altfrankfurt.com
- ^ Fleischerbrunnen on the website art in public space in Frankfurt am Main
- ^ Application NNR 442 of November 8, 2017
- ^ Execution of Heinrich von Nathusius-Neinstedt's commentary on the reprint of the Liber censuum in: Verein für Geschichte und Altertumskunde (Ed.): Archive for Frankfurts history and art. Third episode. Fifth volume . K. Th. Völcker's Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1896, pp. 1-54
- ↑ a b Alt-Frankfurt, New Series . Verlag Englert & Schlosser, Frankfurt am Main 1924, pp. 39–42
- ^ Friedrich Bothe : History of the City of Frankfurt am Main . Moritz Diesterweg publishing house, Frankfurt am Main 1913, p. 92
- ↑ a b Alt-Frankfurt. A legacy . Sauer and Auvermann publishing house, Glashütten 1971
- ^ Manfred Gerner : Fachwerk. Development, structure, repair . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1998
literature
- Paul Wolff , Fried Lübbecke : Old Frankfurt, New Series . Verlag Englert & Schlosser, Frankfurt am Main 1924, pp. 39–42
- Heinrich Voelcker, The old town in Frankfurt am Main within the Hohenstaufen wall . Frankfurt am Main 1937, Moritz Diesterweg publishing house
- Georg Hartmann , Fried Lübbecke: Old Frankfurt. A legacy . Sauer and Auvermann publishing house, Glashütten 1971
- Hartwig Beseler , Niels Gutschow : War fates of German architecture - losses, damage, reconstruction . Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1988, ISBN 3-529-02685-9
Web links
- The five-finger cookie. altfrankfurt.com
Coordinates: 50 ° 6 '36.6 " N , 8 ° 40' 58.8" E