Frankfurt house-to-house warfare

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The Livingston horse stable built around 1880 on the corner of Ulmenstrasse and Kettenhofweg only narrowly escaped demolition for a high-rise office building. It was acquired by the city in 1978, is now the seat of the Westend Action Group and serves as a community center and restaurant.

The Frankfurt house-to-house war included protest movements , rallies, and demonstrations from the Frankfurt spontaneous scene in the early 1970s. The protests were primarily directed against the speculation of land in Frankfurt's West End and the associated displacement of the resident population ( gentrification ).

The house-to-house war marks the beginning of the German squatter movement and the beginning of the end of urban planning that is remote from the citizens . The development of participatory planning models received decisive impulses from the “Frankfurt house warfare”. In the Westend district itself, however, the movement was only able to achieve partial success: while many of the Wilhelminian-style villas threatened with demolition were rescued and the construction of further high-rise office buildings stopped, the evictions of residents by office tenants continued.

initial situation

After the Second World War, the war-torn Frankfurt am Main took over several capital functions for the newly founded Federal Republic instead of Berlin . Especially in economic terms, Frankfurt gained in importance, which went hand in hand with a boost for urban development. The companies settling in Frankfurt triggered a need for space that went beyond the restoration of the pre-war stocks.

After most of the open spaces within the actual city ​​center , i.e. the central and western part of the Neustadt within the ramparts , had been built on towards the end of the 1950s , the question of developing so-called city ​​expansion areas arose . Because of the "west-leaning" of Frankfurt City, which has arisen since the middle of the 19th century with the construction of the Westbahnhof , the two Wilhelminian-style inner-city districts to the west of Neustadt were ideal: the Bahnhofsviertel and the Westend. Both were considered to be well developed due to the proximity of the train station , wide roads and good connections to the airport .

The Bahnhofsviertel is a dense, urban inner-city quarter with Wilhelminian-style block development. The density of use was already high due to the five- to six-storey front buildings and the widespread backyard buildings and could hardly be expanded. The population declined and the number of jobs increased. The corporate headquarters of Dresdner Bank and Philipp Holzmann were built in the Bahnhofsviertel . These two companies were the only ones to erect high-rise buildings in the station district in the 1960s and 1970s.

The neighboring Westend was more interesting for trade, banks and insurance companies than the station district, which was already largely used for business purposes. Like the Bahnhofsviertel, the Westend also suffered comparatively little bomb damage. In the 19th century, however, it was not created as an inner-city business district, but as a residential area for the upper class . Planned for a considerably smaller city, it was now in the middle of the big city due to the rapid urban development that followed. Due to the inflationary period , the murder of Frankfurt's Jews in the Third Reich , the turmoil of the war and post-war and the incipient suburbanization of the bourgeoisie, the original social structure had largely been lost. Around 1960 the Westend was largely a "simple" residential area.

The two- to three-storey neo - classical , Wilhelminian and Art Nouveau villas with their large gardens were largely preserved, albeit often in a poor structural condition. This fact made the Westend on the one hand one of the most beautiful and historically valuable districts of Frankfurt, on the other hand - in view of the central location and the low usage density - in the eyes of urban planning and politics the ideal city expansion area.

In 1962, Lord Mayor Werner Bockelmann announced exactly this in his speech at the opening of the Zurich House on Opernplatz . It was built on a plot of land owned by the Rothschild family , which the city of Frankfurt took into its possession in 1938 during the Nazi era and which was returned in 1960 after sustained resistance. Two thirds, today's Rothschildpark , they kept, one third went to the heirs, whereby an exploitation was granted to compensate. They sold the returned site to Zurich Insurance and Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft , which built high-rise office buildings there. The construction of the Zurich skyscraper at the beginning of Bockenheimer Landstrasse marked the beginning of the rush of builders and investors on the Westend and was followed by a wave of land speculation .

Investors, city planners and the "five-finger plan"

Driven by massive investor interest, the social democratic city ​​administration, represented by the building department head Hans Kampffmeyer and the head of urban planning Hans-Reiner Müller-Raemisch, developed an informal plan in 1968 to expand city uses into the Westend: the so-called five- finger plan . He planned not to completely redesign the Westend, but to concentrate office uses in new high-rise buildings along five development axes . Starting from the Opernplatz as a "palm of your hand", this should affect the Taunusanlage or Mainzer Landstrasse , the Kettenhofweg , the Bockenheimer Landstrasse , the Oberlindau and the Reuterweg (clockwise) .

Above all, however, the “index finger” and “ring finger”, ie Kettenhofweg and Oberlindau, were narrow residential streets that were previously unaffected by inner-city uses. Thanks to its numerous elegant villas, the Bockenheimer Landstrasse was also one of the most beautiful and elegant streets in the city. All three streets were therefore extremely unsuitable for massive densification through high-rise development. It quickly became apparent that the plan could only be implemented at the cost of considerable city destruction.

This endangerment of the architectural and urban heritage of the city, which was already badly reduced by the war destruction, was given far less importance in the city administration than in the public. With reference to the successful urban development program Neues Frankfurt of the twenties by Kampffmeyer's predecessor Ernst May , a functionalist- oriented planning policy was pursued , which clearly showed little respect for the structural evidence of the city's rich history . Since the 1950s, the supreme and expressly named principle of Frankfurt city planning has also been the car-friendly city . The numerous projects to combat the housing shortage have been limited to the construction of new residential areas on the outskirts since around 1960 after the completion of the reconstruction of the city center and the lifting of the forced management of living space. B. the northwest town . The maintenance of inexpensive living space in the old stock played no discernible role in Frankfurt's housing policy , although the population showed great interest in modern housing in the traditional neighborhood.

The overall importance of the five-finger plan for the structural and social redesign of the West End is difficult to assess. The conflict of interests between urban housing policy and the interests of the long-established citizens arose as early as the early 1960s, and even after 1968 many of the controversial but approved building projects lay outside the five development axes named in the plan. In any case, the plan helped to politically legitimize the emerging protests.

One passage in the finger plan in particular had a significant effect: a minimum size of 2,000 square meters was specified as a prerequisite for a high level of utilization of a property by building an office high-rise. Private owners of residential buildings then tried to acquire neighboring properties and to combine them into a large area in order to then earn money by selling them to a builder on the increase in the price of the land. In the first year after the finger plan was passed, the most intensive land acquisitions occurred in the Westend. According to the Frankfurt planning department, there were seven individual buyers or groups of buyers, a total of fewer than 30 people, who bought a large part of the property. They received loans from seven banks for more than one billion German marks . The squatters strongly criticized the fact that the Hessische Landesbank , half of which belonged to the then social democratic state of Hesse and whose board of directors was Frankfurt's Lord Mayor Rudi Arndt , also granted such loans.

Conflict and resistance

The destruction of the West End by real estate speculation took on worrying forms in the late 1960s. The number of apartments fell rapidly, in 1968 alone the number of living spaces fell by more than 4,000. Most of them were converted into offices or residential buildings were demolished and replaced by office buildings. Rooms for office purposes can be rented for significantly higher rents than for residential purposes. In addition, there was the speculative prospect of obtaining approval from the city authorities for a new building with a much larger area.

The methods used to evict the tenants were drastic. Necessary repairs were deliberately omitted, apartments that had already been rented out were occupied with so-called guest workers . The catastrophic overcrowding, with many people crammed into each room, led to the neglect of the houses. The sanitary facilities were insufficient, and plagues of rats developed. Homeowners deliberately made their apartments uninhabitable: heating suddenly failed, pipes broke and massive, sometimes nocturnal construction noise annoyed the tenants.

When the residents finally gave in to this pressure, numerous historically valuable old buildings were demolished and replaced by office buildings in the style of the time. The Bockenheimer Landstrasse in particular changed its image radically, with practically nothing of the former upper-class boulevard remaining. Building speculation, tenant eviction and demolition also reached unimagined proportions in many side streets. Within four years, the population of the West End halved to around 20,000.

For the first time in recent German building and planning history, however, resistance developed in the West End. The events coincided with the general mood of optimism and protest of the student movement and sparked a resistance movement that was to have consequences up to the present day, not only for Frankfurt's West End, but also for the general self-image of urban planning in Germany.

As one of the first citizens' initiatives , around 700 citizens founded the Westend Action Group (AGW) in 1969 . The AGW declared its goal to be “committed to maintaining a functional, social and architectural mixed structure in the west end of the city of Frankfurt. She called for the conversion of the district from a residential area to an expanded city to be set, the expulsion of the multi-layered population to be stopped and not even more old buildings to be destroyed without taking into account social aspects and maintaining the cityscape. ” The chestnut trees on Bockenheimer Landstrasse, which after the If subway construction plans should disappear, AGW helpers demonstratively kept them alive in a dry period. With around 12,000 questionnaires, the AGW obtained documents about the living conditions in Westend and made them available to the city.

In view of the large number of vacant houses despite the housing shortage , the first squattings in the history of the Federal Republic took place at Eppsteiner Strasse 47, Liebigstrasse 20 and Corneliusstrasse 24. Students and families of guest workers moved into these houses. Numerous occupations followed. The vacant house in Grüneburgweg 113 was the first house that was only occupied by students.

Although parts of the movement in the style of the time and the political-social currents of the time pursued a class-struggle - left-wing radical rhetoric against "big business" in general, the resistance in the Westend was supported by a broad coalition of completely different affected groups and groups, which stood out from the " left youth ”and the very political student movement extended to churches and trade unions to the affected“ guest workers ”and the petty bourgeois residents. The citizens' movement in the West End also enjoyed great sympathy among the general public, in large parts of the press and even in parts of the ruling party, the SPD.

In the autumn of 1971 the city administration decided, under pressure from the property owners, not to tolerate any further squatting. The evacuation of the occupied house at Grüneburgweg 113, which was enforced by the police, resulted in the first of numerous street battles in the Westend. The dispute was subsequently carried out with great severity on both sides.

A change ban issued on January 5, 1971 following a request by the city council to prepare a development plan, as well as the Hessian ordinance against misappropriation of living space , issued in 1972 initially led to an end to the unlimited property speculation in Westend. The Hessian Monument Protection Act of 23 September 1974 and a list of houses worthy of monument protection drawn up by the Westend Action Group have protected numerous buildings from future demolition plans.

Because a large number of houses and apartments were vacant for speculative reasons, but for which there were neither demolition permits nor permits for the misappropriation of living space , the municipal dormitory company was commissioned by the city to endeavor to use them temporarily. At that time, the residential home company managed nineteen hostels and two refugee hostels, totaling 9,500 apartments. She then concluded temporary lease agreements with many homeowners and left the apartments to those who wanted to move in or who had already moved in as squatters. However, there were considerable arrears in rent and the residents often did not move out after the lease agreements had expired. The dormitory society obtained eviction orders and had the houses evacuated by the police.

The conflicts were not limited to Frankfurt's West End. The joint stock construction company for small apartments and Hellerhof AG , which were mainly owned by the city and owned over 12,000 old apartments at the time, increased rents by twenty to sixty percent in 1972/1973. These apartments were built to house mostly families of low-income civil servants, city trams, garbage collectors, postmen and railroad workers. In the simple apartments, some of which had no bathroom and were still heated by coal stoves, the companies had rarely had repairs carried out; but the rents were low, and the tenants had often modernized at their own expense. Initially, 4,000 tenants refused to agree to the rent increase, over 1,000 risked litigation. Young socialists and old communists from the Gallus quarter , where the KPD had a stronghold before 1933, organized tenants 'resistance in tenants' associations.

aftermath

Some of those involved in the Frankfurt house-to-house war later gained national political prominence. On the side of the squatters, the later Green politicians Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Joschka Fischer , who at the time belonged to the organization Revolutionary Struggle , were among the spokesmen. Ignatz Bubis played an important role among the property speculators . Bubis bought houses that were to be demolished for the planned new construction projects and rented them to students until the building permit was granted. Fischer also lived temporarily in houses owned by Bubis. In the immediate vicinity of Frankfurt University, Bubis owned a block of four three-story Wilhelminian-style houses on the corner of Bockenheimer Landstrasse and Schumannstrasse , which was occupied for a long time and when it was cleared in 1974, one of the largest street battles between demonstrators and police in the history of the city broke out . In mid-1972, the city's building committee approved the construction of an office building on this property and made the construction of fifty social housing units on Altkönigstrasse, where Bubis owned another property, required as replacement living space. After the development was demolished, this area lay fallow for years due to a lack of interested parties and caused considerable financial disadvantages for its owner.

The squatter movement quickly spread to other major West German cities. The best known here were the Berlin-Kreuzberg district, which was also threatened in its existence by new urban planning , later the conflicts over Hamburg's Hafenstrasse and, for the time being, the last climax, the squatting in the eastern part of reunified Berlin at the beginning of the nineties, including in Mainzer Strasse .

The last occupied house in Frankfurt's Westend, Siesmayerstraße 6 , which has been occupied since 1971 , was handed over to the new owner, Deutsche Bank , in 1986 . The squatters had prevented the planned demolition and achieved that the three-storey Wilhelminian style villa was placed under a preservation order.

In urban planning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, participatory models and citizen participation replaced the failed technocratic understanding of planning based on the infallibility of the planner. The growing appreciation of historical buildings was also expressed from the mid-seventies through the legally strengthened monument protection .

The SPD, which had ruled Frankfurt since the end of the war, lost power in the 1977 local elections to the previously opposition CDU, which gained an absolute majority. The new Lord Mayor Walter Wallmann initiated a rediscovery of the historical cityscape, which was expressed, among other things, by the reconstruction of the old opera and the reconstruction of the east line of the Römerberg .

The high-rise construction in Frankfurt shifted from the Westend to the major axes of the western city like the Mainzer Landstrasse and the Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage , since the skyscraper master plan in 1990 in the narrower banking district on both sides of the Neue Mainzer Strasse .

The remaining old buildings in the Westend could largely be preserved after the house-to-house war, but the displacement of the old, lower-income residents continued. Service providers such as banks and law firms moved to the lavishly refurbished Wilhelminian style villas instead of newly built office buildings, some of which are also used as residential property by wealthy private individuals. The population of the district fell from 40,000 to 18,000 between 1965 and 1987. The Hessian ordinance on misappropriation of living space from 1972 was repealed in 2004.

The premiere of the 1975 theater play Der Müll, die Stadt und die Tod by Rainer Werner Fassbinder at the Schauspiel Frankfurt , which was inspired by the Frankfurt urban warfare, was prevented on October 31, 1985 by members of the Frankfurt Jewish Community and other demonstrators by occupying the stage and actors and the audience engaged in discussions, so that the performance was finally canceled. The protesters believed they recognized Ignatz Bubis in the main character of the play, a wealthy Jewish real estate speculator, who at the time was chairman of the Frankfurt community and a member of the board of directors of the Central Council of Jews in Germany . Fassbinder, who died in 1982, was posthumously accused of anti-Semitic attitudes . It was not until October 1, 2009 that the German premiere was finally able to take place in a slightly abridged version in the Theater an der Ruhr in Mülheim an der Ruhr . The Fassbinder play was based on Gerhard Zwerenz 's novel The Earth is Uninhabitable Like the Moon from 1973, which already introduced the stereotypes of the wealthy Jewish real estate speculator. This was understood as an allusion to Bubis and, when it appeared, triggered similar accusations as later Fassbinder's play.

The Westend Action Group was presented with the Theodor Heuss Medal in 1973 as an exemplary citizens' initiative , and its main initiator and long-term deputy chairman Otto Fresenius received the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon.

Residential houses that have been returned to residential purposes

  • Bockenheimer Landstrasse 94/96
  • Bockenheimer Landstrasse 111/113 and Schumannstrasse 69/71 (the "block")
  • Eppsteiner Strasse 47
  • Freiherr-vom-Stein-Strasse 18
  • Ginnheimer Landstrasse 181
  • Guiollettstrasse 56
  • Heidestrasse 11/13
  • Leipziger Strasse 3
  • Niedenau 46, as well as Zimmerweg 13, 15 and 17
  • Niedenau 51
  • Niedenau 57
  • Niedenau 59
  • Schubertstrasse 27
  • Siesmayerstraße 3
  • Siesmayerstraße 6
  • Ulmenstrasse 18

Web links

literature

  • Rudolf Heinrich Apel: Hot soil. Urban development and housing problems. Published by the Press and Information Office of the City of Frankfurt, October 1974.
  • Fritz Backhaus, Raphael Gross, Michael Lenarz: Ignatz Bubis. A Jewish life in Germany . Jewish publishing house , Frankfurt 2007. ISBN 3-633-54224-8 .
  • Frolinde Balser : From ruins to a European center: History of the city of Frankfurt am Main 1945–1989 . Ed .: Frankfurter Historical Commission (=  publications of the Frankfurter Historical Commission . Volume XX ). Jan Thorbecke, Sigmaringen 1995, ISBN 3-7995-1210-1 .
  • Geronimo: Fire and flame. Publisher ID archive, Berlin. 4th edition 1995. ISBN 3-89408-004-3 (Der Frankfurter Häuserkampf p. 59f) (Online [1] ; PDF; 558 kB)
  • House Council Frankfurt: Housing fight in Frankfurt. Writings on the class struggle 2 . Trikont Verlag, Munich, 1974, ISBN 3-920385-62-4 .
  • Richard Herding: Destruction of housing, squatting, ecological change and skyline: public learning process in Frankfurt am Main , August 2000. Full text on the website of the information service for critical media practice.
  • Serhat Karakayali (2000): Across Bockenheimer Landstrasse. In: diskus 2/2000. [2] , (On the author [3] )
  • Wolfgang Kraushaar : Fischer in Frankfurt. Career of an outsider . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2001. ISBN 3-930908-69-7 .
  • Jürgen Mümken (2006): Capitalism and Housing. A contribution to the history of housing policy in the mirror of capitalist development dynamics and social struggles. Publisher Edition AV, Lich. ISBN 978-3-936049-64-0 (On house-to-house fighting in Frankfurt: pp. 228-231)
  • Hans-Reiner Müller-Raemisch: Frankfurt am Main. Urban development and planning history since 1945. Campus, Frankfurt / New York, 1998. ISBN 3-593-35918-9 .
  • Margret Steen: The “Café Marx” and a “five-finger plan”. The west end. In: Jürgen Engelhardt (Ed.): Frankfurt on foot. 20 tours through past and present. VSA-Verlag, Hamburg 1987. ISBN 3-87975-420-9 .

Single receipts

  1. ↑ Müller-Raemisch, page 206.
  2. ↑ Steen, page 180.
  3. ↑ aufbau-ffm.de: first skyscraper - the Zurich high-rise ( memento from September 24, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on June 28, 2007
  4. ^ Rudolf Heinrich Appel, 1974, p. 8.
  5. ↑ Müller-Raemisch, page 205.
  6. ↑ Magistrat der Stadt Frankfurt am Main: Documentation on land speculation and misappropriation of living space in Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main, October 1975, pp. 3-92.
  7. ^ Steen, page 172.
  8. ↑ Müller-Raemisch, p. 211.
  9. ↑ Magistrate of the City of Frankfurt am Main: Documentation on land speculation and the misappropriation of living space in Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main, October 1975.
  10. ↑ a b c Steen, page 179.
  11. ↑ a b aufbau-ffm.de: building supervision authority. Reporting period: 1969–72 ( memento of March 3, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on June 28, 2007
  12. ^ Rudolf Heinrich Appel, 1974, p. 40 f.
  13. ^ First Hessian ordinance on the prohibition of the misappropriation of living space (GVBl. II (362-12)) of January 25, 1972 . In: Hessische Landesregierung (Hrsg.): Law and Ordinance Gazette for the State of Hesse . 1972 No. 3 , p. 19 ( Online at the information system of the Hessian State Parliament [PDF; 117 kB ]).
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on July 17, 2007 .