Frankfurt

No sooner had I blogged the Hamburg card than this arrived from Stefan!  What a co-incidence.

 Card no 222 – 1^st October 2012

Frankfurt am Main, commonly known as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2011 population of 695,624.  The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010.  Frankfurt is the financial and transportation centre of Germany and the largest financial centre in continental Europe.  Frankfurt is an international centre for finance, commerce, culture, transport, education, and tourism. It is therefore considered an alpha world city as listed by the Loughborough University group's 2010 inventory.  In 2011, the human-resource-consulting firm Mercer ranked Frankfurt as seventh in its annual "Quality of Living" survey of cities around the world.  According to The Economist cost of living survey, Frankfurt is Germany’s most expensive city, and the 10th most expensive in the world.  Like Wow! 

Here are some of the main buildings which are shown on the postcard -

The Eschenheim Tower (Eschenheimer Turm) was erected at the beginning of the 15th century and served as a city gate as part of the late-medieval fortifications of Frankfurt. It is the oldest and most unaltered building in the Innenstadt district.

Saint Bartholomew's Cathedral (Dom Sankt Bartholomäus), named after Bartholomew the Apostle, is a gothic building which was constructed in the 14th and 15th centuries on the foundation of an earlier church from the Merovingian time. From 1356 onwards, kings of the Holy Roman Empire were elected in this church, and from 1562 to 1792, the Roman-German emperors were crowned here. Today, it is the main church of Frankfurt.

 

Saint Paul's Church (Paulskirche) is a national historic monument in Germany with great political symbolism, because it was the seat of the first democratically elected Parliament in 1848. It was established in 1789 as a Protestant church but was not completed until 1833. Its importance has its root in the Frankfurt Parliament, which met in the church during the revolutionary years of 1848/49 in order to write a constitution for a united Germany. The attempt failed because the monarchs of Prussia and Austria did not want to lose power, and in 1849, Prussian troops ended the democratic experiment by force of arms and the parliament was dissolved. Afterwards, the building was used for church services again.  St. Paul's was partially destroyed in World War II, particularly the interior of the building, which now has a modern appearance. It was quickly and symbolically rebuilt after the war; today it is not used for religious services, but mainly for exhibitions and events.

The Alte Oper is a former opera house, hence the name "Old Opera". It was built in 1880 by architect Richard Lucae. It was one of the major opera houses in Germany until it was heavily damaged in World War II.  Until the late 1970s, it was a ruin, nicknamed "Germany's Most Beautiful Ruin". There were even efforts to just blow it up. Former Frankfurt Lord Mayor Rudi Arndt called for blowing it up in the 1960s, which earned him the nickname "Dynamite-Rudi". (Later on, Arndt said he never had meant his suggestion seriously.)  Due to public pressure, it was finally fully reconstructed and reopened in 1981. Today, it functions as a famous concert hall, while operas are performed at the "new" Oper Frankfurt. The inscription on the frieze of the Alte Oper says: "Dem Wahren, Schönen, Guten" ("To the true, the beautiful, the good").