Frankfurt am Main

Over the weekend I went on a trip to Frankfurt am Main. For the first time in a while, I took some time to take some photos with my camera and some turned out quite well.

Frankfurt am Main (not to be confused with Frankfurt an der Oder) is the fifth largest city in Germany with about 750k inhabitants. While that is not that much bigger than my home city of Dortmund (with about 590k inhabitants), Frankfurt has a significantly higher population density – about 3000 inhabitans/km² against 2000. And well, that’s noticeable. Also, Frankfurt a. M. is the only German city with a real skyline. It mainly consists of bank buildings, which isn’t that great, but they look impressive, so…

One of the most impressive things about Frankfurt is the contrast between the beautiful historic city parts and the modern high-rise buildings of the country’s only skyline.

Among other places we visited the local university, the “Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität”. Well, we visited one of their campuses, the “Westend-Campus”. The main building there is the “IG-Farben-Haus”, which is named after the IG Farben, a conglomerate of chemical companies, which was the supplier of Zyklon B, the poison gas that was used to murder hundreds of thousands of people during the Holocaust. The building was used as headquarters of the US occupation forces until 1995, and later became part of the university. After some controversy it was decided that the building should keep its name.

Not without irony is the fact that only a few dozen metres behind the IG Farben building there is a place and a memorial in honor of Theodor W. Adorno, a German philosopher and the author of the popular statement:

Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch.

Writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Of course we visited the airport as well, the biggest one in Germany and the fourth biggest in Europe.

All these photos (except the skyline one that isn’t from me) I took with my Sony α6000 and the bundled lens (camera lenses are expensive, okay?). Editing was done with the open-source application Darktable.