The high staircase looks like a waterfall. Right at the top, apparently far away, where the light glows pale blue, it is strongly tapered, with each step it becomes wider and the blue wall color richer in tone, interrupted only by deep window niches through which the sunlight falls and the scene with its reflections fully brought to life. Until a real living being, commonly known as a person, enters the stairwell on the top podium and destroys the illusion with its size in one fell swoop. The supposedly eternally high staircase turns out to be a staircase with 66 steps. Welcome to the new German Romantic Museum in Frankfurt, where the ordinary is transformed, made exciting and exciting until the illusion is broken.
“The house is our first and most important exhibit,” says Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, director of the Free German Hochstift in the foyer of the new museum. Whoever walks through the building with her and the architect of the house Christoph Mäckler will understand what she means. Because Mäckler dealt with romanticism in a stimulating way in his design and took up its motifs again and again. A German lesson in brick, steel, glass and concrete, if you will.
The architect Christoph Mäckler calls the staircase, which supplies the otherwise almost windowless house with sunlight, “Himmelstreppe”.
(Photo: Free German Hochstift, Photo: Alexander Paul Englert)
The starting point for the dialogue between literature and architecture was also a stroke of luck. Because the property of the new museum is directly adjacent to that Frankfurt Goethe HouseOr rather, of what was faithfully reconstructed between 1947 and 1951 from the pathetic remains of Goethe’s parents’ house, which had been destroyed in the war. The poet spent his childhood here at the Großer Hirschgraben, but a few years later Friedrich Hölderlin also came and went to the Gontards as a private tutor in the immediate vicinity. Until 2011, the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels resided on the property in a 1950s bar that was just as unadorned and sober as the building on the other side of the street. The move out of the Börsenverein and the fact that the Free German Hochstift owned a small piece of garden directly behind it offered the historic opportunity to give the Goethe House more equal neighbors.
Mäckler is doing much better than the Frankfurt architect Michael A. Landes, who was not only responsible for the master plan of the vacated area, but also for the so-called Goethe-Höfe directly adjacent to the museum, next to the Volkstheater and the Cantate Hall also include apartments. The latter in particular has been razed so carelessly that one wonders how many faceless residential boxes Germany will have to endure before this country finally comes to a friendlier residential architecture.
Christoph Mäckler tries harder to do justice to the neighborhood. In any case, one has the impression that the small size of the building, which cost just 12 million euros – another 6.5 million euros were used for the expansion and realization of the permanent exhibition – was good for the Frankfurt skyscraper architect. In order not to overwhelm the Goethe-Haus with the mass of the new building, Mäckler optically divided his design into three houses, which also have three separate entrances – to the entrance hall, to temporary exhibitions and to convey culture, especially for school classes – but also three different facade colors including types of plaster. The ensemble created in this way wants to enclose the Goethe-Haus in a way that it used to be before the war. It does, but without disguising its own time of origin or ingratifying oneself with the past. In fact, the lively distribution of the windows – from top left to bottom right, because they lead to the stairwell -, the prominently placed blue bay window and the three doors make you feel more reminiscent of postmodernism.
The architecture continues the conversation with the past in the foyer, too, from where you can access the temporary exhibition, the Goethe House and the three floors of the Romantic Museum in the basement. “We are standing here on the rubble history of the city of Frankfurt,” says Mäckler, alluding to the stones of the “rubble recycling company”, which were formed from the rubble of the city after the end of the war and used to rebuild the houses, including in the previous building of the museum. The handy TVG stones now cover the elongated foyer, among other things.
“Like a story by Novalis”: the historic fire wall of the Goethe House in the foyer of the German Romantic Museum.
(Photo: © Free German Hochstift, Photo: Alexander Paul Englert)
The history of the location is made even more visible by the historic fire wall of the Goethe House, which completely takes up one side of the foyer. The spatial impression of the wall is enormous, you can immerse yourself in the tactile structure of the masonry, the small stones and the visible traces of the craftsmen almost endlessly. The architecture critic of the FAZ Dieter Bartetzko did not exaggerate when he wrote in 2014: “A spatial impression, moving like a story by Novalis or a poem by Eichendorff”. Bartetzko did not yet know that the sandstone walls of a previously unknown bricked-up window, which must have been made at the beginning of the 17th century, were stuck in the fire wall. One more reason to linger and, like the romantics, to discover history, not rationally, but as a surface for one’s own utopias and longings.
View through the foyer of the German Romantic Museum on the “Romantic Garden”.
(Photo: Free German Hochstift, Photo: Alexander Paul Englert)
From the bright foyer the view falls through the large window front into the “romantic garden”, a small piece of earth that seems to have fallen out of time – even if the bank towers rise behind it – and thus reflects the way romantics deal with nature. In the future, anyone who wants to visit the Goethe House will cross the garden and will inevitably walk past the sculpture group “Faust and Gretchen”, which takes up the theme that runs through the Romantic Museum as a central theme. You can see: Everything is interwoven with everything, relates to one another and reflects on one another.
A truly ingenious view on the top floor of the museum ensures that the Frankfurt present is not neglected. A window is let into the otherwise completely windowless house exactly where the view falls on a kind of triad: from the Paulskirche to the top of the cathedral to the tower of the ECB. You don’t really need to know more about Frankfurt to understand the history of the city and its powers.