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protect & clean® x ‘Schöneres Frankfurt’

At the heart of Frankfurt’s city centre, at the southern end of today’s Konstablerwache, is the small street ‘An der Staufenmauer’, which to this day still remains recognisable in the city’s layout as a fragment of the 600-year history of one of the largest Jewish districts in Germany (1356 - 1796 - 1944). The pedestrianised passageway to Kurt-Schumacher-Straße was upgraded and redesigned within the scope of the ‘Schöneres Frankfurt’ programme that aims to make Frankfurt more beautiful. We applied our protect & clean® graffiti product to protect the pedestrianised passageway from being defiled with new graffiti in the future. It’s now possible to easily remove graffiti with water and high-pressure equipment; stickers and similar will also no longer adhere.

The newly designed pedestrianised link was inaugurated on 15 July 2024 – an occasion that presented the opportunity to review its history:

The buildings in the historic Judengasse were destroyed repeatedly, particularly by fire, down the centuries. Especially the northern section of the Judengasse was completely demolished when Napoleon's troops conquered Frankfurt in 1796. The opening of the ghetto and the associated first new civil rights for the Jewish residents opened up the opportunity to rebuild the ruined section with stately neoclassical residential and commercial buildings. The old synagogue dating from 1711 then soon became too small for the growing Jewish community so a new larger one was planned and officially opened as the Große Hauptsynagoge (Great Main Synagogue) in 1860. Its special architecture and religious modernity dominated the newly built section of the Judengasse for the young Jewish Reform Movement and was a symbol of a new understanding that the Jewish residents had of themselves within Frankfurt’s municipal society and their contribution towards it.

More than 100 years later, the Hauptsynagoge, the synagogue on Börneplatz and the synagogue on Friedberger Landstraße were set ablaze by the National Socialist regime’s henchmen on Reichskristallnacht in 1938, as happened everywhere that night in Germany. They were subsequently completely demolished by order of the Lord Mayor of Frankfurt by mid-1939.

The destruction of large parts of Frankfurt's city centre in March 1944, however, revealed the remains of the Hauptsynagoge within the rubble. The American occupying forces placed a commemorative plaque there as early as 1945, which was moved to the current office building at Kurt-Schumacher-Straße 41 before the wall on which it had been installed was removed in the 1960s.

The unfriendly and graffiti-covered pedestrian passageway to Kurt-Schumacher-Straße was upgraded and given a narrative design as a preliminary measure to commemorate the destruction of the large Hauptsynagoge in April 2024. The inside wall has been adorned with large-format images showing the location and the Hauptsynagoge as they were before Frankfurt's old town was totally destroyed in 1944.


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