Frankfurt

• 1. Introduction

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  Frankfurt am Main was first mentioned in a document in 794, when Charlemagne presided over an imperial assembly and church synod and the name Franconofurd entered the written record. A founding legend recorded by Thietmar of Merseburg in the 11th century claims Charlemagne and his army of Franks found the river crossing when a doe waded across, showing them the way. The city was named in honor of that moment: the ford of the Franks on the Main. Today this is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse, home to 778,589 inhabitants as of 2025. It is the fifth-most populous city in Germany, yet its administrative boundaries hide a far larger story. How did a shallow river crossing become the headquarters of the European Central Bank and the financial heart of continental Europe? Why do its towers earn it the nickname Mainhattan? And what does it mean that half its people, and most of its young people, carry a migrant background? The answers run through coronations, a failed parliament, a war that flattened the medieval center, and a skyline almost no other city in the European Union shares.

• 2. Ford Of The Franks

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  Frankonovurd in Old High German, and Vadum Francorum in Latin, were the first names set down in the records from 794. The word breaks into two parts: the Germanic tribe of the Franks, and Furt, the cousin of the English word ford, marking where the Main ran shallow enough to wade across. By the Middle Ages the name had shifted to Frankenfort, and in the modern era to Franckfort and Franckfurth before the spelling Frankfurt settled in by the 19th century. The suffix am Main has been used regularly since the 14th century, and the full name means Frankfurt on the Main. Germans sometimes use that full name to keep it distinct from Frankfurt an der Oder, a far smaller city in Brandenburg near the Polish border. The older English spelling Frankfort survives now mostly across the Atlantic, in more than a dozen American towns including Frankfort, Kentucky. One newspaper of record switched its spelling within a few short years: it first used Frankfurt for the city on the Main on the 24th of October 1953 and last used Frankfort on the 10th of June 1954. Locals reach for shorthand: FFM on railway signs, and FRA, the airport code that travelers see on their boarding passes.

• 3. City Of Coronations

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  From 1562 onward the kings and emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were crowned and elected in Frankfurt, beginning with Maximilian II. The ceremonies took place in St. Bartholomew's, the church known as the Kaiserdom or Imperial Cathedral, whose spire was built to plans by Madern Gerthener in 1415 and rises 95 meters. The tradition reached back further still: Louis the German, grandson of Charlemagne, made Frankfurt one of his two capitals alongside Regensburg and founded the collegiate church later rededicated to Bartholomew the Apostle. In 1372 the city became a Reichsstadt, an Imperial Free City answerable directly to the emperor rather than to any local lord. The line of coronations ended in 1792 with the election of Francis II. His coronation was deliberately scheduled for the 14th of July, Bastille Day, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. Frankfurt had also learned to survive disaster: it stayed neutral during the Thirty Years' War but still suffered the bubonic plague carried in by refugees, then recovered its wealth once the fighting ended. In the late 1770s the theater principal Abel Seyler settled in the city and built up its theatrical life.

• 4. From Free City To Prussia

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  Following the French Revolution, Frankfurt was occupied or bombarded several times by French troops and remained a free city until the Holy Roman Empire collapsed in 1805 and 1806. In 1806 it passed to Karl Theodor Anton Maria von Dalberg, the Prince-Primate, and was folded into the Confederation of the Rhine. By 1810 Dalberg had taken the title Grand Duke of Frankfurt, and Napoleon intended his adopted son Eugene de Beauharnais to inherit the duchy after Dalberg's death. That grand duchy lasted only from 1810 to 1813, ending when the military tide turned toward the Anglo-Prussian-led allies. The Congress of Vienna of 1814 and 1815 dissolved the duchy and made Frankfurt a fully sovereign city-state with a republican government. It joined the German Confederation as a free city and became the seat of the confederal parliament, where the Habsburg Emperor of Austria was represented by a presidential envoy. After the revolution of 1848, Frankfurt hosted the first democratically elected German parliament, which met in the Frankfurter Paulskirche and opened on the 18th of May 1848. The assembly drafted a constitution for a unified Germany under the Prussian king, but the project collapsed in 1849 when Frederick William IV refused what he called a crown from the gutter. Sovereignty ended for good after the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, when Prussia annexed the Free City and absorbed it into the province of Hesse-Nassau. The annexation was widely felt in Frankfurt as a grave injustice.

• 5. Bombed And Rebuilt

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  In 1914 the citizens of Frankfurt founded the University of Frankfurt, later named Goethe University, in what stands as the only civic foundation of a university in Germany. A decade later, in 1924, Ludwig Landmann became the city's first Jewish mayor and led a major expansion. During the Nazi era the synagogues were destroyed and the vast majority of the Jewish population fled or was killed. The city held a Nazi prison for underage girls, forced labour camps, a camp for Sinti and Romani people, the Dulag Luft West transit camp for Allied prisoners of war, and a subcamp of Natzweiler-Struthof. Frankfurt was severely bombed during the Second World War. About 5,500 residents were killed in the raids, and the medieval center, once among the largest in Germany, was almost completely destroyed. The fighting reached the streets on the 26th of March 1945, when the United States Army's 5th Infantry Division and 6th Armored Division took the city in contested urban combat that included a river assault. It was declared largely secure on the 29th of March 1945. Even so, more than 40 percent of Frankfurt's buildings still date from before the war. Among the irreplaceable losses was the collection of Cairo Genizah documents in the Municipal Library; the Genizah scholar S.D. Goitein wrote that not even handlists indicating its contents have survived.

• 6. Capital That Never Was

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  After the war Frankfurt joined the newly founded state of Hesse and fell within the American Zone of Occupation. The United States military governor and later the High Commissioner for Germany ran their headquarters from the IG Farben Building, which the Allies had deliberately left undamaged during the bombing. In 1949 Frankfurt was the original choice for the provisional capital of West Germany, and the city even built a parliament building for the purpose. That building was never used as intended and instead housed the radio studios of Hessischer Rundfunk. Konrad Adenauer, the first postwar chancellor, preferred the town of Bonn, partly because it sat close to his hometown. Other politicians worried that naming Frankfurt would make it the permanent capital, weakening support for reunification with East Germany and the eventual return of the capital to Berlin. Reconstruction afterward leaned toward a plain modern style, though a few landmarks such as the Romer, St. Paul's Church, and Goethe House were rebuilt historically in simplified form. Between 2012 and 2018 the old quarter between the Romer and the cathedral was rebuilt as the Dom-Romer Quarter, including 15 reconstructions of historical buildings destroyed in the war.

• 7. Mainhattan

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  Frankfurt is the largest financial hub in continental Europe, and its towers are so unusual that the city is nicknamed Mainhattan, a blend of the Main river and Manhattan, as well as Bankenstadt and Bankfurt. It is one of the few cities in the European Union with such a skyline. The Frankfurt Stock Exchange accounts for more than 90 percent of the turnover in the German stock market and is the third-largest in Europe after London and Paris. In 2010-63 national and 152 international banks held registered offices in the city, including Deutsche Bank, DZ Bank, KfW, DekaBank and Commerzbank, and 73,200 people were employed at banks that year. Commerzbank Tower rises 259 meters at Kaiserplatz, the second-tallest building in the European Union. The Main Tower stands 200 meters and is the only Frankfurt skyscraper with an observation deck open to the public. The European Central Bank has been based in the city since 1998, moving in 2014 into a new complex in the Ostend district built around the former wholesale market hall, the Grossmarkthalle, paired with a newly built 185-meter skyscraper designed for up to 2,300 staff. The ECB sets monetary policy for the Eurozone, and the city has used the slogan The City of the Euro since 1998. The Deutsche Bundesbank, established in 1957 and based in Ginnheim, was greatly respected for its control of inflation through the second half of the 20th century. Banking is only part of the base: the city's DE-CIX is the world's largest internet exchange point.

• 8. Crossroads City

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  Frankfurt Airport became the busiest in Germany, owing to its central location in former West Germany, and serves as the primary hub for Lufthansa, the national airline and Europe's largest carrier. In 1961 it ranked as Europe's second-busiest airport behind London Heathrow. Lufthansa alone employs 35,000 people in the city, and the airport serves as its primary hub with 157 worldwide destinations, against 110 at its second-largest hub in Munich. Frankfurt Central Station opened in 1888, replacing three smaller downtown stations, and was the largest railway station in Europe by floor area until Leipzig Central Station opened in 1915. It is now Germany's second-busiest station after Hamburg, operated by Deutsche Bahn, with 342 trains a day to domestic and European destinations. Nearby, the Frankfurter Kreuz is the most-heavily used motorway interchange in the European Union, carrying 320,000 cars daily. The city's reach extends beyond commerce into culture and faith. It holds the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest book fair, and is one of two seats of the German National Library alongside Leipzig. The Jewish community, with a history dating to medieval times, numbers over 7,200 members and ranks third in Germany after Berlin and Munich, served by four active synagogues. Roughly 52 percent of the city area is green, and Frankfurt is a founding member of the Climate Alliance of European Cities, pledged to cut carbon emissions by half by 2030. On the northern bank of the Main lies a microclimate called the Nizza, where palms, fig trees and lemon trees grow in one of the largest parks of Mediterranean vegetation north of the Alps.