🇩🇪 Germany · West and the Rhine
Frankfurt is the most modern and cosmopolitan face of Germany: the only city in the country with a real high-rise skyline, home to the European Central Bank and to one of the most important stock exchanges in the world. They call it 'Mainhattan', a play on the river Main and Manhattan, and that label sums up its character: business, finance, international trade fairs and an airport that is a gateway to Europe. It is a city many travellers pass through on the way somewhere else, but it has rather more to offer than its office-city reputation suggests.
It is worth being honest: Frankfurt's old town is not an intact medieval centre like those of other German cities. The city was devastated by Second World War bombing, and its historic heart — the Römerberg and the 'New Old Town' (Neue Altstadt) between the town hall and the cathedral — is a careful reconstruction, the last phase opened in 2018. Even so, it is a very successful and charming ensemble, and the genuine article is a few steps away: the cathedral where the emperors were crowned, the Paulskirche of the first German parliament, and across the river, in Sachsenhausen, the old taverns where cider is served in a stoneware jug.
This guide walks through Frankfurt without misleading postcards: what to see in its rebuilt centre, which museums to choose on the famous Museumsufer (the museum embankment), where to look out over the skyline, how to drink Apfelwein like a local and how to use the city as a base for exploring the Rhine Valley and central Germany. A city of contrasts — skyscrapers and taverns, banking and books, imperial history and modernity — that gives a lot back when you look at it calmly.
Frankfurt has a far older and denser history than its image as a financial metropolis lets on. It began as a settlement beside a ford on the Main; its name, Franconofurd ('the ford of the Franks'), first appears in the year 794, when Charlemagne called an assembly there. In the late Middle Ages it became a free imperial city and a central place in the Holy Roman Empire: from the Golden Bull of 1356, Frankfurt was the official seat of the election of the emperors, who from 1562 were also crowned in its cathedral. At the same time, its trade fairs made it rich and cosmopolitan, and from that merchant tradition came its stock exchange and its banking — including the famous Rothschild family, which emerged from the Jewish ghetto of the Judengasse. In 1848, the city was the setting for the first democratically elected German parliament, meeting in the Paulskirche, an experiment that failed but left a deep mark on the country's democratic memory. Frankfurt is also Goethe's birthplace. The Second World War destroyed almost all of its old town in the bombing of 1944, and the postwar years rebuilt it as the financial capital of the new Germany and, later, the seat of the European Central Bank. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Rhineland heart of Germany: Cologne, a Roman colony and city of archbishops with its Gothic cathedral; the Rhine valley of castles and legends; Frankfurt, city of imperial coronations and today the financial capital; and the Ruhr basin, the country's industrial forge.
Read the history of West and the Rhine →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Frankfurt did not begin as a city of skyscrapers and bankers, but as a river crossing. Its name says it all: Franconofurd, 'the ford of the Franks', the shallow point where you could wade across the river Main. That ford, on a fertile and well connected plain, had been used since Roman times — there was a military camp in the area — but the first written mention of Frankfurt has an exact date: the year 794, when the emperor Charlemagne convened an important synod and imperial assembly there, and signed a document at 'Franconofurd'.
Under the Carolingians, the town rose in rank: it was one of the royal residences and a seat of assemblies of the East Frankish empire, the seed of what would become Germany. Its position in the heart of the country, at the crossing of trade routes linking north with south and east with west, gradually turned it into a place of meeting, market and power.
That vocation as a central point — geographical, commercial and political — is the key to all of Frankfurt's later history. It was not the capital of a great kingdom nor a powerful bishop's seat, but something different and very German: a merchants' city at the centre of the Holy Roman Empire, a place where business was done and, in time, where emperors were made.
The Holy Roman Empire was not a simple hereditary monarchy: its king (who was then crowned emperor) was chosen by a small group of great princes, the prince-electors. For centuries the place of those elections varied, until a key document fixed it for good. In 1356, the emperor Charles IV issued the Golden Bull (Goldene Bulle), the Empire's 'constitution', which regulated how the king was chosen and established that the election would be held in Frankfurt. From then on, and for more than four centuries, Frankfurt was where it was decided who would rule the Empire.
At first, those chosen were crowned in Aachen, Charlemagne's old city. But in 1562 the coronations also moved to Frankfurt, to St Bartholomew's cathedral — hence 'Kaiserdom', imperial cathedral — where ten emperors were crowned up to 1792. It was a lavish event: the city filled with princes, ambassadors and crowds, there were banquets, a whole ox was roasted in the square and wine ran from the fountains. The young Goethe, born in the city, left a vivid account of the 1764 coronation in his memoirs.
That imperial function gave Frankfurt a special status: it was a Free Imperial City (Freie Reichsstadt), that is, it answered to no local prince but directly to the emperor, and it governed itself through its council, based at the Römer, the town hall the city bought in 1405 and whose imperial hall (Kaisersaal) was decorated with portraits of all the emperors. Frankfurt was thus an urban republic of merchants in the middle of an empire of princes.
If anything made Frankfurt great and rich, it was not the imperial crown but trade. From the Middle Ages, its fairs (Messe) drew merchants from all over Europe: the autumn fair is documented from the twelfth century and received imperial privileges in the thirteenth. With the invention of printing, Frankfurt also became the great centre of the European book trade: its book fair, which has existed since the fifteenth century, is the direct ancestor of today's Buchmesse, still the largest in the world. From the money those fairs moved came, naturally, the activity that defines the city to this day: banking and finance. The Frankfurt Stock Exchange was founded in 1585.
Within that commercial history there is a chapter that has to be told plainly, because it is at once glorious and dark: that of the Jewish community and its ghetto. In 1462, the authorities forced Frankfurt's Jews to move to a single walled street, the Judengasse ('Jews' lane'), one of the first ghettos in Europe. They lived there for centuries in cramped conditions — thousands of people came to be crowded into a tiny space — with the gates shut at night and on holidays, subject to special taxes and to harsh restrictions on what work they could do and how many could marry. It was a discriminated, confined community, but also intensely active in trade and finance.
Out of that street came one of the most powerful financial dynasties in history. Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812) was born and set up his business in the Judengasse, starting as a money changer and merchant. He sent his five sons to establish themselves in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Vienna and Naples, weaving the first great international banking network. The Rothschilds financed governments and wars and became a symbol of modern financial power; their rise, from the oppressive conditions of Frankfurt's ghetto, is one of the most extraordinary stories of the nineteenth century. Jewish emancipation came slowly through that century, and the community flourished and integrated into the life of the city, until Nazism destroyed it all. Today, a museum and a memorial on the site of the old Judengasse (Museum Judengasse and the Neuer Börneplatz memorial) recall that history, including the names of the more than 11.000 Frankfurt Jews deported and murdered in the Holocaust.
In 1848, a wave of liberal revolutions swept Europe, and Germany — then a mosaic of kingdoms and principalities with no unity — was no exception. Amid that fervour, Frankfurt lived its most important political moment. Drawing on its tradition as a neutral, central city, it became the seat of a historic experiment: the Frankfurt National Assembly, the first parliament for all of Germany elected by vote.
The deputies — professors, lawyers, writers, civil servants, the flower of the educated liberal middle class, which earned it the somewhat mocking nickname 'the parliament of professors' — met from May 1848 in the Paulskirche, an oval-plan church in the centre. For almost a year they debated passionately how to build a united, free, constitutional Germany. They drafted a constitution advanced for its day, with a declaration of fundamental rights, and decided to offer the crown of a unified German empire to the king of Prussia, Frederick William IV.
The experiment failed. In 1849 the Prussian monarch scornfully refused the crown — he said he would not accept a crown 'picked up from the gutter', offered by the people and not by the other princes — and without the backing of the great German powers the assembly lost its force. The princes' armies put down the last revolutionary flare-ups and the parliament dissolved. German unification would come later, in 1871, but by the opposite route: 'from above', imposed by Prussia and Bismarck with blood and iron, not by a parliament.
Despite the failure, the Paulskirche of 1848 was engraved as the great symbol of German democratic yearning, the moment when an attempt was made to build a nation out of freedom and popular representation. That is why, when postwar Germany looked for democratic roots of its own after the catastrophe of Nazism, it turned its eyes to Frankfurt: the Paulskirche was one of the first buildings rebuilt, in 1948, as a statement of principle.
The nineteenth century brought a change of status: in 1866, after the war between Austria and Prussia, Frankfurt lost its old independence and was annexed by Prussia, ceasing to be a Free City. Even so, it kept growing as a commercial and financial power, with its stock exchange, its banks and a thriving cultural and industrial life.
The Second World War came close to erasing it. Frankfurt still had the largest half-timbered old town in Germany, a medieval maze of lanes and centuries-old houses. In March 1944, above all in the Allied raids of 22 March, that historic centre burned almost completely: thousands of buildings were destroyed and much of the city's medieval heart disappeared forever in one night of fire. The city was left in ruins.
The postwar years rebuilt Frankfurt, but with a decision that shaped its character: instead of recreating the whole old town in detail, it largely opted for a modern, functional city. In 1948 the new German currency, the Deutsche Mark, was introduced from here, and in 1949 Frankfurt came close to being chosen as capital of the Federal Republic of Germany — it narrowly lost the vote to Bonn. That 'lost' role as political capital turned into another: Frankfurt became the country's economic and financial capital. The German central bank (Bundesbank), the headquarters of the German stock exchange and, in time, the towers of the big banks that drew the unique 'Mainhattan' skyline all settled here. In 1998 the European Central Bank (ECB) was created in Frankfurt, managing the euro for the whole eurozone, and its monumental headquarters opened in 2015 on the east bank of the Main.
In recent decades, the city has also wanted to recover something of its historic soul. The high point was the Dom-Römer project: between 2012 and 2018 the Neue Altstadt was rebuilt, the small quarter between the cathedral and the Römerberg, with houses faithful to the vanished medieval ones. It is the symbol of Frankfurt today: a financial, cosmopolitan, modern metropolis that, alongside its glass skyscrapers, has decided to carefully rebuild the memory of the imperial city it once was. Walking it means passing, in a few metres, from the cathedral where emperors were crowned to the tower of the central bank that today rules the euro.