Last Friday, the European Central Bank chief economist, Juergen Stark, resigned in a shock announcement, sending the euro and European stock markets into freefall as fears about the debt crisis deepened. His stated reason was personal, but it is known that he was critical of the bank’s controversial program of buying bonds of those countries – such as Greece – that find themselves unable to drum up financing by the markets.
This happened in Frankfurt, not in Brussels. The creators of the European Union placed its central bank where it belonged – in the financial centre of Europe. More than four hundred banks of all kinds call it their natural home, for the same reason that for nearly a thousand years merchants from everywhere held their annual fairs in this city, the same reason that Holy Roman Emperors were crowned there. The reason is its central geographical location and its enterprising population.
It is gratifying that the children of Frankfurt learn in their schools that they should also be proud of their city for reasons unconnected with money or emperors. In 1848, it was the place where the Good Germany was to be born, where idealistic democrats met in the Paulskirche, St. Paul’s Church, to draft a democratic constitution for a united Germany. The king of Prussia turned it down.
Frankfurt’s children even learn that Frankfurt was the birthplace in 1749 of the celebrated poet-scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the author of Faust, the basis of the film about a scholar making a pact with the devil that last week received the Golden Lion prize in Venice.
Frankfurt’s local poet laureate Friedrich Stoltze (1816–1891) was so proud of his native city that he asked, with irrefutable logic, whether it was conceivable that anybody could be born anywhere but in Frankfurt.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Well… some people dally, conceivably, in other parts of the world on their way to realizing Frankfurt’s the place to come out. There are hot dogs everywhere these days.
Very true and interesting. Also true, it seems, is that you can take the boy out of Frankfurt but you can’t take Frankfurt out of the boy. And that’s good.