For a long time, Frankfurt had hoped to make it through WWII unscathed, or at least with a minimal loss of life and architecture. In half a year, a few bombs had rained down on the Old Town: there had already been a few fires in October 1943, and after the attacks on the Sachsenhausen district and other targets in the city centre in late autumn and early winter the Main river embankment must have resembled a lunar landscape. And yet a great deal had been saved, people were still living in the Old Town and they had good reason to believe they'd be able to cover up the holes that had appeared in the rows of houses and thus blot out the traces of destruction. But then Frankfurt was to be literally ploughed up in just two attacks: on 18 March 1944, it was the eastern half of the city between the cathedral and the Hospital zum Heiligen Geist, and with the subsequent and decisive bombing on the night of March 22, whatever was left.

Shortly after 8:30 p. ‌m. the few sirens that had withstood the bombing four days earlier began to howl. Just a few minutes later, the first blasts could be heard in the north. The air raid lasted 45 minutes, and 816 airplanes were counted. The first ones dropped 3,000 high-explosive bombs onto the city, destroying most of the roofs. These were followed by more than a million stick-type and liquid-incendiary bombs. Burning phosphorus rained down on the city like a glistening curtain and darted through the streets. It must have been an infernal roar. The pressure from the impacts alone caused large buildings and churches to sway. In no time at all, the houses were in flames. Whatever had not been hit directly was set alight by flying sparks. The first walls collapsed. In the streets and alleyways, stones and beams began to pile up and then even more stones and beams. One house after the other collapsed, tipped over, or imploded, until the city's silhouette disappeared and only the cathedral's spire could be seen amidst a sea of swirling flames. Of the 1,500 half-timbered houses only 11 remained standing. For days the city did not see the sun, hidden under the pall of smoke rising from the rubble.

When not even six weeks later, at the beginning of May, an employee of the Frankfurter Anzeiger knocked on the bull's-eye panes of the cathedral's little gatehouse, the spire's custodian sat there in his city-employee uniform as if nothing had happened. A lot of people are making their way up these days, he said, on Sundays it's a veritable river. They come back down with tears in their eyes. The view from above is a gaping field of rubble with only a few points of reference poking up here and there: the staggered gable facade of city hall, the Römer, its windows empty; a stump which was once the fountain niche on the Belvederchen roof garden of the Haus Zur Goldenen Waage; a decorated archway rising above a bomb crater. That is the extent of what the chroniclers of the Frankfurter Anzeiger saw.

Yet there was definitely more that had survived the hail of bombs, but no one saw it that way. On the contrary, in the shortest amount of time a thoughtless approach pitilessly delivered the foundations and remains of historical buildings to the pickaxe. First, whatever was still standing was torn down, then the rubble was removed. In October 1946, Mayor Walter Kolb allowed himself to be photographed in front of the Römer wearing a suit and crushing pieces of stone with a jackhammer. What was to be rebuilt on top of it triggered furious debates. The churches were understood to be not only historically meaningful, but pieces of a spirtual Heimat as well. And discussions regarding the Paulskirche and the Goethe House–the former a symbol of German democracy, the latter of German culture–were fierce, and centred on whether reconstructions would be tantamount to hushing up guilt and falsifying history, or whether they might function as a beacon, pointing a new society in the right direction.