NEUALTLAND: A LAYERED LOCAL JEWISH NARRATIVE

Someone whose face we never saw,
threw his cloak down here
and went away.
And we are left to learn from the cloak
folds, folds, folds,
holy, holy, holy.

 Yehuda Amichai (1992), from Open-Eyed Land

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Neualtland is the outcome of a year-long architectural and historiographic exploration, carried out as a Master’s thesis. The project strives to unearth spatial and cultural layers of the historic city centre of Frankfurt am Main, focusing on the modern urban fabric which was built on the ruins of the Judengasse, the centuries-old Jewish ghetto. Neualtland holds onto two seemingly disconnected ends of the local Jewish history: one is the violently segregated and oppressed - yet culturally rich and intricate historic Judengasse, and the other is the surroundings of the modern and utterly ordinary An der Staufenmauer street, which were built in the same area in the decades following World War II.

Regarding all layers as indispensable fragments of the place’s story, the project negotiates between the scant traces of the historic fabric and the postwar urban blocks which obscure them from the cityscape. It culminates in a detailed architectural intervention in two office buildings which were built in the 1960s on the site of the Hauptsynagoge, the ghetto’s main synagogue.