As the gleaming new headquarters of the European Central Bank rose in Frankfurt, a tide of upscale development swept the city, toppling scores of buildings. Meike Fischer has spent her life in and around the city, and like many Frankfurters has marveled at and mourned the rapid changes to the skyline. Her series Panta Rhei captures the precise moments of destruction, the instant when wrecking balls create an explosion of cement, tangle of rebar, and screech of metal on metal.
“The city is starting to change its whole face,” said Fischer. “I began to realize that it’s quite brutal to see whole quarters start to vanish, so I wanted to get closer and closer and that’s how this series developed.”
Fischer wanted to show a view of the city even the most aloof passerby walking the streets of Frankfurt has grown accustomed to: Buildings, many of them beloved and at least nominally protected by historic designation, reaching the end of their lives in a flash of violence.
Among the many edifices destroyed in recent years was the oldest brothel in all of Germany, a country where prostitution is legal. The entrance to the lascivious landmark sat between a pair of 20-foot-tall legs with red high heels. Those gams are gone now.
Crowds gather to gape at the destruction. Some buy a cup of coffee or a sandwich and stay a while. “If you talk to them they say it’s so sad that they’re tearing down our buildings and our city will lose its face,” Fischer says. “People come to say adieu. They stare with open mouths and can’t believe what is happening two meters next to them in their own neighborhood.”
Much of Frankfurt was destroyed in World War II and much of what remained was later razed, she says. “Every 20 years or so since, the city is trying to reinvent itself.” There’s a tone of anxiety and dislocation in these images—there’s no location clues at all, just an explosive dystopian moment stripped of context.
Like any city undergoing rapid gentrification, working- and middle-class residents are being priced out. The influx of wealth rippling out from the seat of the European Central Bank has pushed those of modest means to the outskirts. “This is what our politicians want Frankfurt to be,” Fischer says. “A very nice looking modern city with very nice looking rich people.”
