Farewell, Hellerhofstrasse!
By MATTHIAS ALEXANDER (text) and BEN KUHLMANN (photos)
January 14, 2023 The FAZ has moved to the Europaviertel.
The old house in Frankfurt's Gallusviertel is giving way to a new development.
A last look back at a fulfilled time in unadorned beauty.
Office in the feuilleton
Journalists love bold theses.
A department head once expressed the opinion that someone whose desk is meticulously tidy cannot be an original author.
Studies on the connection between love of order and creativity could have been carried out in the individual offices.
This feature editor's office bespoke a tendency toward creative disorder.
There was a very good author sitting here, let's betray that.
Go to the archive
Photo studio with background
Go to the archive
The inexhaustible archive of the newspaper was suitably housed in a crooked old building, a glass corridor connected it to the editorial building, which was completed in 1988.
Whoever entered it for the first time could be startled when a gray box whizzed past just above head height.
It belonged to the conveyor system with which the yellow newspaper clipping folders floated to their customers on one rail and back again on the other.
This analog information cycle was discontinued when the archive was largely digitized and could be used from any workstation.
If a folder was later asked for, the colleagues in the archive seemed to be particularly pleased - and they often brought it in personally.
Photo studio with background
A year ago, a last fashion spread was created here for the magazine;
the model Sandra Klewinghaus, photographed in black and white by Frank Röth, presented fashion beyond gender roles.
In the newspaper's photo studio, right next to the archive, the portrait photos of the editors for the "Blue Book" were taken, with which the readers could get an idea of the people behind the newspaper.
Background cardboards in many colors were available for product photography.
As the crowning glory, the European Cup won by Eintracht was staged here in the summer.
Still Life with Plant
Photo archive Barbara Klemm
Still Life with Plant
A lavishly landscaped garden in the inner courtyard belonged to the editorial building.
Probably for static reasons - it was on the roof of the garage - entry was forbidden.
The architect's idea of greening the southern facade facing the courtyard, which was far ahead of his time, was not fulfilled;
the climbing aids remained bare.
The inside of the building wasn't exactly green either.
The potted plant in the newsroom of the online editorial office was almost a biotope.
Photo archive Barbara Klemm
Order is half of life, this is especially true for photographers.
Images from pre-digital times that are not filed according to a clear system are effectively lost.
A great treasure in the photo archive of the FAZ are the photographs by Barbara Klemm, who only photographs in analogue and in black and white.
20 or more large-format prints of her photographs are kept in more than 400 blue boxes, and negatives and contact strips are also sorted into drawers according to an ingenious system.
That's how it stayed even after the move to the Europaviertel.
Business conference room
Bust of Lenin in the editor's office
Business conference room
The corona pandemic also caused changed forms of communication in the FAZ, which worked pretty well from one day to the next.
In the video conferences, not only the colleagues in the home office could join in, but finally also the correspondents.
In order to give them a presence, large screens on carriages soon found their way into the tastefully furnished meeting rooms.
Despite all the advantages, this has a serious disadvantage: where a screen is lit, it attracts everyone's attention, and conversations between those physically present suffer as a result.
Bust of Lenin in the editor's office
Keeping hope alive for reunification remained the task of the newspaper for Germany, long after others had come to terms with the division.
A corner of the publisher Berthold Kohler's office bears witness to the fortunate turn of events in world politics with which this task was fulfilled.
The bust of Lenin that was taken from the pedestal was given to him when he was a correspondent in Prague to commemorate the “Velvet Revolution”, as a symbol of the triumph of freedom over dictatorship.
Above it hung Barbara Klemm's famous photo of the opening of the Brandenburg Gate in December 1989. Against the light, a single banner can be seen above the outlines of the crowd.
It says "Germany united fatherland".
View into the lobby
lonely workplace
View into the lobby
The history of modern architecture is full of design elements borrowed from the elegant, dynamic appearance of ocean liners.
Hans Scharoun, for example, who grew up in Bremerhaven, was inspired by maritime forms.
Similarities were also found in the lobby of the editorial building – in the form of a (non-glazed) porthole on the second floor and the railing-like white railings with a wooden handrail, from which one looked down on the goings-on at reception as if it were the quay a port.
lonely workplace
The newsroom was housed in a large room with a curved glass front.
The heart of the newspaper beat here, trainees and young editors learned how to plan, write and edit pages under time pressure.
It could help to hide behind screens.
And when the work with the proof was done for the time being, the political editors preferred to meet here for a drink, the so-called Molle.
There were enough occasions.
Elevators with distant views
Seating set in the hallway
Elevators with distant views
The fear of getting stuck was always present in the two elevators that took you from the lobby to the individual editorial floors.
They creaked and jerked, and sometimes they didn't quite hit the floor level of the floor they were headed for.
Quite often they were locked until mechanics got them working again.
Perhaps the need for repairs was due to the idiosyncratic shape: From a glass pulpit in the shape of a three-quarter circle, the view first fell on the reception, then on the publishing house and finally on reaching the fifth floor on the skyline in the city center.
Seating set in the hallway
It was style-conscious, but the seating area in the corridor of the feature section did not radiate comfort.
Editors rarely sat down on the four examples of the B 3 club chair, which was designed by Marcel Breuer in 1925 and is better known as the "Wassily Chair".
Those who sat there usually had an appointment with the publisher, whose office was diagonally opposite.
The glazed square conference room with a flat pyramidal roof, called the pagoda, spoke of the postmodern taste of the eighties.
Conference room pagoda
Smoking area outside
Conference room pagoda
Helmut Kohl was here and so was Angela Merkel.
They were guests at the Great Conference, which brought together the entire editorial board every two weeks to discuss matters of general interest.
There was a separate room for this: the pagoda.
In fact, it was a glazed square pavilion with a flat pyramidal roof, indicative of the postmodern taste of the 1980s.
Smoking area outside
The remaining smokers called the sculpture in front of the editorial building "Hans-Wolfgang".
Halfway sheltered from the weather under an arcade on the corner of Frankenallee and Hellerhofstrasse, they met at the two steely newspaper readers since smoking was forbidden in the house.
The nickname was a tribute to Hans-Wolfgang Pfeifer, the legendary managing director of the FAZ, who was also held in high esteem by the editorial staff because no one surpassed him in terms of the intensity with which he read the newspaper.
The work of the artist Jochen Geißler was officially entitled "News".
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