It's a complicated story.

They have always been on Schweizer Strasse in Sachsenhausen, first at number 27, then at 41, sometimes they only had the ground floor, sometimes the floor above including a sewing workshop, sometimes they sold evening gowns and nightwear in addition to corsetry and nightwear coats and at some point gave up men's fashion, shirts, sweaters and ties.

Table linen played a role, there was also a costume shop over on the other side of the Main.

He no longer exists.

But one thing is clear: it all started with the grandfather.

In 1927 he founded the family's first women's clothing and lingerie store.

Anja Merscher, his granddaughter, is running it in the third generation.

The shop hasn't moved for about thirty years. "Wäsche Mode Köhler" with its two shop windows is located at Schweizer Straße 76. The predecessor was a toy dealer, with dolls in one shop window and the trains in the other.

Anja Merscher remembers exactly.

Her business seems a bit out of date, but she wants to defy the times, doesn't give in to fashionable furnishing frills, relies on advice.

Selling underwear is something very intimate.

"It doesn't get any closer," she says.

Anja Merscher has not counted how many customers with cancer she has had in her shop, how many women are unhappy about their figure.

"It's like at the hairdresser's," she says, "it's between us." This also applies when she drives home to grateful customers.

She has a delivery service and drives off on her motor scooter to Oberrad or Niederrad.

In the luggage, for example, underwear for people who can no longer walk well.

Anja Merscher is a businesswoman, she learned that, but also inherited it from her grandmother.

"She lived for business," says the granddaughter, it was always an issue at home too.

Anja Merscher, on the other hand, grew up with the shop, which means her parents were always in the shop, she played for hours in the basements of the shops.

There was "a lot of junk" lying around.

That made her happy.

Or she did a lot of alterations, she had three seamstresses.

Since then she has been good at sewing, making dresses for the Barbie doll from the remains of the evening gowns.

“Small and familiar and in the old style”

Anja Merscher is also a genuine Sachsenhausen resident.

She was born in the university clinic in 1966, went to the Textor and Deutschherrenschule, and completed a social year in the Sachsenhausen hospital.

"They would have liked to keep me." But she did an apprenticeship in Offenbach at the Hassert fashion house, a "great business" that has long since ceased to exist, but was 170 years old.

The lingerie saleswoman knows her neighborhood like the back of her hand, and it knows her.

How can it be otherwise - Anja Merscher is a member of the Sachsenhausen Carnival Society from 1947, and in a fairly prominent position.

After the station in Offenbach, she went into her own business, which is still called Köhler - the name of her parents.

In the 1970s her father bought the house in which she is the third generation to continue the family tradition.

When the toy shop gave up, her father asked her what she was planning to do.

And she has said that she wanted a store "small and family and old style".

He is to this day.