650 years after the purchase of the royal imperial forest by the city council of Frankfurt on June 2, 1372, the city forest of Frankfurt is in such a miserable condition as never before in living memory.

Word has gotten around to the federal government.

Cem Özdemir (Die Grünen), the Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture, said in a video message during the ceremony for the city forest anniversary in the Institute for City History: "The Frankfurt city forest is anything but good." More than 90 percent of its trees are sick or critically endangered.

It is climate change that is causing extreme problems for Frankfurt's green lungs.

"The forest is under stress," warned Rosemarie Heilig (The Greens), head of the environmental department.

In fact, the city forest has had to endure a lot in its history.

Threat of overexploitation due to heavy logging and overgrazing by cattle in ancient times.

Land use by the construction of highways, railway lines and the airport or the establishment of the Monte Scherbelino landfill in recent times.

The city forest survived everything, albeit with injuries.

Not even the 7,000 bombs and air mines that fell on it in World War II and destroyed entire forest areas have irrevocably devastated it.

"We have to take action"

But now a much more dangerous enemy is looming in the shape of climate change.

Drought and heat are now affecting the city forest to such an extent that its survival is at stake.

"We have to act," warned Heilig, head of department at the ceremony.

Because the existence of the city's most precious treasure is at stake.

Özdemir said something similar: "We have to take better care of our forests." Because the grandchildren should also be able to romp through the city forest and the other forests in Germany

Tina Baumann, the head of the city forest, shows how big the city forest in the south of Frankfurt is in the film "From Reichsforst zum Naherurlaubsgebiet" shot by Thomas Claus for the anniversary.

Standing on the summit of Monte Scherbelino, it points to the green forest area of ​​5000 hectares stretching from Offenbach to Schwanheim - including 1000 hectares on the edge of the Taunus.

Other cities envy Frankfurt for this largest contiguous city forest in Germany.

Money troubles in the Middle Ages

Forest manager Baumann and her employees are now experimenting with new plantings and trying out tree species from different regions of the world to find out which mixture can defy climate change.

However, it will still take a few years for the findings to be made, because trees grow slowly and under normal conditions can live to be 100, sometimes 300 years old.

The fact that the royal forest in the south of Frankfurt became a city forest in 1372 was, in Heilig's words, a "stroke of luck".

The fact that Emperor Charles IV sold his forest property together with the mayor's office to a delegation of the Frankfurt Council as a pledge during a visit to Mainz was related to his chronic lack of money, which, as the historian Michael Matthäus from the Institute for City History explained in his lecture "1372 – an imperial document and the consequences”, already plagued the predecessors of Charles IV and also his successors.

In theory, the emperor could have redeemed the pledge, but he and the following rulers lacked the means to do so.

Only after the Thirty Years' War with the Peace of Westphalia did this option cease to exist, and the city forest was now definitely in Frankfurt's permanent possession.

"Why don't we use our own wood?"

The caricaturists Greser and Lenz added a cheerful note to the anniversary, they drew a poster with many funny scenes.

And then in the past few days, completely new documents about the city forest were found in the archives - at least that's what Michael Quast claimed at the ceremony.

Of course, the audience knew that they shouldn't put the cascade of words of this gifted joker on the gold scales.

In the Frankfurt dialect, the patron of the Volkstheater told hair-raising stories from the Frankfurt Forest, all of which took place at the time when the forest was bought in the late Middle Ages.

“Why don't we use our own wood?” asks a citizen in front of the Fahrtor in view of the logs that have been landed from the Spessart.

"Because we don't own the forest," replies one citizen.

"Something has to change," is the conclusion of the citizen.

In 1372 something changed.

Frankfurt is still benefiting from this today.