The website of the Frankfurt Tourism and Congress Society spreads a good mood: "The time of year is perfect for getting to know our small metropolis on the Main.
There are more than enough ideas for relaxing summer days in Frankfurt.” And the tourists in Hesse are back.
In its most recent evaluation, the State Statistical Office recorded more than one million overnight stays in one month for the first time.
That is beautiful.
But what travelers and locals get to see when they are in downtown Frankfurt is not nice.
A few scenes only.
On the Liebfrauenberg, beggars move so unpleasantly on people who are sitting and eating in a bar that a child begins to cry.
In front of the small market hall, office workers who have bought something for lunch sit chewing next to wastepaper baskets in which others are rummaging for food.
And the public misery of the junkies is no longer just at home in the station district.
Walking across the Zeil, preferably in the evening or at night, when groups of drug addicts and homeless people and men who appear vaguely to openly aggressive dominate the scene?
If you don't have to, don't do it.
Newcomers to Frankfurt like manageability
Frankfurt has a few top museums, a well-developed cultural infrastructure, and beautiful districts.
Local patriots call Frankfurt a cosmopolitan city, they mean it in a positive way, the internationality of the community serves as proof: people from all over the world, banks, corporations, law firms, the high-rise buildings, the nearby airport.
If you ask newcomers about their life in Frankfurt, they often emphasize the almost small-town aspects, the manageability.
The pandemic has changed a lot.
The behavior of the citizens, for example: all the rubbish everywhere doesn't just fall out of the sky, people leave it lying around.
And that apparently more and more addicts and homeless people are making Frankfurt their place of residence: public space belongs to everyone, including those on the fringes of society.
A big city, even a small one, is not idyllic, and social problems cannot simply be wished away.
But one can wish for something from city politics: for example, that it takes care of impoverishment.
Words are not only overdue from the health department.
Above all, those that show that in Romans one sees what cannot be overlooked outside.