They say the best way to start an article is with an explosion.

And maybe that's a good idea for an exhibition, too.

In any case, an explosion is the first thing that visitors to “Everything Disappears!

Carl Theodor Reiffenstein - pictorial chronicler of old Frankfurt".

The slow motion projected over a large area shows the demolition of the AfE high-rise building at Frankfurt University.

How the tower collapses bolt upright and turns back into the concrete dust from which it was once created, is also fascinating in the umpteenth loop.

Matthew Trautsch

Coordination report Rhein-Main.

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And what does it have to do with Carl Theodor Reiffenstein?

Nothing and everything, one would like to say.

An architecture like that of the AfE tower was unthinkable in Reiffenstein's time, he would probably have found it abysmal ugly.

He found the historicist style that was rampant in his time on Kaiserstrasse or in the Westend to be clumsy and misanthropic.

Apart from the entrance projection, the exhibition that opens in the Historical Museum on Saturday is not spectacularly explosive either.

Like Reiffenstein's work, it is characterized by a clever, detailed and loving eye.

In love with the winding streets of his childhood

The blasting sequence is appropriate because it references the theme of impermanence.

As man disappears, so will the buildings he creates, sooner or later.

In a city like Frankfurt earlier.

Museum director Jan Gerchow quotes the dictum that Frankfurt is a construction site and recalls Alexander Mitscherlich's writing on the "inhospitable nature of cities".

But the idea that the "old" Frankfurt was only lost after the Second World War is only partially correct.

As early as the 19th century, the modern city was developing not only outside the plant ring, but also in the city center.

Medieval buildings had to give way, for example for the Burnitz building, today part of the Historical Museum, or the brutally cut aisle of Braubachstrasse.

Born in 1820 as the son of an innkeeper in the old town, Reiffenstein felt this modernization as a tremendous loss.

He loved the winding streets of his childhood, the slate bay windows, the carvings in the half-timbering, the wrought-iron fittings, the artistically hewn sandstone.

In several thousand drawings, many of which he later did in watercolours, he meticulously captured this world of the little people, the craftsmen and merchants.

He wasn't interested in new buildings, he painted what was destined for demolition or no longer existed.

"He was fighting a losing battle, he knew that and he reflected on that," says Gerchow.

Reiffenstein began training at the Städel in his early youth.

Coming from architecture and stage painting, he became a successful landscape painter, traveled to the low mountain ranges and river valleys in the area, and later also to Belgium, Switzerland and Italy.

He later bequeathed the collection of his romantic landscape paintings to the Städel.

The views of the old town, which were created during leisure hours, went to the city in 1877 and shortly afterwards to the newly founded Historical Museum.

Of a "certain pleasure in loss"

Thus, the museum can now draw on the founding stock for the first extensive Reiffenstein show.

As Gerchow says, a comparative show with Reiffenstein's contemporaries, the photographer Carl Friedrich Mylius, was originally intended.

Both left behind unique documentation of urban development in their respective mediums, with Mylius also being open to the modern era of the time.

However, it has been shown that such a double show would not do justice to the abundance and importance of Reiffenstein's work.

Curator Wolfgang Cilleßen speaks of a "huge and unique collection" that took almost ten years to develop.

The notes that Reiffenstein left on his drawings have also been digitized and are linked to the works and made publicly accessible.

Co-curator Aude-Line Schamschula draws attention to the aesthetic and emotional quality of the views of the old town.

Reiffenstein looked with the eyes of a child, with melancholy, but also with a "certain pleasure in losing".

In addition to everything worth knowing about the development of the city, the exhibition also conveys this feeling.

A catalog priced at EUR 24.95 has been published for the exhibition, which runs until March 12, 2023.