After the dramatic fire, the Goethe Tower is now back in all its glory in the Frankfurt city forest. The story of its founder Gustav Gerst is brought back to life in a documentary.
City forest, a place of longing. Frankfurt is looking forward to August, then there will be a festival: The Goetheturm, which has burned down, was much wept and rebuilt with all the heart and soul of the city, will receive its plaque back, on which it is written who the wooden construction is to be owed to – the founder Gustav Gerst, or how today they say: tower father Gerst.
He couldn’t imagine anyone else at all, says Thomas Claus, nobody else who would have paid for the Goetheturm back then, in 1931, than Gustav Gerst. The man whom the Nazis harassed three years later, expropriated and finally forced to flee. That Gustav Gerst, who would have been 150 years old this year.
Thomas Claus made a documentary about the reconstruction of the Goethe Tower and came across the story of the tower’s father. A story that called for more attention, much more. She tells a lot about the world 90 and 80 years ago, about the good and the bad.
Reconstruction of the Goethe Tower in Frankfurt: Thomas Claus accompanied the work on film
Frankfurt in the 1920s. A dilapidated wooden tower on the “Goetheruh” in the forest is to be replaced, higher, more splendid. Discussions are taking place in the magistrate. The city planning officer Ernst May proposes a concrete building. However, it would cost 70,000 Reichsmarks. “Why so expensive?” Asks Oberforstmeister Bernhard Jacobi. “We have enough material in the forest.”
But still no one to pay for a wooden tower. Jacobi goes to great lengths. He was driven by a thought: to turn the forest into a recreational area – a term that was not even invented at the time. Then he made the acquaintance of a neighbor of the chemist and founder Arthur von Weinberg on Niederräder Landstrasse. It’s Gustav Gerst, the manager of the Frankfurt department store Tietz. Horse lover Gerst wants to ride in the city forest. That could be okay, says Jacobi, if Gerst pays for the tower in return. The men agree.
Stadtwald gets its jewel back: Goethe Tower bears a new plaque
“The refined Jacobi initially only gave him half the price,” says Thomas Claus, “15,000 Reichsmarks.” That increases bit by bit to 28,000, but Gerst always agrees. The city has to ask the Prussian state for permission three times; Donations over 3000 Reichsmarks must be approved from the very top.
How does Thomas Claus know all this? It’s a big community that helps him. People moved by the fate of the Jewish Tietz / Gerst family, who did so much for Frankfurt, donated large sums of money to research and culture, only to be tortured, chased away and killed by the unjust state. In response to a large report in the Frankfurter Rundschau and calls in other newspapers, descendants of contemporary witnesses who still have old documents respond. A reader from Maintal, for example, sends photos of the Tietz branch in Hanau. “I am sending some photos from the Tietz department store in Hanau from my father’s photo album,” says the cover letter. “My father was a volunteer from January 6, 1930 to January 6, 1931 and from January 7, 1931 to April 2, 1932 a confectioner’s assistant at Tietz in Hanau.” The pictures show the neatly dressed workforce. One of the photos shows confectionery products and an advertising sign above it:
Thomas Claus made a documentary about the Goetheturm in Frankfurt
“Do you have an engagement, wedding, Christmas party, / believe me, it is the best / if you buy the cakes from Tietz / you will definitely be satisfied.”
A reader from Langen sends an excerpt from a brochure from the city survey office: A district forester and an anonymous citizen had “demanded the renaming of Gerstweges, a path in the city forest, with reference to Jewish ancestry”. There was resistance: “In an extraordinarily courageous statement, the building authority – forest management – detailed the merits of the Gerst Commercial Council and came to the conclusion that this path should not be renamed.” But in vain. “In the municipal advertising paper of June 5, 1936, it was announced that the name of the path had been canceled without replacement.”
“Our search for clues, with which we are in the process of closing a gap in the city’s memory, touched a lot of people,” says the Frankfurt environment officer Rosemarie Heilig (Greens). The city archives and the historical museum are particularly helpful. “Frankfurt works extremely well there,” says Thomas Claus. “There is no better institute for urban history than here. One piece of the puzzle is added to the other. ”The Historical Museum even has a game called:“ A visit to the Tietz department store ”.
All of this should find expression in a second, larger film that Thomas Claus is planning, perhaps even for the international stage.
In memory of tower father Gustav Gerst: Documentary film about the Goetheturm commemorates displaced families
But first, on August 15, the founder and his story will be commemorated, the tower father Gerst, who had to flee from the Nazis, via Sweden to the USA, and died completely impoverished in New York in 1948. Music is planned on the 43-meter-high tower with its 196 steps, the Claus film will run there in a loop, someone shouts in it: “The Goethe Tower is alive!” Historisches Museum: “A city participates. Frankfurt and the NS ”. Gustav Gerst should definitely appear in it.
Anyone who can contribute testimonials from that time, for example about the Tietz auf der Zeil department store or the Gerst family, is collected at the email address gustav.gerst.dezernatx@stadt-frankfurt.de.
