The Großer Speicher was a historic patrician courtyard in the north-western old town of Frankfurt am Main. The houses, grouped around a roughly square inner courtyard, were located to the west on Rosengasse (from 1918 Schüppengasse) and to the east on Rotkreuzgasse, both of which are no longer existing parallel streets from and between Großer Hirschgraben and Kornmarkt. The north side with a walled garden and the south side facing Schüppengasse (from 1899 Bethmannstraße) were blocked by adjoining houses. The last house address was Schüppengasse 2 or Rotkreuzgasse 1.
At the end of the 16th century, a Dutch immigrant rebuilt the courtyard complex, which can only vaguely be dated to the Gothic period, in High Renaissance style. It was thus the earliest documented civic building in the city to adopt this style and underwent hardly any alterations over the centuries. Shortly before the resulting significance of the Grosser Speicher for Frankfurt's art history became known to a wider public in the 19th century, extensive late classicist alterations destroyed large parts of the building's original state.
As part of the redevelopment of the old town in the 1930s, the few surviving remains of the courtyard were carefully demolished so that it could later be rebuilt elsewhere, which did not happen due to the war. Today, the former Federal Audit Office, which was built in the immediate post-war period, is located on the former site of the building. Most of the stored parts have survived to this day in municipal depots.
History
Etymology, sources and topographical classification The term “Großer Speicher” obviously dates back to the 18th century. The sources do not even refer to it as a granary before the 16th century; prior to that, it is usually referred to as a “Hof”. The attribute added to the house name was introduced to differentiate it from two nearby houses, whose older names were also only replaced in the 18th century by the names Mittlerer Speicher (Schüppengasse 2 / Bethmannstraße 16) and Kleiner Speicher (Schüppengasse 4 / Bethmannstraße 18). What the word Speicher refers to remains unclear. Since medieval house names, in the absence of a system of house numbers, usually used special features of a house or its owner to distinguish it from other buildings, it can only be speculated that the courtyard, possibly after a conversion, was distinguished by a particularly peculiar granary in the sense of a storage facility.Jung, Hülsen 1902–1914, p. 80.
Considering its significance for the history of the town, comparatively little is known about the history of the building. In contrast to other important monuments in the city, such as the Golden Scales at the cathedral or the Salt House on the Römerberg, there is no surviving history of ownership that can be traced back to modern times. Furthermore, many documents that could possibly shed light on this today, in particular the master builder's books from the imperial city period, were lost when the Frankfurt city archives were destroyed at the beginning of 1944.
A relatively extensive monograph from 1902 exists, but it mainly deals with the architecture of the building - which had already changed considerably by then - and has also preserved important building photographs in printed form.Jung, Hülsen 1902–1914, p. 87–97. For (then) earlier periods, it often draws on the only source that describes the building in its approximate state at the time of construction, namely the texts and pictures by the Frankfurt painter Carl Theodor Reiffenstein. They meticulously document the changes to the city from his earliest childhood memories from 1824 until shortly before his death in 1893, around 1885.
On the other hand, the fact that the monograph was co-authored by the then head of the town archives, Rudolf Jung, initially suggests that there was only a small amount of material available anyway - after all, he had unrestricted access to the huge archive holdings at the time for his work (see, however, Reception in the 19th century). Finally, the sketchbooks created for Treuner's model of the old town in the 1930s, which are preserved in the Historical Museum, provide a picture of the purely external state of the complex shortly before its demolition.Battonn 1869, p. 246.
Despite the lack of sources, it is possible to determine relatively precisely how far back the history of the Great Warehouse may have gone. The city historian and topographer Johann Georg Battonn commented on Rotkreuzgasse at the beginning of the 19th century:
The “Andaue”, or Antauche, formerly also known as Schüppe, was nothing other than the Braubach, a tributary of the Main that had already silted up in the first Christian millennium and roughly followed today's street of the same name in the old town area.Nahrgang 1949, p. 10 (footnote). From today's Paulsplatz, it ran along the Schüppengasse named after it - Bethmannstraße since it was widened on the south side in 1899.Nahrgang, p. 13. It served as a natural moat for the first city wall directly to the south, which was probably built in the 10th century. In the Hohenstaufen period,Orth 1991, p. 23; a document dated May 9, 994, in which King Otto III donated the royal fishing rights in the Main to the Salvator Church, refers to Frankfurt as "castello".Wintergerst 2007, p. 95–98 the town developed beyond these boundaries from the 12th century and was surrounded by another town wall, the Staufenmauer, the remains of which can still be seen today, by 1200 at the latest.
After the construction of the Staufenmauer, the former moat of the first fortification no longer had any military significance and could now be used as an inner-city canal for both economic purposes and to drain waste water.Battonn 1861, pp. 72-76; in 1468, the canal was lined with wooden planks to improve canalization, and from 1558 it was walled in and vaulted at the expense of the residents, although the latter measure was not completed until the early 19th century. For this reason, the white tanners with their foul-smelling businesses settled along the Schüppengasse.Battonn 1869, p. 227; the "wisgerwern" on Schüppengasse were first mentioned in a document in 1322. The fact that the entire area between Grosser Kornmarkt, the later Grosser Hirschgraben, Schüppengasse and Weissadlergasse was referred to as “valle rosarum” or “Rosental” in the 14th and 15th centuries, first documented in 1307.Battonn 1869, p. 224–227.
The Rosental was cut through by two streets, the aforementioned Rotkreuzgasse to the east and Rosengasse to the west. It was not until the end of the 16th century that the Staufenmauer in this area, which had become pointless due to subsequent fortifications, was demolished and the moat in front of it, the Hirschgraben, was filled in and transformed into the street of the same name.Schindling 1991, p. 206. Until then, Rosengasse had been the kennel of the Hohenstaufen wall, which was described by Baldemar von Petterweil in 1350 as “hic proximus muro opidi”. This condition can still be clearly seen on the siege plan of the city from 1552, despite the fact that the streets in the area are only very vaguely marked. It was not until 1918 that it was given the name of Schüppengasse, which had disappeared in 1899, and the name of Rosengasse disappeared.
Rotkreuzgasse, which was called Dietrichsgasse until the 17th century, was also mentioned in Petterweil's records. Battonn suspected that the courtyard of the eponymous court messenger Dietrich, mentioned there as early as 1273, was a predecessor of the Great Granary, without, however, providing any evidence in his documentary excerpt that it was actually a building on this exact spot. Regardless of this, the division of the Rosental into cross streets, which determined the later parcelling out of the land, can already be traced back to the first half of the 14th century.
Previous history On the southern edge of the Rosental valley, a predecessor building to the later Great Granary was probably first erected in the 14th century, based purely on the development history of the Niederstadt described above. However, the earliest written sources referring to the building only date from the beginning of the 15th century. In 1412, a rent book described income from a “farm with garden” owned by a Lutz zum Wedel. The bridge over the still open moat was also explicitly mentioned.Battonn 1869, p. 249; „Item decem sol. hall. cedunt in vico dieterichgassse de et super Curia orto (horto) fundo et suis attinentiis quondam Lotzonis zum Widdel sitis precise in acie circa pontem sinistro latere eundo transpontem ad supra dictum vicum. L. C. SS. M. et G. de 1412. f. 4.“.
According to older literature, which does not provide any source evidence, the building was already owned by the family in the 14th century. There is an entry in the register of houses from 1433 to 1438 which shows it as being owned by Heinrich Weiss zum Wedel.Jung, Hülsen 1902–1914, p. 88. This proves that the estate was passed down through several generations of the well-known Frankfurt patrician family in the 15th century, although it can no longer be traced in its original form.
Meanwhile, it is not possible to attribute it to a builder, although the construction of a courtyard complex of this size could only have been undertaken by someone from the ranks of the city nobility or patriciate, to which the Wedel family clearly belonged. At the end of the 15th or beginning of the 16th century, the buildings must have come into the possession of the Knoblauch patrician family, who were no less deserving of the city, through sale or family connections, which were common among the families of the city's upper class. However, this entry from 1509 about payments made by Siegfried Knoblauch as the owner of a garden belonging to the courtyard means that the written evidence about the predecessor building is already exhausted.Battonn 1869, p. 248.
Around 1540, the family must have converted or rebuilt the farm, although the extent of this is unknown. The only indication of this was the date 1542 on the gable of the half-timbered upper floor of the north building on Rotkreuzgasse.Jung, Hülsen 1902-1914, p. 93; verbatim: „An dem Nordbaue befindet sich noch eine zweite Datierung; an dem nach der Rothkreuz-Gasse stehenden Giebel ist auf der Unterseite des Brettes, welches die hervortretende Nase nach unten abschließt, die Jahreszahl 1542 eingeritzt.“. There is no documentary evidence of building activity on the Great Granary until 1550. Despite the good reproduction of the town's topography, the building itself cannot be recognized with certainty on the siege plan of the town from 1552, in contrast to Matthäus Merian's plan from 1628.
Seventy merchants and 30 goldsmiths from Antwerp alone settled in Frankfurt at once; by 1589 there were almost a thousand, and by the middle of the following decade there were almost as many again. Initially, they lived wherever they could find space, and thus spread out all over the city. However, as they neither found nor were given space to practice the trades and crafts they had imported, they gradually moved to the western part of Niederstadt, where there was still plenty of free building land and where the Weißfrauenkirche, which had initially been left to them, was also located.Dietz 1921, pp. 64 and 65.
The district formed by Alte Mainzer Gasse, Schüppengasse, Grosser Kornmarkt, Grosser Hirschgraben and Roßmarkt became their preferred quarter. In the former Rosental, where a house directory in 1509 had counted just 20 houses and the courtyard with garden, the building density was now similar to that of the rest of the old town center.
Acquisition by Franz de le Boë