Glamour and Abyss

Glamour und Abgrund

In the context of our project Poverty and Homelessness we started off to an unusual guided tour in our neighbouring city Frankfurt.  With Frankfurt's glamourous side of glass fassades, pompous villas and a high porsche density being the better known and more likable face of the city, the tour's focus was on the more hidden, darker side which Frankfurt shares with other big cities around the world: homelessness, poverty, drug addiction and prostitution. In the course of about the last 20 years "Little Manhattan", as the city is often called in Germany, has established an elaborate and well received community welfare programm to support its needy residents on the fringes of society.  It comprises supervised homeless shelters, residential care homes, soup kitchens, partly run by churches and charities, drug-counseling centres and drug consumption facilities, which are, besides a tough and police inforced prevention policy, part of the harm reduction approach towards the drug problem.  These supervised injection centres offer hygienic (e.g sterile injection equipment) and medical services (access to medical staff and treatment) as well as counseling, information about drugs and the distribution of methadon, whereas the sale and purchase of drugs within the facilities is strictly prohibited.
In addition, to relieve the hardship in the streets a crew of medical staff tours the city to provide medical aid at the hot spots and during the cold season a so called "Kältebus" offers temporary shelter and assistance for those who refuse to make use of or do not find their way to other facilites.

Like  in most cities, Frankfurt's trouble spots are concentrated in the neighborhood of the main station. Therefore social facilities are predominantly here. Here we are standing in front of a church that takes great efforts to alleviate need and poverty. Somehow special is the annual comunity feast conducted and financed by volunteers from all walks of life, from bankers to committed teenagers. 

Life is full of contrasts. The house with the red door way is the  homeless shelter Weser5, run by the church. In front of it a porsche.



In the background a supervised injection centre. As it is no Tourist attraction, we kept at a respectful distance.



Just around the corner office towers and parks  

as well as the old opera house. With a more modern stage in the city, the impressive, 19th century neo-Renaissance building is no longer used for opera performances but solely for concerts and other events.

Later on, we got a glimpse of Frankfurt's world of finance. Here a view from the visitors' gallery at the stock exchange.