Rooms by idea, not by date
Night, longing and wandering each get a room of their own.
The German Romanticism Museum opened on the fourteenth of September twenty twenty-one, wall to wall with the Goethe House in the old centre. It belongs to the Freies Deutsches Hochstift, a literary foundation that spent a hundred years quietly buying up the manuscripts, paintings and drawings of the German Romantic period until it held the largest such collection anywhere. This is the first time that collection has had a permanent home instead of a store room. Christoph Maeckler designed the building with a modern front that deliberately declines to compete with the historic house next door. Three floors of rooms are arranged by theme rather than chronology, so night, wandering, longing and dream each get their own space. The Goethe House beside it was flattened in the air raid of March nineteen forty-four and rebuilt piece by piece to reopen in nineteen fifty-one; the same ticket takes you through both. Plan two hours for the pair. Original manuscripts are light-sensitive and rotate in and out of the cases, so you cannot count on seeing one particular sheet. The museum opens every day including Monday, which is unusual in Frankfurt, and runs late until nine on Thursdays. The historic Goethe House is reached by staircase only and has no lift.
Night, longing and wandering each get a room of their own.
Destroyed in forty-four and rebuilt to reopen in fifty-one.
Grosser Hirschgraben 23-25, 60311 Frankfurt am Main
You cannot. Tickets are sold at the museum desk on the day and there is no online reservation. Come early in the morning or on a Thursday evening if you want to avoid the queue, especially during German school holidays.
Goethe came before the Romantics and was often their critic rather than one of them. The two museums sit together because one foundation owns both and both belong to the same literary story, so the visit gives you two generations rather than one.
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