The building at Eppsteiner Straße 47 in Frankfurt's Westend is an imposing corner house with an Art Nouveau facade, dignified.
It is difficult to imagine that the residents of this town house, built in 1904, would deliberately breach the peace and barricade themselves against the police.
But this is exactly what happened, 50 years ago a left-wing radical form of action had its premiere here in the Federal Republic: the squatting.
It was September 19, 1970 when students and migrants made history here.
They fought against the speculator Simon Preisler, who wanted to tear down the city villa and build a high-rise.
He had the blessing of the SPD city administration, which wanted to transform Frankfurt into a "car-friendly city" with many offices for banks.
Mainhattan.
Malte Rauch, 83, documentary filmmaker, visited the "Arbeitskreis Wohnen und Rent", a left-wing Frankfurt group that evening, which demanded, among other things, that no one should spend more than a fifth of their income on rent and that land should be socialized.
At the meeting, a student named Til Schulz stormed in, a member of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) until it was dissolved a few months earlier.
He lived in a four-person flat-sharing community at Eppsteiner Strasse 47 and had seen the owner let one apartment after the other rent.
Now five of the ten apartments were empty and the community feared it would be demolished soon.
Strangers had smashed the toilets and sinks in the empty apartments at night.
The heater was broken.
"We have to occupy the empty apartments," shouted Schulz, "immediately. Tonight!"
Said and done.
Schulz, Rauch and others broke up and shortly afterwards they broke the peace.
When morning dawned, the last vacant apartment was open.
Italy as a model
The next morning only those who had overcome the wrought iron fence with the help of a ladder and climbed into the house via a balcony could enter the house.
The front door was barricaded.
The squatters had painted on the sheets: "Against the destruction of apartments" and "We will manage this house ourselves."
Homeowner Preisler said, "This is the beginning of the end."
The occupiers hung a banner in front of the windows on the ground floor: "There is a risk that the police will evacuate the house by force today. Help us defend the house."
But there was no real danger, because the cast was carried by a wave of sympathy.
Neighbors who had passed out from the destruction of the West End applauded the occupiers.
Money and furniture were donated.
"After the establishment of an occupation committee," remembers the ex-occupier and doctor Lelle Franz, who still lives in the house today, "we held a press conference. The reports in the media were very positive."
The occupiers declared: "We have occupied this house. Because the owner systematically overestimated his rights and abandoned it to decay."
According to Franz, the goal of the occupation was: "We have to stop the destruction of the West End."
The occupiers had a role model.
In northern Italy there were thousands of house and apartment occupations in 1969.
Migrant workers from the south of the country took up housing in Turin, Milan and elsewhere.
Your slogan "La casa si prende, l'afitto non si paga!"
- "You take the house, you don't pay the rent."
Frankfurt was the most multicultural city in Germany, most of the "guest workers", as leftists called the migrants, lived in the Main metropolis.
"We were inspired by the Italian comrades, by their squatting and rent strikes," remembers the later Green politician Dany Cohn-Bendit.
"Activists from Lotta Contiuna came to Frankfurt and told us about these forms of struggle."
Street battle with Joschka Fischer
"We all already had apartments," remembers Malte Rauch, "so the campaign was a little unreliable."
But one of the occupiers had contact with large families who lived in overcrowded emergency shelters.
It took some persuasion before a German, an Italian and a Turkish family agreed to move into the occupied bourgeois apartments.
Even before the spectacular action, several hundred residents of the West End had demonized for the preservation of the quarter, but the SPD city administration stuck to its plans for a "city expansion", with which even more banks should be lured into the city.
The peaceful protest had brought nothing.
Ignatz Bubis, real estate dealer and later chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, reported in 1985: "Then the city planning office came and said: You know, a few more floors, that doesn't matter once we're around sixteen. Be nice. Buy To do this, take Schumannstrasse 61, 63, 65, 67 and tear it off. "
The occupation at Eppsteiner Strasse 47 became a beacon.
Young people briefly occupy two other houses in the Westend.
They were looking for large apartments in which to live in shared apartments.
For them it was about freedom.
In the next three years up to 20 houses were occupied in Frankfurt, there were street battles and evictions.
In the middle of it all, the future Green Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer
Only after a martial eviction of four houses that belonged to Ignatz Bubis, in February 1974, the vigor of the squatter movement was broken.
Trespassing soundtrack
Joschka Fischer's friend Daniel Cohn-Bendit later summarized the theoretical superstructure of the "Frankfurt house warfare" as follows: "We tried not to postpone socialism to an unattainable future, but to develop forms of life in the here and now that are not subject to the rulers . "
Original occupation Til Schulz had already recognized why the explosiveness and political significance of the squatting was "that they radically question the conventional concept of property."
At the same time, the occupations were mostly carried by a utopia of the humane, ecological city and forced the turn to cautious and sustainable urban renewal.
While the house-to-house war was raging in Frankfurt, young people in West Berlin occupied a former nurses' home in Kreuzberg in December 1971 and named it Georg-von-Rauch-Haus after a young anarchist shot by the police.
A second house, the Tommy Weißbecker House named after a RAF member who had been shot, was occupied a good year later.
Both still exist today.
The squatters, on the other hand, had only held out for a few hours and wanted to fight for a youth center in West Berlin a few months before those in Eppsteiner Strasse.
On May 1, 1970, several hundred leftists moved into the satellite town "Märkisches Viertel" and tried to acquire an empty factory floor.
There was also the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, who was arrested for serious trespassing and resistance against law enforcement officers - and two weeks later went underground and co-founded the "Red Army Faction (RAF).
But from 1971 young people occupied empty houses in more and more West German cities and set up self-administered youth centers in them.
The West Berlin anarcho-rock group "Ton Steine Scherben" was happily engaged for a concert, which created something like a squatter anthem with the "Rauchhaus song" and its refrain "This is our house".
After their concerts there was a collective breach of law.
Wrestling with the building lion
A large squatting movement requires empty houses, rebellious young people, a political power vacuum and a delegitimization of the previous urban development.
All of this came together in West Berlin at the end of 1980, when the SPD Senate fell over one of the notorious building scandals and at the same time a failed deforestation policy in the city center aroused displeasure.
Young punks, hippies and autonomous people occupied up to 165 houses within a few months.
They found that they only attracted political attention when they fought street battles with the police.
Finally the CDU came to power in Berlin and had many occupied houses evacuated.
Squatters Klaus-Jürgen Rattay died on September 22, 1981 during the first major evacuation operation.
But more than half of the houses were not cleared and transferred to cooperatives.
In Hamburg, for a large part of the 1980s, the squatted houses on Hafenstrasse in St. Pauli were a central issue in city politics.
After long negotiations and tough confrontations, eleven of the colorful old buildings on the Elbe were transferred to a cooperative.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a power vacuum opened up in East Berlin.
At the same time, old buildings were empty in Prenzlauer Berg and Friedrichshain.
First East Berlin opposition members, then West Berlin left-wing radicals struck.
But as in 1981 in the western part of the city, it was only a short summer of anarchy: In November 1990, the SPD Interior Senator had the police evacuate 13 occupied houses in Mainzer Strasse.
The squatters at Eppsteiner Strasse 47 in Frankfurt were more successful in comparison, but it was a long battle before they could finally stay.
Initially, the owner Simon Preisler built a plot of land higher than permitted on a different plot of land and had to sell the partially occupied house to the city.
However, a municipal housing association only gave the occupiers a "lease agreement" for the apartments, and in 1981 brought eviction proceedings.
"I'm staying here," said Lelle Franz, and finally got a proper lease after the house was renovated in 1982.
Icon: The mirror
