Tales from the Fast Trains: Frankfurt

We meet Elizabeth Lucke, a guide from the tourist office wearing a leather jacket and Art Deco-style glasses, outside the station. We are about to embark on an “On the Streets” tour designed to take in “the poor Frankfurt: drugs, prostitution and homelessness”.

“Are you sure we want to do this?” whispers my girlfriend.

“Well, it is different,” I whisper back.

“We’re on a weekend break and we’re going to see druggies and hookers?” she asks as Elizabeth walks a few steps ahead.

“It would appear so,” I reply, ignoring the fact that I booked it for the very reason that it sounded so offbeat.

Soon Elizabeth is turning to face the station from across the street next to a building where Oskar Schindler lived in a small apartment after the war. During his time in the city during the 1960s he failed to make a cement factory business work and he was eventually reduced to living on a small pension; the man credited with saving the lives of almost 1,200 Jews during the war died penniless in 1974. There is a small plaque on the apartment block.

We walk on along narrow streets, passing “Dr Müller’s Erotik Shop” and a run of seedy fast-food joints, where the tour proper begins.

“We have a big drugs problem. About 70 per cent of Germany’s drugs are imported through the airport,” Elizabeth says matter-of-factly.

“In the 1980s Frankfurt was considered the crack capital of Germany. But since then we have adopted a system of offering clean syringes in clean facilities. It has taken a lot of the drugs off the street.”

Since 2002, we learn, laws have also been introduced to legalise prostitution, giving women the right to sue men who do not pay and also providing health insurance and a pension fund. The area we are walking through now is known both as the “Red Light District” and also, officially, as a “Tolerance Area”. The vast majority of the prostitutes are from Eastern Europe, only 3 per cent are German, and they work in buildings with set standards of hygiene for which they pay landlords a set rent per day. We pass one of these, named Crazy Sexy, with mannequins of scantily-clad women draped over the balconies of its many floors. Streetwalking is not officially allowed. The turnover from prostitution in Germany is, according to Elizabeth, €14.5 billion annually with 1.2 million men asking for the services of prostitutes each day.

“They are not forced to do so,” says Elizabeth, who is middle-aged and might pass for a librarian. She’s referring to the prostitutes, not their customers. “It’s their thing. It’s OK. That’s my personal view. It’s the oldest profession in the world. At noon you see bankers coming over every day at lunch. Prices start at around twenty-five to thirty euros.”

We continue, taking in the garish red and yellow façade of Showcentre: Sexyland and a Blue Movie Kino Centre, as we are told that there are 1,700 homeless people in the city, including many illegal immigrants. A short walk along, we exit the “Tolerance Area” and enter a park with pleasant benches and landscaped gardens. At the far side in front of a row of skyscrapers there’s a blue sculpture in the form of the euro’s currency symbol. Beyond this, on the other side of the park, is the Euro Tower, headquarters of the European Central Bank, founded in 1998 in readiness for the introduction of the new currency across much of Europe on 1 January 1999.

At the base of this, we find a shop selling commemorative coins and old German mark notes. After what we have seen a couple of hundred yards away, it’s hard to come to terms with the stark contrast: bankers on one side of the park, bedlam on the other.

We return to the bedlam, where we come to a complex with a “consumption room” with clean needles for heroin addicts. But the users we see have not bothered to go inside. Instead, we watch four men with jerky puppet-like motions come to a halt at a windowsill outside the building. They hurriedly retrieve objects from pockets and, totally disregarding everyone and everything around them (including two tourists with a guide across the street watching them) begin to prepare their drugs for shooting up.

They fix their heads downwards, intently involved in the task at hand, their bodies twitching. The four are in a row, but each is so absorbed that he pays no attention whatsoever to the others: none. They remind me of chickens poking at grain left on a barn floor. Nothing else matters. Then one turns outwards and strips off his hooded jacket. His eyes are the colour of ash and he has deep lines in his young face. He pulls a tourniquet round the top of his arm and injects his concoction. The others do not even glance in his direction as he does so. Then, one by one, they do the same. The group becomes animated in a way that seems totally alien to their former states of existence. They appear jovial and relieved: they have got where they want to be. Nothing now matters, in a different way. And even though they have clearly “arrived”, they still seem as though they are living in entirely separate spheres. They may be wired in to what they were seeking. They may be brothers in needle-pricked arms. But they are as alone now as they were when they were twitching at the windowsill. They still don’t notice us. Why would they? We are irrelevant.

We walk back in silence to our starting point at the station, turning past the entrance to Oskar Schindler’s old flat. As we near the entrance, Elizabeth simply says: “you can never have a society without drugs.” And we head back towards our hotel...

Tales from the Fast Trains by Tom Chesshyre is published by Summersdale and is available in the Times Book Store now at a discounted price for Times subscribers. Click here for more information.