Voyay walking tour

Bockenheim Thinks Back on Foot

Critical theory, student revolt, and memory across Frankfurt’s old campus

Frankfurt, Germany
12 stops
241 min
10.4 km
History

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This is not a tour of grand façades or academic celebrities frozen in bronze. It treats Frankfurt’s former university quarter as an intellectual landscape where cafés, student rooms, libraries, crossings, and contested buildings helped ideas become public action. Beginning in Bockenheim’s surviving alternative scene, you will follow the traces of student self-organization and the postwar university. The route explores the complicated relationship between Adorno and the 1968 generation, including shared critiques, sharp disagreements, and the dramatic 1969 confrontation at the Institut für Sozialforschung. The walk then moves into Westend, where Goethe University carried selected symbols of its past onto a very different campus. Adorno’s glass memorial, the Norbert Wollheim Memorial, and the former I.G. Farben headquarters reveal how relocation can create new responsibilities while leaving old neighborhood memories behind. Anyone interested in political ideas, social movements, university life, or contested urban change will find plenty to discuss. Come ready to look beyond plaques and ask how institutions remember, what redevelopment erases, and where critical thought still finds room to gather.

Try the first stop

Free sample · Stop 1

ExZess

An autonomous cultural hub where Bockenheim’s radical traditions remain loudly alive.

Begin amid the posters, stickers, bicycles, and event notices of this autonomous cultural center. ExZess shows how Frankfurt’s extra-parliamentary politics survived beyond 1968 through concerts, anti-racist work, neighborhood campaigns, and self-organized gatherings. It is an active community space, not a preserved monument, so approach it with curiosity and respect.

The route

12 stops, in order.

1
Stop 1 · Free sample
ExZess
An autonomous cultural hub where Bockenheim’s radical traditions remain loudly alive.
2
Stop 2
Café Albatros
A neighborhood café preserving the everyday sociability of Frankfurt’s student counterculture.
3
Stop 3
Dondorf-Druckerei
A former printing works where industrial memory became a new protest cause.
Stop 4
Philosophicum
A rescued modernist university building where campus memory became student housing.
Stop 5
Adorno-Ampel
A tiny traffic-light philosopher turning an ordinary crossing into critical theory.
Stop 6
Studierendenhaus
The old campus heart of student organizing, debate, film, and dissent.
Stop 7
Senckenberg University Library
A working archive revealing the quieter labor behind Frankfurt’s critical ideas.
Stop 8
Institut für Sozialforschung
The institutional home of critical theory and Adorno’s painful student rupture.
Stop 9
Instituto Cervantes Frankfurt
A former American cultural center recalling protest, Vietnam, and Cold War contradictions.
Stop 10
Adorno Memorial
A glass-encased desk making intellectual work visible yet tantalizingly unreachable.
Stop 11
Norbert Wollheim Memorial
A distributed memorial confronting forced labor behind the university’s elegant new campus.
Stop 12
IG Farben Building
A university landmark confronting corporate power, forced labor, and difficult institutional memory.