Information in English to Make Your Next Trip Easier or More Enriching
Home	Goethe's House in Frankfurt Goethe's house stood on a street called Grosser Hirschgraben, which meant Great Stagsditch.  It was on the very edge of the cramped medieval old town.  This street, wider than was usual, had formerly been the city moat, that had been filled and built upon. The houses on the street, such as that of the Goethe family, were as a result not only larger than the norm for the city center but also had two stories of cellars.  The immense stock of  wine in barrels that these held, worth in all one-third of the value of the house, impregnated the whole building with a sweet scent that marked it off, as home, different from the stinking world outside.  Despite the substantial extension and modernization of 1755 which had flanked the front door with two reception rooms, the ground floor was generally hot and smelled of cooking fat, because it dominated by the kitchen.  It grew dark very early on this floo,r and was lit by homemade candles.  On the first floor (using the European method of counting floors) however, in the main living rooms, the fine arrays of fashionably large windows installed by Goethe's father came into their own.  The air was fresher.  The great presses that stood on the landings of the elaborate new staircase (Goethe's father's and mother's initials were worked into the ironwork of the baluster) contained an immense stock of clean linen, for wash-day was only three times a year.  There was nothing unusual in a man owning several hundred shirts.  On the second floor, where Geothe was born, and where his sister Cornelia (1750-1777) had her bedroom, there was a more private atmosphere. Here too was the library of some 1,700 volumes.  Finally on the third floor, which was often flooded with light, Goethe on the east side, had his own rooms which were his until he left Frankfurt finally at the age of 26.  On the west side were kept his father's silkworms, fed in season on Mulberry leaves that it was his and his sister's duty to collect.  And from the west side the windows looked out across the courtyard of the family house and the remains of the old town ditch, then across the flowering back gardens of the wealthy houses toward the watch towers on the city wall, and the distant Taunus hills. Home