4 Best Sights in Frankfurt, Germany

The German Architecture Museum is housed in a late-19th-century villa, which was converted in the early 1980s by the Cologne-based architect Oswald Mathias Ungers. He created five levels, including a simple basement space with a visible load-bearing structure, a walled complex on the ground floor, and a house-within-a-house on the third floor. With more than 180,000 drawings and plans, and 600 scale models, the museum features a wealth of documents on the history of architecture and hosts debates and exhibitions on its future, including sustainable urban design. A permanent exhibit features the most comprehensive collection of model panoramas in the history of German architecture.

This fascinating museum in a building in Römer Square that dates from the 1300s doubled in size with the addition of an adjoining wing in 2015. The city's oldest museum explores two millennia of Frankfurt history through a collection of some 630,000 objects, including what the city of the future might look like. Standout exhibits include scale models of historic Frankfurt at various periods, with every street, house, and church, plus photos of the devastation of World War II. The new wing blends in with the surrounding historic architecture with its gabled roof and carved sandstone sides, and offers both a café and city views from the top floor.

The story of Frankfurt's Jewish community dating from the 1500s is told in the former Rothschild Palais, which overlooks the river Main. Prior to the Holocaust, Frankfurt's Jewish quarter was the second-largest in Germany (after Berlin), and the silver and gold household items on display are a testament to its prosperity. The museum contains a library of 5,000 books, a large photographic collection, and a documentation center. Be sure to check out the wall of ceremonial menorahs. The museum reopened in 2020 after a five-year, $59 million renovation that included the addition of modern, light-filled annex for temporary exhibits, including focusing on anti-Semitism and current Jewish life in Germany. There's also a new restaurant, Flowdeli.

This branch of the Jewish Museum is built on the site of the Bornerplatz Synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) in 1938, and includes the foundations of mostly 18th-century buildings that were once part of the Jewish quarter, or Judengasse, dating from 1460.