Frankfurt conference

I am writing this entry on the train from Frankfurt, where I spend the last several days at a conference put on by the German-North American Resources Project (GNARP). The conference took place in the former IG Farben headquarters, which has become part of the University of Frankfurt. It is an immense building that reminds me of the GM Building in Detroit. The stone facing is lighter, there are more unconventional shapes such as a rotunda entrance and the slight curve to the whole structure, but they have the same broad ratchet-like mass of wings and windows that gives space similar to a high rise without the extremes of height. The tour guide told a story about when the US army occupied the building. They planned to replace all the windows, but only measured the ones on the ground floor, since all of the windows appeared to be the same size. When the windows for the upper floors arrived, they discovered that the architect had used perspective to play an optical illusion on them. The upper windows were sized to look the same as the lower ones, not actually to be the same. None of us thought to ask what became of the thousands of pieces of glass that did not fit.

One of the conference organizers, a good friend, offered to organize all of the accommodations. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but turned out to be an immense headache for all concerned. The hotel itself was in the small town of Gelnhausen, something over half an hour by train from Frankfurt. And the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof was close to half an hour from the University building where we were meeting, depending on how well the U-bahn connections worked.

The hotel was itself 20 minutes to half an hour from the Gelnhausen train station, which meant that the trip to the conference and back again each day took nearly three hours. If the room were really nice, it might have been worthwhile, but it lacked some important amenities. For example, it had no telephone, and I am also not completely sure that there was a sheet on the mattress. The cloth beneath the standard featherbed comforter looked remarkably like a mattress cover. It was spotlessly clean, however, and I felt too tired to care. The room also had no Internet access even for a price, but who expects wireless in a place with no phone or sheet?

When I went to check out, the hotel forgot to deduct the deposit I had paid. I had been warned that this might happen and protested, so the proprietor went to the other extreme of telling me to pay nothing and he would settle it all with my conference organizer friend. Not a nice thing to do to a friend, but I could more easily arrange to pay him once I found out the true total, than persuade myself to give any money to the proprietor without a note saying “paid in full.”