"Everything succumbs to the sharp scythe of time"

In its simple design, the La Roche residence corresponded to a type of late Baroque house that was widespread far beyond Offenbach am Main throughout southwest Germany at the time. Of medium size and with wrap-around doors on all sides, it blended inconspicuously into the row of houses on Domstrasse, which at the time was quite uniformly built. Mrs. von La Roche herself liked to refer to her home as a small hut with a little garden or as her "cricket hut", whether out of understatement, coquetry or disappointment at what she perceived as limited living conditions remains to be seen. By Offenbach standards, the house may not have been a particularly grand residence, but it was certainly a befitting retirement home for a former state councillor living in seclusion.(3) One of the advantages of the property was a large garden, which Mr. von La Roche had planted with trees and flowers according to his own ideas as soon as he moved in and which bordered on the most beautiful and largest park in the city at the back, belonging to the Bernard and d'Orville families. The immediate neighborhood, namely the small house of the music publisher Johann André on the western side and the larger residential and business house of his son Hofrat Johann Anton André to the east, was also respectable and promised the La Roche couple pleasant social intercourse in the future.

Solidly built with stone outer walls over a vaulted cellar, the La Roche house originally had two storeys and a high mansard roof above. The upper floor and attic each had five windows. On the ground floor, the front door was located in the central axis between four windows, with a small flight of steps in front of it to compensate for the difference in level to the street.(4) It was above all the clear symmetry and proportions that gave the façade a well-designed appearance; architectural decoration was largely dispensed with. It is not known whether the outer walls were originally plastered or whether the red sandstone of the masonry was visible - common on the façades of better residential buildings in Offenbach before 1800.

Entering the house from Domstraße, one first came into a long, wide hallway, lit only by the skylights above the doors, which ran through the entire building on the ground floor. At the front, near the front door, there were two large rooms on either side of this spacious hallway, each with two windows facing the street, suitable for receiving guests. These were adjoined by further rooms in the depths of the house; one of them housed the kitchen. At the rear, northern end of the hallway was the door that led out into the courtyard and the adjoining garden. Next to it inside the building was the staircase leading up to the upper floor. The layout of the rooms was repeated there, but the hallway to the forecourt was shortened and one of the two rooms on the street side was enlarged like a hall instead. Connecting doors created an enfilade of beautiful living spaces, which also included rooms on the garden side.

Little is known about the specific use and furnishings of individual rooms. The lessons that Mrs. von La Roche gave to her granddaughters Bettine, Lulu and Meline, who had largely lived with her since 1798, took place in a living room. From the library room, which probably also housed Mr. von La Roche's mineral collection and pictures from his painting collection, one could see over to the distant Berger Höhe; an indication that this was probably the northwest room on the upper floor.(5) Presumably in the years before 1799, when La Roche wrote her book 'Mein Schreibetisch', this room was also her workplace, surrounded by important books and pictures near a window that offered a view of her chicken yard.(6) At the very top of the attic there were other smaller and lower rooms of a more intimate character. The grandchildren lived here as permanent guests. It is not known where the daughter Louise Möhn, who had moved in with her mother after the divorce in 1789, had her refuge, or where the young von Bethmann and his tutor were accommodated as temporary lodgers. Bettine reported that her elderly niece Cordula ("Kordel"), a penniless relative of Georg Michael Frank von La Roche who also lived in the house, slept in a leather armchair in a living room on the second floor.

The garden played an important role in Bettine Brentano's memoirs and Sophie von La Roche's writings. Surrounded by high walls, it was bordered to the north by a green wall formed by a row of poplars that grew ever higher. Acacia trees, apricot and other fruit trees, vines, a honeysuckle arbor and flowers were a delight to the eye. There were also extensive vegetable beds with beans, cabbage, lettuce, parsley and potatoes, which were cultivated by a gardener. The granddaughters also did some gardening, as Mrs. von La Roche attached great importance to reading books on garden economics during their school education. For Bettine, the design and order of the garden, right down to the carefully stacked wood stocks, were an expression of her grandmother's sense of beauty.

Around 1831, Spieß, who had also worked to develop the public school system in Offenbach, closed his private institute and moved to Sprendlingen. In 1832, he advertised the first floor for rent, including a salon, two rooms, a cabinet, a kitchen and a large attic room.(8) In 1837, he then sold the property to the master tailor Carl Krauß, who in the following years advertised his padded sleeping skirts, summer skirts and quilted bedspreads in the newspaper and was always looking for young girls to work there. Josef Kößler, who subsequently acquired the property in 1846, was also active as a manufacturer of sleeping skirts and as a trader. He was also one of the first in Offenbach to sell ready-made clothing, which he had sewn in a factory, which was probably located on the ground floor. In 1846, Kößler had a narrow store built on the area of the western driveway next to the residential building, into which the milliner Jeanette Herchenröder moved with her ladies' hat store. At this time, it was already foreseeable that Domstraße would develop into a busy street due to the construction of the railroad and train station(9).

The upgrading to an attractive commercial location was not without consequences for the house. While the garden with two water basins, a so-called Wieland grotto and tree trellises along the boundary walls was still recognizably preserved in its old state,(10) the building file shows how several side and rear buildings were erected in the area of the courtyard and southern half of the garden from 1851 onwards and subsequently enlarged further. With the Steinhart and Günzburg portfolio factory, a larger company moved into this conglomerate of buildings in 1855. In 1863, Kößler sold the house to his neighbor to the east, August André, who lived at Domstraße 21, who was probably interested in expanding the premises of his music publishing house and music printing company. After partially removing the dividing wall along the southern boundary of the property, André first had a new bowling alley built in the garden. After the modernization in 1864, the Bernard brothers' snuff factory moved into the store, and it is thanks to an apprentice working there that it is remembered that visitors from abroad, including from England, still came to see the home of the writer La Roche.(11) This had been rented by Mayor Johann Martin Hirschmann and his son Georg, a family of factory owners who were close friends of the André family. The Hirschmann lithographic establishment, known for its artistically sophisticated reproductions of prints, produced in the rear buildings of the neighboring house no. 21. When Johann Martin Hirschmann died in 1874, a huge crowd escorted the popular mayor from the funeral home to the cemetery. Hirschmann's family then moved into their residential and commercial building on Frankfurter Strasse, with the portfolio manufacturer Hartmann Stöhr becoming the new main tenant with an apartment and a workshop. In the last decades of the 19th century, bookbinderies, leather processing companies and other craftsmen also moved in.

Since the 1860s, owner August André had had a number of minor modernization measures carried out on the residential building at Domstraße 23. However, only the addition of a small bay window for lavatories to the side of the staircase on the rear façade changed the exterior. Compared to contemporary new buildings, the building appeared increasingly old-fashioned and lacked comfort. The formerly beautiful view from the house of the Büsing-d'Orville family's private park beyond the garden wall was obscured by the commercial rear buildings, and only a meagre remnant of the house's own garden remained. The construction of the new Main Bridge in 1887 shifted through traffic from the old town to the previously quiet northern section of Kaiserstraße, and street noise also increased steadily on Domstraße, which was now finally part of the city center. In view of the declining residential value, it is understandable that the André siblings, as heirs and owners, had the ground floor converted in 1911 in order to rent it out as office space and a warehouse to leather goods companies such as Dieterle and Winter. The last major extension to the workshop buildings in the courtyard area was during the First World War for the Grundmann and Altschul cigarette factory, which expanded briefly. In the interwar period, a car saddlery and various companies, mainly in the leather industry, rented the side and rear buildings.

In the years of National Socialism, such commemoration then took on other, propagandistic forms: as a cult of German intellectual heroes, especially in the local press media. However, Sophie von La Roche was only perceived superficially and as a locally esteemed representative of her time. Her home remained untouched by all this. But some of the commercial tenants suffered from the increasing anti-Jewish repression: One of the forced company sales, for example, involved the Heymann and Bachert leather goods factory; Hey and Michel profited from the "Aryanization". While most of the houses in Domstrasse were reduced to rubble in the bombing raids of the war years, the houses of La Roche and their neighbor André remained standing like islands with only minor damage. As early as 1945, the Pietz carpentry business began to repair the destroyed side building for furniture production, and sales were made in the small, tube-like long store extension.(14) Even in the first years after the war, it was foreseeable that the municipal reconstruction plans would implement old ideas for improving inner-city traffic conditions in Domstraße without sentimentality. The city purchased the ruined plots of land required for the Durchbruchstraße as well as preserved buildings, and when sufficient new housing was finally available elsewhere at the end of the 1950s, the demolition of Sophie von La Roche's house for the expansion of the generously dimensioned Berliner Straße began in August 1960. The rear part of the site was used as an extension to Büsingpark. To commemorate what was lost, a memorial stone has stood between bushes and flowerbeds near the roadside ever since. Another place of remembrance is the family gravestone, which was moved to the ground floor arcade of Isenburg Castle in 1928.

Sophie La Roche herself, rooted in 18th century thinking, was aware of the finite nature of everything earthly. She once wrote wistfully in the face of old, destroyed castles: "[...] everything succumbs to the hands of fate and the sharp scythe of time [...]". (15) But if she could have seen how, shortly before the demolition and not far away, new and more beautiful rooms had been created for the Offenbach public library in part of the former residential and commercial building of the Bernard and d'Orville families - perhaps this would have reconciled her to the disappearance of her house from the cityscape.

(1) Johann Caspar Nicks, site plan, 1784 (Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Archiv, Offenbach am Main) In 1784, the house still had the serial number 74. There are three different contemporary spellings for the name of the princely building commissioner and engineer: Nicks, Nix and Niels.

(2) Unfortunately, this plan only shows a small part of the existing buildings in the quarter. It is also peculiar that the name La Roche appears in an unexpected place on Nicks' plan, namely on the plot where the residential building at Kaiserstrasse 91 last stood [see site plan, note 1]. From the early days of this building it is only known that it was built in 1792 for a Mrs. La Fontaine from Frankfurt. Whether Mr. von La Roche originally had this property in mind or whether it was the property briefly acquired by his son Fritz cannot be clarified for the time being. Further questions are raised by some letters from the husband Georg Michael Frank von La Roche from his first weeks in Offenbach. Julia Bastian was kind enough to draw my attention to the collection of letters in the archives of the Freies Deutsches Hochstift/Frankfurt Goethe Museum. In these letters, La Roche tells his daughter Maximiliane about his search for a suitable property and his negotiations with the building contractor and master carpenter Seib. Due to Heinrich Seib's character, which La Roche perceived as unfriendly and coarse, as well as differing price expectations, negotiations did not begin without complications, which led to a purchase decision in September 1786 and Mr. von La Roche's subsequent move into a house that cannot be identified with certainty at present. A subsequent letter suggests, however, that Seib still considered himself the owner and insisted on a prompt payment of the purchase price. The possibility that this deal fell through and La Roche acquired another property with Brentano's support cannot be ruled out. Another indication of a change could be that although these letters mention Mr. La Roche's friendship with the André family, who provided him with lodgings during his first weeks in Offenbach, nothing was written in September concerning a future relationship with the Andrés [see Georg Michael Frank von La Roche, letters to Maximiliane Brentano, Offenbach am Main, 10 July [1786], 23 July [1786], 27 September [1786]. (Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurt Goethe Museum)]. Sophie von La Roche herself did not arrive in Offenbach until December, as Mrs. Bernard noted in her diary [see Wingenfeld 1975].

(3) In the Offenbach list of houses drawn up in 1808 for a tax levy with four value categories, the house is classified in the second best category, it now had the number Lit. Q 11 [see Offenbacher Häuserverzeichnis, 1808. (Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Archiv, Offenbach am Main)]. A comparison shows that other higher officials and wealthy people owned similarly sized houses. According to the advertisement in the 'Frankfurter Ober-Post-Amts-Zeitung', this house had eleven rooms as well as a kitchen, cellar, wood yard and garden [see Frankfurter Ober-Post-Amts-Zeitung, Frankfurt am Main, August 12, 1808. (Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main)].

(4) A high cellar was necessary to protect the living quarters from the recurring floods of the Main; the La Roches' garden was flooded in 1798, but their living quarters were apparently spared.

(5) According to the advertisement in the 'Frankfurter Ober-Post-Amts-Zeitung', announcing the last auction date of the estate, the La Roche couple's book collection still comprised about 1400 volumes at this time [see Frankfurter Ober-Post-Amts-Zeitung, Frankfurt am Main, October 8, 1808. (Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main)].

(6) Later, in Bettine's youth, the desk stood in a place from which Mrs. von La Roche could look out onto the street through a mirror and observe the arrivals.

(7) Due to the lack of clarity about the whereabouts of the eldest son Fritz, the inheritance settlement took longer than a year, as evidenced by advertisements [see Frankfurter Ober-Post-Amts-Zeitung, Frankfurt am Main, June 30, 1807 (Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main)]. As the daughter Louise married elsewhere, she no longer attached any importance to the Offenbach house. The auction of the oil paintings and engravings belonging to the estate was advertised in the newspaper [see Privilegirtes Offenbacher Frag- und Anzeige-Blatt, Offenbach am Main, April 29, 1808. (Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Archiv, Offenbach am Main)] and on September 30, 1808 the sale of the house and its accessories [see Privilegirtes Offenbacher Frag- und Anzeige-Blatt, Offenbach am Main, September 30, 1808. (Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Archiv, Offenbach am Main)]. This auction was rescheduled several times, which suggests a lack of interested parties or initially too low bids [cf. Frankfurter Ober-Post-Amts-Zeitung, Frankfurt am Main, August 12, September 13, October 3, 1808 (Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main)].

(8) Cf. Privilegirtes Offenbacher Frag- und Anzeige-Blatt, Offenbach am Main, June 22, 1832 (Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Archiv, Offenbach am Main).

(9) Since 1842, Offenbach citizens had been actively trying to get a rail connection. The former garden of the von Amerongen family on Kanalstraße opposite the junction with Domstraße was envisaged as the location of the station. Construction work began in 1845, and the railroad began operating in 1848.

(10) The "cricket hut" of Mrs. v. La Roche in Offenbach, probably written by Emil Pirazzi, in: Offenbacher Intelligenzblatt, Offenbach am Main, 26 [23 ! ] August 1862 (Haus der Stadtgeschichte, Archiv, Offenbach am Main).

(11) Cf. Völker 1929, p. 15.

(12) In 1931, the private "Lili Park" and Metzler's bathing temple were opened to the public for the first time through guided tours. The two frequently depicted lithographs of Sophie von La Roche's house, which show a view of the north façade and the garden in their original state around 1800, were probably also created in this context.

(13) Cf. Offenbacher Zeitung, Offenbach am Main, December 5, 1931 (House of City History, Archive, Offenbach am Main)

(14) We are grateful to Mrs. Pietz and Mr. Buschhaus for their information on the condition of the house in the post-war years.

(15) La Roche 1791, p. 331.

Source: The essay by Christina Uslular-Thiele was published in: Dr. Jürgen Eichenauer (ed.): 'My freedom to live according to my character'. Sophie von La Roche (1730 - 1807) - Writer of Sensitivity. Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, Weimar 2007 Publication by kind permission of the publisher and the author