18 - Lithographische Anstalt und Druckerei F. Schoembs

The houses at Kaiserstrasse 11 to 19 are exemplary of the close coexistence of working and living, where commercial side buildings from the late 19th century can still be found behind the front buildings.

Kaiserstrasse 15 was home to the Friedrich Schoembs printing and lithographic company from 1884. Members of this family had been working independently as lithographers in Offenbach since around 1830, where, after the invention of lithography by Senefelder, together with the music publisher André in 1799, a considerable number of companies were involved in the creative and technical development and commercial use of this printing technique.

It was an advantage for the efficiency of the Schoembs company around 1900 to be able to gradually expand the workshop buildings and to have an artist in the form of the partner Johannes Lippmann at the head of the company. Schoembs printed posters for the Darmstadt Artists' Colony exhibition in 1901 and, whether Art Nouveau or Art Deco, his printed matter was always at the cutting edge of stylistic developments.

It was not until the Great Depression that the company's success came to an end. Unlike the side wing, the residential building did not survive the bombing raids of the Second World War. The former factory buildings, which were repeatedly converted, were modernized around 2002 by the Frankfurt architect Karl Dudler.