The Racehorse on the Runway
While Frankfurt International Airport is among the world’s biggest international air hubs, locals still call it “Waldflughafen,” meaning the airport in the woods. Situated in one of the most diverse ecosystems in the Rhein-Main region of Germany, the surrounding forests served as hunting grounds for the local aristocracy for hundreds of years and, protected from urbanization, preserved a dazzling variety of species. Transforming this diversity of land use patterns into a major international airport meant disrupting that ecosystem, altering the migration patterns and “homes” of countless animals and plants. But the story of Frankfurt Airport’s borders is as much about the creation of homes as it is about their destruction. The modern airport, and Frankfurt Airport in particular, gives us a unique window onto the many tensions implicit in any definition of home, and shows us how the construction of home is essentially intertwined with the production of borderlands. These borders show us that home is not something that is given, but rather something that is made and managed, transitory and subject to conflict.
When Frankfurt Airport opened in 1936, the diversity of
