Frankfurt finds a golden solution to its European School problem

FRANKFURT — For some Eurocrat children, being born with a silver spoon in their mouth is only the beginning. Those in Frankfurt are set to be educated with gold under their feet.

The City of Frankfurt may have found the perfect solution to its search for a home for the European School, one that goes back almost two decades. The Deutsche Bundesbank is set to leave its iconic headquarters and decamp to the city center, it announced on Wednesday, while the city has signaled it is ready to buy parts of the existing site, subject to an independent valuation.

As a result, the imposing brutalist masterpiece that once sent shudders down the spines of European finance ministers may in future inspire the more prosaic aversion of children who don’t feel like going to school.

The gold, it’s true, won’t be directly under the playground or the chemistry block. The vast underground vaults that house around half of Germany’s 3,350 tons of gold reserves are at the southern edge of the campus, and will be carved out and kept by the central bank. All the same, heavily armed guards may become a common sight for the next generation of Eurocrat kids.

Back when European politicians were haggling over the right to host the new European Central Bank, the city administration legally committed to provide land for a permanent European School campus as its part of the deal. But its search has been derailed time and again by opposition from multiple local interest groups, from sports clubs to allotment gardeners and even Ferris wheel operators.

The Bundesbank site — where access has been restricted for more than half a century — comes with the rare advantage of virtually no competing claims.

Frankfurt Mayor Mike Josef said the site “is ideally suited.” The land is already designated as municipal property and able to be used, among other things, for schools.

“We could therefore begin implementation immediately after concluding a purchase agreement. It would be the fastest possible and best solution of all the alternatives considered,” Josef told a press conference on Wednesday. The new school could open its doors in four to six years.

It’s high time. The school’s interim home was initially designed for 900 students but now hosts more than 1,650.

That’s because the ECB almost doubled in size when it became the supervisor for the eurozone’s biggest banks back in 2014, and because the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) also set up in Frankfurt.  They’re soon to be joined by the kids of employees at the freshly-established Anti-Money Laundering Agency, which will have a staff of over 400 by 2027. Student numbers are expected to rise further to over 2,200 by 2032.

The news was welcomed by ECB President Christine Lagarde, who had previously raged against an “embarrassing” impasse that resulted in children having to study in “container over containers over containers.”

“After many years of uncertainty, a promising path forwards for the future ESF site has finally emerged,” she said in a joint press briefing with the city government. “We very much hope that the Frankfurt authorities will make swift progress so that the new school site can open as soon as possible.”

The City of Frankfurt may have found the perfect solution to its search for a home for the European School, one that goes back almost two decades. | Andreas Arnold/picture alliance via Getty Images

All this has been made possible by the decision of the Bundesbank to leave the place that has been its home for 54 years, a bastion of hard currency orthodoxy that stood tall amid the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, multiple oil shocks and European currency crises, making it the inevitable model for today’s European Central Bank.

The move may represent a further step away from the awesome legacy of the Deutsche Mark, but it’s also a relief for today’s Bundesbank, which on Wednesday scrapped its long-planned renovation and expansion project due to massive cost overruns. These had risked damaging its still-unparalleled prestige among the German population.

Originally pegged at €3.59 billion, the cost had soared to €4.6 billion by 2022 before a scathing audit condemned oversized sports facilities, restaurants and guest apartments. A cost-effectiveness review commissioned by President Joachim Nagel concluded it was better to buy a new site than to try to salvage the ageing brutalist complex, a process that has been made more complex and expensive by a decision to grant it special conservation status.

According to Josef, building experts said the main building — often compared to a Holiday Inn on steroids — could be suitable for the school. Other options, he said, include designating part or all of the old headquarters to European institutions, such as the AMLA, and adding a new building to the site.

And happily for both the city and the Bundesbank, finding the money for whatever comes next will be someone else’s problem: The federal government is responsible for covering the cost of a new building for the European School. That means the costly and uncertain renovation of the existing building will have to be covered by Berlin.