Neu-Isenburg

Neu-Isenburg was drawn on a drawing board for the persecuted. In 1699 Count Johann Philipp of Isenburg granted French Huguenot refugees land in the forest south of Frankfurt, and they laid out their new town as an ideal grid — straight streets crossing at right angles around a central square, French sermons in the church, weavers' looms in the houses; the plan survives intact as the old quarter's geometry, and the town has kept faith with the founding, its history museum in the "Haus zum Löwen" telling the refugee century and the Hugenottenhalle — the civic concert and congress hall — carrying the founders' name into the cultural calendar.

Frankfurt's proximity wrote the modern chapters: Neu-Isenburg grew into a prosperous service-and-headquarters town at the metropolis's southern gate, the Isenburg-Zentrum's commerce and airport-adjacent hotels balancing leafy residential quarters. The forest that received the refugees still rings the town — the Frankfurt Stadtwald's oaks and the Gravenbruch district's green seclusion — with the Waldschwimmbad's pools and the Jacobiweiher's herons keeping summer local.

Memory is tended with care, including of the town's noted early-twentieth-century home for Jewish mothers and children founded by Bertha Pappenheim, honoured today as a memorial site. A grid for conscience's sake, a hall for music, a forest for breathing: Neu-Isenburg remains a planned act of hospitality, three centuries in operation.