Few historians of nineteenth-century German liberalism would attribute importance to the fact that both Leopold Sonnemann (1831–1909) and Georg Varrentrapp (1809–86) participated in the foundation of the Frankfurt Zoological Garden in 1858. As local and national leaders of the democratic and liberal political movements from the 1860s to the 1880s, both men figure in political histories, in which appreciation of exotic animals played little part. This chapter will show that taking such details seriously can significantly enhance our understanding of Frankfurt's liberal political milieu. The link between the lifestyles and values of the liberal middle class and scientific rationality has been much discussed in nineteenth-century German history. A major area of research has been the development of municipal public health, where ambitious sanitary reformers achieved a successful union with the liberal middle class to clean up the city. I shall discuss public health in the next chapter; here I establish a link between the success of the Frankfurt Zoological Garden and the emergence of a self-consciously middle-class community in the city's suburbs.

This chapter will go against the conventional periodization of Frankfurt's political history, and trace the cause of the liberals' ascent in the German Reich to the city's topographical transformation in the 1850s. Frankfurt after the Prussian annexation in 1866, kept under firm liberal control, has been intensively studied by a number of political historians.