One of the most straightforward mathematical rules is: minus times minus equals plus. Seen in this light, the negative signs for many commuters in the Main metropolis apparently cancelled each other out this Thursday. Please note: train drivers' strikes times farmers' protests equals astonishing calm – apart from the short-term honking of horns. Anyone who predicted a traffic apocalypse in the face of the rail labour dispute, farmers' demonstrations and tractor rallies has obviously not considered the modern and pragmatic home office culture.

Faced with foreseeable logistical hurdles, many employees opted for the nerve-sparing home office instead of making the potentially arduous journey to their offices in the city centre. Rarely have the streets been quieter, the intersections less congested and the pedestrian crossings emptier at a Thursday lunchtime in the heart of the financial metropolis than on the biggest protest day of the still young year.

Every shopping Saturday, the shopping-loving people of Frankfurt cause even more chaos with their lines of cars and queues in car parks. Every centimetre of fresh snow causes significant delays downtown. If the angry farmers and train drivers on strike had expected the Frankfurt labour force to be highly emotional or even show solidarity, they were disappointed. Ultimately, the two major protests on this day levelled each other out.

The Historical Museum in Frankfurt is showing pictures by photographer Barbara Klemm until the beginning of April. A marvellous and anecdotal look at the city's politically turbulent past. Some of the photos show scenes from the days of the Frankfurt housing struggle in the early 1970s when the squatter scene was at its peak in protest against rapidly rising rents.

The scene on that December morning in 2023, when the police in the Bockenheim district began to clear the Dondorf printing works occupied by activists, felt like a journey back in time. Set against the glittering silhouette of Frankfurt's office towers and in the face of all the realities of escalating rents, this form of protest is now anything but commonplace in Germany's financial capital.

The historic printing plant building on the edge of Frankfurt University was to make way for a new building for the Max Planck Society. However, the plans for the Institute for Empirical Aesthetics triggered massive resistance from activists who want to preserve the brick building and use it as a cultural centre. They occupied the building for days, holding out on the roof on winter nights, surrounded by police forces – until the police finally cleared the site.

But the protest had an effect: This week, the Max Planck Society announced that it was cancelling its plans at this address – and is looking for a new location for the new institute. The scientific organisation argued that no financially viable scenario exists for retaining the old building.

However, demolition and new construction would not make sense "due to the criticism voiced by various interest groups, some of it extremely aggressive". The squatters rarely experienced such rapid success in the 70s.