AH Challenge: Independent Frankfurt am Main

Your challenge, should you accept it is to have the city of Frankfurt am Main exist as an independent city-state (ala Singapore)
into the modern day without the rest of Germany being HREified.
 
If this is a "independent Frankfurt while the rest of Germany has unified" challenge, specifically with the German unification, I'd suggest that the best way of doing this is for France to somehow keep small parts of the Rhineland from after the Napoleonic Wars. Then have that area change hands a few times over the next century, with Germany taking it in a conflict, maybe like the Franco-Prussian War, a bit before WW1 (while ensuring that there are very few ripple effects and changes in the rest of the timeline to maximise the chance of a WW1 still happening - which is fairly likely, all things considered, if the course of history keeps going along a similar path. If you throw in some resentment to the Germans on the part of the Frankfurters at some point - maybe the Frankfurters do economically better by controlling their part of the Rhineland and extorting it to France, or the Germans utterly waste their city conquering it once or twice, or something, then at the end of WW1 then there is room for it to be turned into an international city, right around the time when other cities like Rijeka were being made into the same, and with all weird analogues like the little Moresnet territory (look it up), Danzig, etc, to rival the Saar due to an inability to integrate the city and its hinterland into the Saar territory.

Just an idea. Probably not the best.
 
Germany does'nt have to fully unify, but their have to be three or less nations (not counting Frankfurt) in the territory of Germany.
 
Well with no full German unification there's more scope for it to survive as a city-state that for some reason rejected the Deutsches Zollverein and thus was left out of the Unification Era, so long as the (preferably three) German countries keep each other on their toes long enough to never let Frankfurt be conquered. In such a scenario, Frankfurt would probably need to be practically insignificant, a shadow of a trading city with no large hinterland like many cities had, to avoid being too good a chance to pass up, though. The Rhineland was very profitable...
 
The city of Frankfurt didn't really have any share of the Rhineland; actually, it had rather narrow borders, even if compared the others of the late Free Cities (Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck).

In short: Frankfurt can survive as a relatively unimportant independent state under heavy German influence; think of San Marino rather than Singapore.
(OK, it would still be a bit more important than San Marino.)
But there is no really reason for that to happen; for there were as many supporters for unification in Frankfurt as elsewhere, maybe even more (reasons: Democratic experiences in the city, and wealth). Nevertheless, the Frankfurters were not quite happy about being incorporated into Prussia; the spirit of a free city has some influence on the self-definition of the city until now.
 
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