A true Frankfurt Citoyen – Anne de Condé

Anne, a native of Paris, has been at home in Germany ever since her teenage days when she regularly spent the Easter holidays in Dortmund, staying with friends of the family. However, it was not the Ruhr region that became her home-from-home and then her home. That didn’t happen until a few years later, when she not only had a degree in law from the prestigious Sorbonne under her belt, but four years working in the Paris office of Clifford Chance LLP. It was then that she took the plunge and moved from the city on the Seine to a much smaller city with a river crossing: Frankfurt, trading the Land of the Franks for the Franks’ Ford, as it were.

It wasn’t her first time in the Main metropolis, as she’d been here on an internship with the same law firm while still a student and had really liked both the city and working for her mentor there. However, this second time round there was nothing interim about the move. When in 2005 she, her then husband and her daughter arrived, it was to stay, with her continuing to work for Clifford Chance. Thus Germany, or more specifically Frankfurt, became her homebase. And she has never looked back.

A lot has changed in the 18 years. Frankfurt is now only a few hours by fast train from Paris, Anne has long since qualified as a German lawyer, and she is the proud mother not just of a daughter, but also of a son. He was born in Frankfurt (“not Offenbach” she laughs, as she was living in Heusenstamm at the time) and she wanted to make certain his ID said Frankfurt. (He is indeed a Frankfurt citizen in a double sense as he was born at Bürgerhospital!) What is more, she and her daughter have now joined her son in being dual nationals: They hold not just French but also German passports (issued in Frankfurt of course).

Paris may have been bigger, more glamorous, boasted more skyscrapers, but before long Anne realized that what counted wasn’t sheer numbers, sheer quantity, but quality, quality of life, and indeed even the quality of the skyscrapers. And what counted even more was the pleasant quality of proximity. While she has down through time worked outside Frankfurt, too, she has never left the Frankfurt metropolitan region because, as she says, “Frankfurt is such a village! Here everyone invariably knows everyone else – which is definitely not the case in Paris. And nevertheless, it’s a metropolis.” She loves strolling around all its different districts - “pandemic or not” she says defiantly. And, of course, there’s the Apfelwein – while it may not be quite the cidre you get in Normandy (she has family roots there) and you can’t turn it into Calvados... Hardly surprisingly, she lives happily in what is often referred to as Frankfurt’s oldest village: Bornheim, which is the heart of Apfelwein country, unless you live in Sachsenhausen of course.

For the last 14 years, Anne has been in-house legal counsel in different international corporations, where she has handled the legal side to their European business. Today , Anne is right in the middle of one of the latest business sectors mushrooming in her chosen ‘village”, as Frankfurt has evolved into one of the largest data-center centers on the Continent. She’s currently SVP Legal, Governance and Human Resources for the EMEA Data Center business of NTT, whose first campus is located in Rödelheim . Where Frankfurt is once again an international hub, as it is here that Japan’s NTT group has set up shop – it operates carrier-neutral data centers in more than 20 countries and regions, including the Americas, Asia Pacific, EMEA and India.

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