Digital offers

The Frankfurt History App opens up new approaches to the historical traces of the city: it combines places with personal stories, historical recordings, video clips and audio tours. Today's city is the starting point from which users can actively navigate through history with the app. It offers historical knowledge on the go: for a quick exploration of the immediate surroundings or for longer city tours. This knowledge is constantly being expanded in a participatory way, new topics and places can be added by users and tours can also be put together by users themselves.

The app currently contains content on the following topics: National Socialism, 1848 and the history of democracy, feminism, architectural history of New Frankfurt, easy language. The app can be downloaded free of charge from the App Store and Play Store.

This digital project aims to improve access to Frankfurt's city history by publishing learning materials and museum content for free use. It is aimed at people from school and university teaching, extracurricular education and people from voluntary or activist contexts. The museum cooperates with media experts in order to understand digitality in an educational context and use it sensibly. The focus is on the needs of future users and the production of diverse open educational resources (OER).

The project is funded by the Commerzbank Foundation and the Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne from 2024-2026. We are currently working on openly licensed learning materials, distributing content on existing platforms (such as Wikimedia Commons, Materialnetzwerk Frankfurt) and developing our own website prototype.

The media guide can be used free of charge on your own smartphone and on loan in the museum. There are QR codes in the exhibitions that lead to the content. In most tours, curators from the museum tell background stories about the exhibited objects. Some tours are more artistic or have been developed in a participatory way together with a group. All tours are also accessible at home and can be listened to conveniently before or after your visit to the museum.

The work "Von Jedem Eins" by Frankfurt artist Karsten Bott comprises 1,507 objects from everyday culture. He sorts them thematically on a wall-filling shelf with 45 compartments. Since October 2021, the artwork has not only been on display in the museum's permanent exhibition, but can also be explored in a new media station and online from home. Here, we invite users to tell their own stories about the objects and share photos or memories: Join in!

The project was developed as part of the "dive in. Program for Digital Interactions" of the German Federal Cultural Foundation, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM) in the NEUSTART KULTUR program.

A digital journey back in time for people with dementia, their relatives and caregivers: Our suitcases full of everyday objects are waiting to be discovered. This web application can be discovered together online at any time as a family, with relatives and loved ones. Memories are stimulated by everyday objects from earlier times in various themed suitcases. By registering, the personal memory suitcase is always available unchanged and can be repacked or changed again and again.

The application is free of charge, and here can be viewed here. Registration for the storytelling cafés and information can be found at the Citizens' Institute. The project was supported by the Commerzbank Foundation, the Schambach Family Foundation and the ODDO BHF Foundation.

Carl Theodor Reiffenstein's "Frankfurt Views Collection" is part of the museum's founding collection. The artist sold it to the city in 1877. He captured old Frankfurt in 2,000 watercolors and drawings as well as 2,400 manuscript pages. The manuscripts are transcribed here and can be searched online.

Prehn's Miniaturkabinett, with its 812 small-format paintings in 32 folding boxes, is a stroke of luck for art history, as it has been preserved in its original composition - in contrast to a number of other old painting collections, which, as the core holdings of many museums, underwent a long selection process and were reduced to a selection considered important in the sense of a "canon" or later enriched with other works. In the process, valuable information about the collectors' intentions and preferences, about the composition of their collections and historical attribution practices, about the hanging of the paintings and the practical handling of them was lost. In Prehn's Miniaturkabinett, all of this can be studied in an exemplary manner, allowing conclusions to be drawn about other painting collections of the time.

The online database with the option of a full-text search provides an overview of all 32 boxes of the Miniaturkabinett and the most important information and in-depth content for each individual painting. Click here for the digital offer.

To accompany the City of Women Photographers exhibition, insights into the work with the photographs and the history of the photographers were published in a digital story. It can still be found online here.

The online collection provides an insight into the objects collected by the museum. The database is currently being revised and is no longer online. The more than 16,000 data records with images and texts that have already been published are available for specialist colleagues and all interested parties in the Internet archive. This list can be used as a research tool. All openly licensed images will soon be transferred to Wikimedia Commons, where they will be available for further use. In the meantime, the museum team is working on a new digital access to the collection.

From 2017 to 2025, Stadtlabor Digital was a participatory platform for contributions from people who live, work or go to school in Frankfurt. The city was documented and interpreted from many perspectives in over 400 contributions. Users uploaded video contributions, audio recordings, photos and texts, contributing to a diverse cityscape. Especially during the Covid pandemic, many Frankfurters took advantage of the offer and documented their everyday lives.

At the end of the project, all contributions were saved in the internet archive and can still be accessed there. Here you can find a list of all contributions and the link to the archived view. Long-term archiving at the Institute of City History is being planned and the team is discussing the inclusion of thematically relevant contributions in the museum collection and the Frankfurt History App. The museum would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the project over the years!

Link to the recordings on Youtube