Taking kids to a museum here mostly means paying for the grown-ups alone: these let kids in free, most of them right up to 18. Several city museums also open free to everyone on the last Saturday of the month. Here's what we checked, from a medieval time-travel game at the Junges Museum to Roman clay toys and antique dollhouses out in Hanau.
The city's children's museum sits inside the Historisches Museum by the river. Its current exhibition, Damals 1410, is a walk-through game: kids time-travel to a medieval town, help a builder raise a castle with AI, work as influencers at the smithy and put out a fire, earning badges for skills like spotting fake news.
Orange family-trail stations in the main museum let kids mint a coin or make a cartoon.
The Städel holds 700 years of European art, from Dürer and Botticelli to Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso and Gerhard Richter, in a building on the Museumsufer riverbank.
Kids get their own program: family tours that turn paintings into stories, studio workshops where they paint or draw and take their work home, and Imagoras, a tablet game for children. It suits kids who like to draw and look closely.
The Caricatura Museum shows cartoons, comic strips and caricatures, built on more than 10,000 original drawings by the Neue Frankfurter Schule, the group behind the satire magazines Pardon and Titanic.
Special exhibitions fill the ground floor and gallery, and the collection on the first floor changes every six months. Many cartoons carry German captions and political satire, so it suits teens more than toddlers.
The Jewish Museum tells the story of Frankfurt's Jews from around 1800 to today, across three floors of the Rothschild Palais, the former home of the banking family. Every floor has hands-on stations and labels written for kids, alongside films, media stations and art.
The last room holds everyday objects, letters and photos from Anne Frank's Frankfurt family. It suits school-age kids with some patience for history more than toddlers.
Frankfurt's city museum of archaeology fills the medieval church of a former Carmelite monastery and traces the region from its first farmers, about 7,500 years ago, to the 20th century.
Standouts include a Celtic prince's grave from the city forest, Roman finds from the town of Nida with reliefs from four Mithras temples, a Roman painter's grave, and objects from ancient Egypt, Greece and Cyprus.
The DAM fills an old villa on the Museumsufer with a white "house within a house" that architect Oswald Mathias Ungers built in 1984, climbing from the basement to a gabled top floor under a glass roof.
The permanent exhibition, "From Primitive Hut to Skyscraper", tells the story of building through 25 model dioramas. Temporary shows on cities and design change through the year.
Darmstadt's state museum puts art and natural history under one roof. For kids, the draw is the natural history wing: ten animal dioramas built when the museum opened in 1906, 48-million-year-old fossils from the Messel Pit (a UNESCO World Heritage site), Peale's Mastodon, the first skeleton ever mounted in the US, and a glowing mineral display. Arms and armor, medieval art and Art Nouveau rooms round out the visit.
The Hessian Doll and Toy Museum fills the first floor of the arcade building in Wilhelmsbad State Park, Hanau. The collection runs from Roman clay toys to Barbie, with dollhouses, porcelain and wax dolls, tin toys and a yearly special exhibition.
Kids can arrange their own mini exhibition in the Wunderkammer and take home a photo of it, and play, craft and draw at hands-on stations.
Taking kids to a museum here mostly means paying for the grown-ups alone: these let kids in free, most of them right up to 18. Several city museums also open free to everyone on the last Saturday of the month. Here's what we checked, from a medieval time-travel game at the Junges Museum to Roman clay toys and antique dollhouses out in Hanau.
The city's children's museum sits inside the Historisches Museum by the river. Its current exhibition, Damals 1410, is a walk-through game: kids time-travel to a medieval town, help a builder raise a castle with AI, work as influencers at the smithy and put out a fire, earning badges for skills like spotting fake news.
Orange family-trail stations in the main museum let kids mint a coin or make a cartoon.
The Städel holds 700 years of European art, from Dürer and Botticelli to Rembrandt, Monet, Picasso and Gerhard Richter, in a building on the Museumsufer riverbank.
Kids get their own program: family tours that turn paintings into stories, studio workshops where they paint or draw and take their work home, and Imagoras, a tablet game for children. It suits kids who like to draw and look closely.
The Caricatura Museum shows cartoons, comic strips and caricatures, built on more than 10,000 original drawings by the Neue Frankfurter Schule, the group behind the satire magazines Pardon and Titanic.
Special exhibitions fill the ground floor and gallery, and the collection on the first floor changes every six months. Many cartoons carry German captions and political satire, so it suits teens more than toddlers.
The Jewish Museum tells the story of Frankfurt's Jews from around 1800 to today, across three floors of the Rothschild Palais, the former home of the banking family. Every floor has hands-on stations and labels written for kids, alongside films, media stations and art.
The last room holds everyday objects, letters and photos from Anne Frank's Frankfurt family. It suits school-age kids with some patience for history more than toddlers.
Frankfurt's city museum of archaeology fills the medieval church of a former Carmelite monastery and traces the region from its first farmers, about 7,500 years ago, to the 20th century.
Standouts include a Celtic prince's grave from the city forest, Roman finds from the town of Nida with reliefs from four Mithras temples, a Roman painter's grave, and objects from ancient Egypt, Greece and Cyprus.
The DAM fills an old villa on the Museumsufer with a white "house within a house" that architect Oswald Mathias Ungers built in 1984, climbing from the basement to a gabled top floor under a glass roof.
The permanent exhibition, "From Primitive Hut to Skyscraper", tells the story of building through 25 model dioramas. Temporary shows on cities and design change through the year.
Darmstadt's state museum puts art and natural history under one roof. For kids, the draw is the natural history wing: ten animal dioramas built when the museum opened in 1906, 48-million-year-old fossils from the Messel Pit (a UNESCO World Heritage site), Peale's Mastodon, the first skeleton ever mounted in the US, and a glowing mineral display. Arms and armor, medieval art and Art Nouveau rooms round out the visit.
The Hessian Doll and Toy Museum fills the first floor of the arcade building in Wilhelmsbad State Park, Hanau. The collection runs from Roman clay toys to Barbie, with dollhouses, porcelain and wax dolls, tin toys and a yearly special exhibition.
Kids can arrange their own mini exhibition in the Wunderkammer and take home a photo of it, and play, craft and draw at hands-on stations.
