Menu-Music-Mix

Tastes and sounds of Berlin between the years 1900–1914

Menu-Music-Mix is an immersive, interactive digital archive that explores the cultural life in Berlin between 1900 and 1914 through two historical datasets: digitized menu cards and shellac music recordings. By linking food and music, our project highlights intersections between musical heritage and cultural expression in imperial Berlin and gives the viewer a unique perspective into the past.

The first dataset, On the Menu, comprises 2,403 historical menus from the Berlin State Library’s Menükarten-Sammlung (ca. 1880–1913), offering insights into dining customs, social hierarchies, and culinary trends across Europe. The second dataset, Echoes of Berlin: 78s, features 110 digitized shellac recordings mostly by composer Paul Lincke that reflect the city’s popular musical tastes and performance culture of the early 20th century.

During the hackathon, our team analyzed, cleaned, and processed the data to identify connections between these two seemingly disparate datasets, resulting in a selection of 47 German language menus and 32 songs that were produced in Berlin in the years 1900–1914. Moreover, OCR technology through Transkribus was used to improve the legibility of the historical German fonts, combined with keyword searches to identify additional information such as dinner occasions and menu items, with the aim of displaying this data on the website as well.

Built with React and TailwindCSS, the prototype enables users to browse menus by date, view multi-page scans, and listen to vocal and instrumental recordings with an integrated audio player. In this way, users can experience what a night out in pre-First World War Berlin would have sounded and tasted like.