Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War Located in Culver City, California, Celebrated Its 10Th Anniversary in 2012
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The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War located in Culver City, California, celebrated its 10th Anniversary in 2012 How a museum comes into being. I met Justinian Jampol, the founder and president of The Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, for the first time in the summer of 2003 on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. That was one year after the museum was established. I had just returned from another extended trip to Europe and was pleasantly surprised to meet a young American who displayed such a keen interest in the history of the GDR and Eastern Europe. We were immediately engaged in an animated discussion about the two German states. From 1972 – 1989 I had been traveling every summer in a rented car through East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Poland in order to help and support politically persecuted families, and continued my travels to the former East Bloc after the unification of Germany and Europe. In 1972 my cousin in Erfurt had given me a cigar box full of family photos from our Grandmother that shed new light on my past and seemed like an unearthed treasure to me. In return for my presents from the west, among them the highly coveted Texas Instruments calculators that I had to smuggle into the GDR, I received the traditionally carved wooden Christmas figures from the Erzgebirge, among them smokers in miner’s uniforms, tiny music making angels, and cute flower girls that represent a typical way of life deeply rooted in the traditions of my Saxon homeland. Over the years I was also given wooden candleholders, hand-painted decorative plates as well as earthenware vases and pitchers with unique artistic designs. Illustrated books about the GDR were likewise favorite gifts. “That’s all we have,” they always added awkwardly, as if they had to apologize for something that was not their fault. Their words, in turn, embarrassed me, because I knew they had to employ all kinds of tricks to procure these handcrafted items, since the GDR exported the greater part of what it produced, because access to hard currency was an economic priority. The Federal Republic of Germany was their most important trade partner, major department and mail order stores sold GDR products as their own brand, but East German merchandise 2 was also shipped around the world – both to communist and non- communist countries. Luxury or high-end products such as Meißen porcelain, Zeiss optics, and even folk art found buyers not only in the Federal Republic but also in other western countries. One day, my cousin proudly presented me with a huge volume simply titled DDR, published in 1981 by VEB F.A. Brockhaus Verlag Leipzig, boasting several double-page colored photographs. For comparison and to document the progress of socialism, they included black and white photos of ruins in Dresden and Berlin opposite rebuilt factories, former government buildings and entire blocks of prefabricated apartment buildings. Without exception, the book shows happy, self- confident women and men as I rarely encountered them on my travels through the GDR. Such recollections went through my mind as Justin, beaming with excitement, was telling me ever more incomprehensible stories about the emergence of the Wende Museum. He is an American, so how was it possible that the disappearance of the GDR over ten years earlier, whose demise had filled me with unrestrained joy and relief, gets him so fired up, holding his undivided attention? I tried to figure out how old Justin could have been in 1989, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall – eleven or twelve at most – and wondered how he could speak so lively and convincingly about recent German and European events, a period in history that he had hardly witnessed himself? Where did this fascination and feeling of closeness originate? He, however, didn’t seem to be conscious of this remarkable fact because he was caught up in the middle of a passion for collecting everyday utensils and other objects from the GDR that I was acquainted with, and that I suddenly saw in a whole new light because of his unexpected interest, – right here on the Campus of UCLA in the bright California sun. It was at this university that I was able to fulfill my dream of getting a degree that began forming in my mind while I was still a little girl living in the Soviet occupied zone of Germany, as it was often called then. And so it happened that years later I could only witness the reunification of Germany on television from the other side of the world. To my question as to the origin of his curiosity about, commitment to and engagement with the former communist workers’ and peasants’ 3 state, Justin explained that as a child he had of course not grasped the significance of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dismantling of the Iron Curtain in the fall of 1989, but that his parents had, as a matter of course, insisted that he and his brothers read at least the daily headlines on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, which pointed them beyond the local and national news to the earthshaking events on the other side of our planet. Justin noticed that his parents were clearly affected by the political upheaval in Europe and intuitively understood that they were of historical importance. Even so, after a week he was wondering when the newspaper would finally change topics and move on to something else. I wanted to know more about his family background, and learned that Justin’s mother is protestant and that her family came from Switzerland. His Grandfather studied at Stanford University and taught as a scientist and specialist for Rhaeto-Romanic at UC Santa Barbara. His family was part of a group of German-Swiss people who had been brought to Russia by Catherine the Great in order to teach Russian peasants new agricultural methods. Eventually they came to North Dakota, where his Grandfather traded with Indians, used his influence to defend civil rights throughout his life, took part in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and was one of the early leaders of the NAACP in Santa Barbara, California. Justin’s father was born in Los Angeles. His family came from the former Polish town of Jampol on the Dnjestr River that today belongs to Ukraine. He still remembers his Grandmother who remained illiterate throughout her life. She spoke Yiddish and Polish, but never learned English. The family suffered greatly during the Russian pogroms until they were finally able to immigrate into the United States via Ellis Island. We met often after our first encounter, and the more I heard about Justin’s work the better I perceived the driving force behind his idea of a Wende Museum and an archive of the Cold War, and was able to integrate it into what was taking place in the reunited Germany. Justin couldn’t answer my question outright as to when he had acquired the first object from the GDR, but he explained to me the origin of his passion for collecting things that grew out of his fervor for history and archaeology. At sixteen he had participated in an expedition to Israel, Egypt and Jordan where he experienced first hand the worth of visual, material culture and learned how important it was to take a second 4 look at objects and to touch them. “If we look closely, these objects can tell us astounding stories about the culture as well as about ourselves,” Justin explained to me with his inexhaustible enthusiasm. As he listened to the different accounts of the Berlin Wall and saw the physical consequences of the city’s past, he realized with amazement, “There was no need to dig deep – you could still see the bullet holes in the walls of houses.” In the case of the GDR and Eastern Europe we are not dealing with tools and utensils from prehistoric times but nonetheless they are from a quickly vanishing historical epoch At that moment I comprehended that his family’s origin and interest in history had predestined Justin for his life’s work. His first assignment in the cultural sphere led him to Prof. Walter Reich, the former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. At the time Justin was employed at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, where he assisted Prof. Reich with the research and compilation of material in connection with political history, a task to which he still looks back today as a rewarding experience. As fate would have it, Justin had chosen on his first trip to Tel Aviv the longer route via Berlin Schönefeld. In Berlin he heard the most improbable stories about the Wall, and apprehended the physical, political and psychical consequences of the past for the city and its population on both sides of the Wall in a completely new light. For the first time he experienced for himself the ramifications the divided city must have had for the inhabitants of Berlin that touched all situations of life. Frequent visits followed and through this physical and mental proximity, the destiny of the German capital became clear to him. Magically attracted, he turned his steps time and again toward the Brandenburg Gate, where, at a permanent flea market, an abundance of items was offered daily for sale on tables that were overflowing with merchandise, as if people, like in a frenzy, had to get rid of everything from their past immediately.