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From the official optimism of the post-war years in East Germany through the dynamic press of the 1970s to the end of the regime in 1989, the state and its critics developed a distinctive print culture that was reflected in its literary and artistic output and in its popular and academic works.

The DDR collection contains miscellaneous volumes printed in East Germany, including literature and drama, touristic books, popular history, works on the arts, and a variety of academic and reference works.

View the full DRR collection in the library’s catalog.

James H. Fraser and his wife Sibylle were eclectic and sometimes omnivorous collectors of the book arts, dedicated to the scholarly exploration of visual culture, the book, and the avant garde. A former Director of the Library at Farleigh Dickinson University and a consultant to many other academic libraries, James Fraser developed an omnivorous passion for German and Eastern European graphic design and book culture and had interests that ranged from Socialist children’s books to Judaica, the American left, Mongolian printing, and Japanese posters of the 1980s. James Fraser died in the fall 2013 and was survived by Sibylle and their two children.

This unusual collection of over 250 volumes is a product of the Frasers’ interest in Swedish book jacket design. Consisting nearly entirely of soft cover volumes printed between the 1920s and 1960s, primarily pre-war, and not necessarily written by Swedish authors, the collection reflects the work of many illustrators drawing on a range of graphic styles, from avant garde modernism to the later parts of the collection, which includes translations of popular works by writers such as Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie.

Eastern Europe’s socialist republics of the Cold War era strove to establish national cultures that reflected communist objectives and withstood Western influences. In order to promote collectivist ideals, state authorities supervised the production of literary works, motion pictures, television programs, sound recordings, and other forms of cultural content. To centralize the manufacturing of music records for its national market of sixteen million citizens, the GDR maintained a state-owned record company. Formally under the supervision of Ministerium für Kultur (Ministry of Culture), VEB Deutsche Schallplatten (German Records, NOE) provided the GDR audience with classical, traditional, and popular music as well as literary and educational recordings.

Mandated to cover a broad spectrum of content, Deutsche Schallplatten established separate divisions to develop artists and repertoire, releasing the vast majority of its works on five major labels:

• Amiga: popular recordings for all age groups
• Eterna: classical and political recordings
• Litera: literary recordings like audio books for adults and children
• Nova: recordings that reflected socialist lifestyles
• Schola: educational recordings for use in schools

Apart from the producers affiliated with these labels, the company’s creative division also included graphic designers who crafted cover art and musicologists who documented the growth of the respective catalogs. Counting managers, administrators, technologists, and the sizeable workforce of its industrial plants, Deutsche Schallplatten after the mid-1970s had around 800 employees. Yet, in the course of German reunification and the privatization of nationally owned enterprises, the enterprise lost its cultural relevancy and failed economically. Ultimately, competing firms acquired the catalogs of Amiga and Eterna, which encompassed the master tapes of and exploitation rights to Deutsche Schallplatten’s commercially most viable recordings.

As the former monopolist underwent its eventual dissolution in the early 1990s, a time when public interest in GDR culture hit an all-time low, most of its material legacy was to be discarded. Aware that a unique cultural heritage was earmarked for destruction, the former music producer Volkmar Andrä intervened to preserve decommissioned recordings and files. With assistance from Sven Kube, an academic historian who has reconstructed Deutsche Schallplatten’s evolution, these materials were transferred to UMass Amherst.

Comprised chiefly of sound recordings and text files, but featuring other media types, this collection offers unique insights into the music life of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) between the early 1960s and the country’s demise in 1990.

For more than fifty years, Jim Ricci collected both machine tools and the books,  catalogs, and manuals that relate to the machinery and the industry as a whole. A graduate of UMass Amherst (’71) and the son of a faculty member, Ricci is an historian of reel lawn mowers who has written extensively on the subject, publishing the book Hand, Horse, and Motor: The Development of the Lawn Mower Industry in the United States in 2016.

The collection represents more than 750 companies and includes brochures, catalogs, manuals, and parts lists from machine tool manufacturers. The majority of the companies represented are located in the United States; international companies are located in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, East Germany, West Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey.

Machine tools are machines that make parts and pieces for end products or other machine tools. These tools range from lathes, range from lathes, milling machines, grinders, manual and hydraulic presses, drill presses and saws to drills, mills, grinding wheels and cutting tools as well as measuring tools, jigs and fixtures. The machine tool industry evolved dramatically throughout the 20th century with the introduction of multi-function workstations. Multi-axis machines with attached tools changers are driven by sophisticated computer-controlled programs. The evolution of the industry is reflected, in part, in this historical collection of printed materials.

The Dominikanerinnenkloster St. Gertud (Dominican Convent of Saint Gertrude) operated in Cologne, Germany, for nearly five and half centuries. An important center in connection with German mysticism in the 13th and 14th centuries, the Kloster survived the Reformation, however persistently poor finances led to its decline in the 18th century. After it was abolished during a wave of secularization on October 14, 1802.

This diminutive book of hours was prepared by Dominican nuns at the Kloster St. Gertrud during the 1480s. Like some other German books of hours it lacks the calendar, Gospel lessons, and the two prayers to the Virgin, Obsecro te and O intemerata, however it includes additional liturgical texts, such as Offices for major feasts, as well as music for the funeral service. This copy may have been made for or by the prioress Magdalena Frankengruenerin (1481-1488), and remained in the convent until the eighteenth century.

When The Broadside first appeared in March 1962, it immediately became a key resource for folk musicians and fans in New England. Written by and for members of the burgeoning scene, The Broadside was a central resource for information on folk performances and venues and throughout the region, covering coffeehouses, concert halls, festivals, and radio and television appearances.

Assembled by Folk New England, the collection contains a complete run of the Boston- and Cambridge-based folk music periodical, The Broadside, with the exception of the first issue, which has been supplied in photocopy.

An author, scholar, and librarian, James Fraser had a voracious intellectual appetite that ranged from visual culture to the inter-war avant garde to Communist-era eastern Europe. Born April 30, 1934, Fraser earning his doctorate in Library Science at Columbia University and enjoyed a career of nearly 50 years in academic libraries. A specialist in international children’s literature, he and Sibylle von Holstein, his wife of 56 years, became known for building research collections at a number of university libraries, drawing upon their extraordinary knowledge of 20th century book arts, graphic design, photography, political ephemera, and East German culture, among other areas. Fraser was also an energetic exibitions curator, often based upon material he had collected. Jim Fraser died at home after a short illness on Nov. 25, 2013.

The product of two active and eclectic collectors, the Fraser collection contains over 1200 imprints on art and design in Communist-era eastern Europe, East Germany, 1960s radicalism, and other subjects, along with ephemera on radical movements in both the United States and Europe.

Fred “Lil” Kerslake was proprietor of one of the premier performing animal acts of the turn of the twentieth century, featuring a porcine troupe that did “everything but talk.” From about 1891 through the 1930s, Kerslake’s Pigs rolled barrels and jumped ropes, climbed ladders, played see saw, and drew carriages to the delight of audiences across the United States and Europe. With his wife Mary and, after 1913, his son Fred by his side, Kerslake’s Pigs toured with Carl Hagenbeck, Walter L. Main, and Ringling Brothers. Fred and Mary retired to Gill, Mass., in 1930 where they ran a dog kennel. Fred Kerslake died at home in Sept. 1949, with Mary following in 1954.

Assembled by Fred and Mary Kerslakes, the four scrapbooks in this remarkable collection are packed with photographs and ephemera documenting their far flung travels between the 1890s and 1920s, along with promotional and candid shots of their beloved pigs, donkeys, and horses. Interspersed in the volumes are photographs of clowns and other circus performers, brochures, fliers, and posters advertising Kerslake’s Pigs and the circuses that employed them.

A scholar of East German literature and cultural politics, Jay Rosellini completed his doctorate at Indiana University in 1976, and held faculty positions at MIT and Purdue before becoming Professor of German and Humanities at Suffolk University in 2001. His writings include monographs on the writers Volker Braun and Wolf Biermann and a study of the right-wing tradition in German literature from the Romantic era to post-unification. Rosellini retired in 2017.

The Rosellini Collection contains novels, poetry, and drama from East German writers, primarily from the 1960s to 1989.

An East German screenwriter and playwright, Ulrich Plenzdorf was born into a Communist family in the working-class Kreuzberg district of Berlin in 1934, settling in East Germany after the war. Abandoning his undergraduate studies in philosophy at the University of Leipzig, Plenzdorf worked as a stagehand at the DEFA film studio while studying at the film academy in Babelsberg. His breakthrough as a writer came with the play Die neuen Leiden des jungen W (1972), which enjoyed enormous success internationally, selling more than four million copies in 30 languages. A year later, he followed up with the popular film, Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973), and his popularity as a writer continued through unification. Plenzdorf died in Berlin on Aug. 9, 2007, at the age of 72.

This small collection includes research files on the screenwriter Ulrich Plenzdorf assembled by Albert R. Schmitt, a professor of German at Brown University. In addition to an early edition of Die neuen Leiden and a mimeograph copy of an English translation by Herbert Lederer, the collection includes a handful of letters and a few pieces of ephemera from early productions of Die neuen Leiden, along with reviews and scholarly articles of Plenzdorf’s work.