Collecting area: Cold War culture

Born in Germany on Aug. 4, 1934, Hans Joachim Ring was a film enthusiast with an encyclopedic knowledge of German cinema. During the Second World War, movie theatres became a refuge for the young boy, whose family was forced several times to flee due to Allied bombing. The hardships of post-war life cemented the role of film in his life and as he grew older, he became an ardent collector of materials relating to film.

The Ring Collection includes hundreds of programs, fliers, and handbills published by the official East German film distributors Progress Film-Vertrieb and the Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (DEFA) and sold to patrons at theatres. This extraordinary assemblage includes several hundred programs covering the immediate post-war period (1945-1950) and hundreds more relating to films released up to and beyond the end of the Communist era. Offering insight into the evolution of graphic design in East Germany and the marketing of film, the collection is one of the largest of its kind in the United States.

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.

In the mid-1970s, the Center for the Study of New Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UMass Amherst began collecting the self-published and underground literature of the Soviet Union as a means of documenting social and political dissent in the Communist state.

The Samizdat collection includes writings in several genres — chiefly fiction, poetry, drama, and literary, social, and political criticism — in handwritten, photocopied, and printed form, as well as photos, a passport application for Mikhail Baryshnikov, and memorabilia from an American production of one of the plays in the collection.

For many years, Sovfoto, a stock photograph agency based in New York City, was the sole source in the United States for the best work in contemporary Soviet photojournalism. Founded in 1932, the company carried photographers for Tass and, later, other news agencies from throughout the Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, and China.

The Tass Sovfoto Collection depicts Soviet life, primarily in the 1950s and early 1960s. Typically rendered in heroic Soviet style, the photographs are relatively varied in subject, documenting political events (e.g., Communist Party meetings, the meeting of Kennedy and Khrushchev); generals, politicians, and celebrities (Lenin, Khrushchev, Shostakovich); and athletic and cultural events. A few images appear to be parts of photo essays aimed at a popular audience, including images of Jewish life in Russia and the life of a Soviet worker, while others are stock images of Soviet troops during the Second World War.

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.

On June 23, 1946, a young Bulgarian refugee, Theodore Konstantin Yantshev, arrived in Baltimore as a stowaway aboard the S.S. Juliet Victory, intending to seek asylum in the United States. Despite the intervention of influential supporters including John F. Kennedy and Leverett Saltonstall, and the services of the Boston legal firm Powers and Hall, Yantshev was deported to Argentina in 1948. Efforts to secure a legal to the states eventually succeeded, yet poverty prevented Yantshev from following up.

The files retained by Powers and Hall in the case of Theodore Yantshev are focused closely on the plight of a Cold War-era refugee and would-be immigrant from Communist Bulgaria. The collection includes memoranda and summaries of the Yantshev’s case compiled by Powers and Hall and an apparently complete set in incoming and outgoing correspondence from the beginning of the case in 1947 through its final, failed disposition in 1958.