Cold War Ends-Fall of the Bibliographic Wall and Die Wende.
"the bibliographic depredations of World War II in Eastern & Central Europe were comparable in spirit to the destruction of the library of Alexandria, while vastly exceeding it in scale."
The end of the Cold War and the unification of Germany inaugurated a new era in German library and archival history. Divided collections began to be reunited and bodies of material considered lost after World War II resurfaced in Eastern Europe.
1989-1994. Collections of library materials long given up as lost resurfaced.
"the bibliographic depredations of World War II in Eastern & Central Europe were comparable in spirit to the destruction of the library of Alexandria, while vastly exceeding it in scale."1
Institutions and governments in Western and Eastern Europe found it possible and desirable to begin talking about returning materials to their libraries of origin. It will require years of international cooperation to sort out many of the complex situations coming to light.2
Sutter states, that the most intriguing caches of material are two sizable media repositories. In 1993 archivists from the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv (Frankfurt) announced the upcoming opening of the archives of East German radio and television, to be housed in the library of the former GDR television network in Berlin-Adlershof. The historical and cultural value of material being made available, as well as its sheer volume, is phenomenal: 100,000 films; nearly 300,000 still photos; nearly 500,000 recordings of popular and classical music (including some 30,000 shellac discs from the Reichsrundfunk before 1945); 100,000 spoken recordings (including 23,000 radio plays); 2,500 linear meters of scripts and administrative archives.3
Reflecting on the reunification in the broader society, librarians at the University of Pennsylvania have organized the “The German Reunification of 1990 Collection” at the Van Pelt Library representing die Wende (the turn). It includes both non-fiction and fiction works, from novels and poetry to literary criticism, to historical writing and memoir as well as scholarly work in the social sciences.4
Sutter, Sem C. 1994. “The Fall of the Bibliographical Wall: Libraries and Archives in Unified Germany.” College and Research Libraries 55 (5): 403–11.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“The German Reunification of 1990 Collection.” Van Pelt Library. University of Pennsylvania. The process of German (re-)unification which began in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the subject of several hundreds of materials in the Van Pelt Library collection. Germans continue to refer to the integration of East and West Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR) with the Federal Republic of Germany--in German, die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD) using the terms die Wiedervereinigung (literally, reunification), or die Wende, “the Turn,” representing a time and process of reconciliation, reintegration, and healing which, in some respects, continues to this day.