The Wende Museum Of The Cold War

The Wende Museum preserves the cultural artifacts and personal histories of Cold War-era Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to inform and inspire a broad understanding of the period and its enduring legacy. The Wende was founded in 2002 in response to the neglect and destruction of material culture after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Begun as a grass-roots effort to acquire important historical remnants of life behind the Iron Curtain, the collection quickly grew into an unique resource for the vanishing cultural history of East Germany and the Warsaw Pact countries and now encompasses 75,000 holdings, widely ranging from consumer goods to fine art, political symbology, audiovisual materials, spy tools, posters, ephemera, commemoratives, archives, and personal histories. The Wende promotes exploration of this pivotal era in modern history and provides a forum for current and future generations to remember and investigate the past and reevaluate historical interpretations. The Museum opens its collections to scholars and students and a growing public community of life-long learners, artists, authors and others from around the world. Applying a multidisciplinary approach to programming that transcends traditional boundaries between academia, museum practice and artistic expression, the Wende uses its collection as a starting point to explore the global implications of the Cold War on our lives today and the parallels and metaphoric relevance of the period on contemporary life.