Museum Wende

In the state of California, in one of the suburbs of Los Angeles, there is the Wende Museum, which houses the archives of the Cold War. It was founded in the 1990s in Culver City. The museum was opened by Justian Jampol, a scholar of modern European history, in order to stop the neglect and destruction of material culture during the Cold War in Europe and the USSR that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

In the early 1990s, historical materials and documents began to disappear rapidly. Monuments were demolished, statues were destroyed, and archives were actively destroyed. Then Mr. Yampol came up with the idea of creating a place that would store all the historical monuments, but the Wende Museum was registered only in 2002.

The museum’s heyday came in 2004, when the Arcadia Foundation awarded it funding to “make a significant contribution to the coverage of a fascinating but still unexplored era.” Since then, the museum has had the opportunity to acquire, store and provide access to its collections.

Now you can see more than 7000 exhibits of that era. The collection includes archives, books, furniture, sculptures, textiles, ceramics, posters, films, documents and more.