A Culver City museum offers an idiosyncratic compilation of life past the Berlin Wall.
The Cold War Museum Inc., publicly known as the Wende Museum, holds over 100,000 pieces from former communist strongholds as well as “everyday” Cold War artifacts from around the world. However, most are not artifacts from top government officials or figures in history textbooks.
The Wende traded the gray, steely associations with the Cold War for colorful, poppy products, art and stories from behind the Iron Curtain. Through mundane material culture, the museum says visitors can understand what everyday life was like in the Soviet Bloc.
The Wende has existed since 2002 but moved into its current space — a renovated armory on Culver Boulevard — roughly six years ago. The museum holds a 75-year lease, paying $1 a month for its exhibition halls.
This year, the museum plans to add a new community center to its campus, as well as an affordable housing complex with six apartments. Los Angeles philanthropist Glorya Kaufman was a major benefactor of the project, and the 7,000-square-foot center will bear her name.
Wende, which means “turning point” in German, is the brainchild of historian Justinian Jampol. While pursuing a PhD at Oxford University in the 1990s he began picking up Eastern European artifacts at flea markets.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, proof of the former Soviet Union was rapidly pulled from public consumption — think statues of former leaders, consumer products bearing former Soviet astronauts, and passport forgery kits from the former German Democratic Republic.
Born out of necessity
According to Andrew Hartwell, the communications director for the Wende, the museum was born out of necessity as Jampol’s collection could no longer be crammed into storage units and researchers needed a space to study artifacts.
Why Los Angeles? In Hartwell’s view, the museum couldn’t have existed in Europe, and the town’s aerospace and Hollywood industries played a major role in the U.S. throughout the Cold War.
“There was definitely a risk that this stuff could just be destroyed and forgotten,” Hartwell said. “The fact is that people were born and lived and died under these systems. It was a huge part of history.”
The Soviet Union’s decades in power still largely influence today’s events, and Wende’s programming hosting artists and activists reflect how its preservation offers context for events like the war in Ukraine, or the death of former Russian presidential candidate Alexei Navalny.
Later this fall, the Wende plans to launch a replica of Sputnik, the first satellite launched into space by the Soviet Union in October 1957.
According to Hartell, this will make Wende the first museum to have launched an object into space (the California Science Center only houses the now-grounded Space shuttle Endeavour). The Wende plans to hold a window on its campus where visitors can communicate with the replica satellite and pinpoint its location in orbit.
