The ZZF library buys books, trades books, begs for specimen copies - and also regularly receives some as gifts. Admittedly, we are a bit picky. We don't take everything. But from time to time the small and large donations turn out to be treasure chests. And we don't want to withhold these treasures from you!
In the last few years, we have acquired eight vorlass and estate libraries and two institutional donations. These donations have been added to the holdings and incorporated into the catalogue, but can also be accessed as finding aids in the form of excerpt catalogues.
The collections cover literature on such diverse topics as Eastern Europe, occupational bans in the old Federal Republic, popular political biographies, National Socialism in film, and Radio Free Europe.
In detail, these collections include:
Simone Barck (1944-2007), literary scholar and historian specialising in Soviet exile, anti-fascism and the literary history of the GDR, was a member of staff at what later became the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam from 1992. The collection includes her academic estate and her reference library consisting of 2073 volumes.
Peter Bender (1923-2008), historian and journalist. In June 2016, the ZZF took over 70 books and several volumes of the Deutschlands-Archiv and Europa-Archiv from Peter Bender's library. The acquired literature reflects his areas of interest. These are mainly books on East-West German and Eastern European contemporary history and the Cold War.
Thomas Beutelschmidt donated 78 volumes to the ZZF in 2016, covering topics such as coming to terms with the past and occupational bans in the former West Germany. These include grey literature, i.e. publications that have not appeared on the official book market.
Klaus Bölling (1928-2014), journalist, government spokesman for the social-liberal coalition (1974-1982) and head of the Permanent Mission of the Federal Republic of Germany in East Berlin from 1981 to 1982. In 2015, the ZZF added 507 volumes from its library to its collection. Besides numerous popular political biographies, the collection mainly contains literature on the press and the East-West conflict..
Christian Domnitz (1975-2015), historian, researcher on Eastern Europe, journalist, worked from 2004 to 2007 in the project network "Europe in the Eastern Bloc. Imaginary Worlds and Communication Spaces in Transition" at the ZZF. In 2018, the ZZF inhterited parts of his working library, which reflects his research interest in examining Europe from an Eastern European perspective. Accordingly, the collection also contains research literature in Polish and Czech.
Friedrich Knilli (1930-2022), media scholar specialisting in radio plays, portrayal of Jewish people in the media, and media consulting. The collection contains about 2,400 audio and video recordings on the topics of broadcasting history, media theory and reception research. In particular, this includes interviews and discussions on the reception of the TV series "Holocaust" (1978) and the feature film "Jud Süß" (1940). Additionally, the collection also contains numerous recordings of radio plays, literary adaptations, documentaries, TV series, TV entertainment shows and news programmes from the USA, Germany and Great Britain. The collection is recorded in a separate database, which can be consulted in the library.
Jochen Laufer (1956-2016), Historiker, gehörte zur ersten Generation der wissenschaftlichen MitarbeiterInnen des ZZF. Nach seinem plötzlichen Tod übernahm das ZZF 265 Bände seiner Arbeitsbibliothek, die sich schwerpunktmäßig mit den deutsch-russischen Beziehungen beschäftigt und Jochen Laufers Arbeit an einer umfassenden Quellenedition zur UdSSR und der deutschen Frage zwischen 1941 und 1953 spiegelt.
Kurt Schilde (*1947), historian and sociologist, primarily researches on National Socialism and the culture of remembrance of National Socialism. In 2018, the ZZF took over 120 volumes from his working library, which add to the ZZF library's holdings on the media history of National Socialism and the cinematic reappraisal of the Nazi era, especially on the history of the making and impact of the Nazi propaganda film "Hitlerjunge Quex".
The Biographical Archive of the Institute for International Politics and Economics contains more than 4,000 folders of newspaper cuttings on around 30,000 individuals from politics, economy, culture and science in the two German states from the period 1946 to 1992.
Radio Free Europe is a radio station that produces radio programmes in 28 Eastern European, Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages and broadcasts these programmes mainly on shortwave. During the Cold War in particular, it served as a propaganda tool to provide listeners in socialist countries with news from Western countries. In 2015, the ZZF received 130 folders of documents from the years 1969 to 1989 as a donation. This valuable collection of sources, divided into 35 series, contains background and situation reports as well as press overviews from the socialist countries.
Without the help of Celine Rocktäschel, the library team would not have been able to include all these collections into the holdings, which is why we would like to thank her in particular at the end of her internship.
As always, we look forward to your visit,
the library team
(13.09.2018)