The largest-ever digital, accessible collection of home movies from the GDR cam onlin on Monday, Sepetmber 23, 2019. The online project, called Open Memory Box, was made availbale just weeks before the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall that led to German reunification. A team of more than 30 contributors has digitized 2,283 rolls of film, sent in from 149 families that lived in the former GDR from 1947 to 1990.

Clips are searchable by themed keywords – such as “beer,” “Alexanderplatz” and “winter holidays” – but the website also has clips of East German life in randomized two-second fragments. In this way, the researchers say, more people can connect with the story they’re watching without having the context and history.

“We think that these fragments give people an incredible opportunity to grasp the zeitgeist of the East in a way that a traditional archive could never achieve,” said Mr. Herskovits, an Argentine-born filmmaker who lives in Sweden.

See also article in The Globe and Mail, Spetember 22, 2019 (Canada): “Canadian professor looks to challenge clichés about East German life with home-video clips.”