Cold War

Featured Archives

‘footage berlin’: Bridging East and West, Past and Present through Archives


No Comments

Can you share a little bit of history about rbb and the ‘footage berlin‘ collection? How does its history set it apart from some of the other major collections in Germany?

rbb media is the commercial side of Berlin-Brandenburg’s broadcasting arm, and we feature collections of tv programs from three archives:

The first is the rbb television archive with material from the city of Berlin and the region of Brandenburg, including TV programs from the former SFB (Radio Free Berlin) in (West) Berlin from 1955 to 2003, and from ORB, the East German broadcaster in Brandenburg after reunification from 1991 – 2003. rbb emerged from the merger of these two broadcasters in 2003 – a bridge between East and West.  (more…)

The Right Footage

De-classified: Nuclear Test Footage and Our Dangerous Past


No Comments

From 1945 to 1962 the American government detonated more than 210 nuclear bombs while cameras captured each test explosion at nearly 2,400 frames per second.

Since the legislative halt of atmospheric testing in 1963, 6,500 out of an estimated 10,000 films have been located with 4,200 scanned and now 750 declassified.  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California set the project in motion in hopes of extracting all lost data that nuclear weapons physicists will use to analyze the magnitude of past and possible future atomic damage.  The project launched out of necessity, has led to the best possible restoration of Cold War bomb footage that the Livermore National Laboratory has now made public on YouTube(more…)