LESSONS FROM THE COLD WAR.

Byline: JIM FARBER

>LA.COM 

The only thing that sets 5741 Buckingham Parkway in Culver City apart from its drab neighbors is a brightly colored piece of artwork that stands at the entrance to Suite E. This monolith of concrete, with its gaily painted cartoon faces, is not just another piece of decorative corporate art. It is a 2.6-ton section of the Berlin Wall!

So what's this remnant of the Cold War doing here, in the land of palm trees and shopping malls? It marks the entrance to the Wende Museum, dedicated to acquiring and preserving artifacts and archives, personal histories and documentary materials of Cold War Eastern Europe.

Beginning Oct. 5, the museum will be open to the public every Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (or by appointment) featuring a fascinating new exhibition called "Facing the Wall." Designed to include a mind-boggling array of authentic objects, the exhibit re-creates a day in the life of Checkpoint Charlie, complete with the actual signage, barbed-wire gate, alarm system, paving stones etc. It focuses on the experience of four individuals: a West Berlin wall painter (Thierry Noir), a border-crossing day visitor (Alwin Nachtweh), a meticulous record-keeping East German border guard (Maj. Peter Bochmann, who was on duty the day the wall fell), and an officer of East Germany's dreaded security force, the Stasi (Hagen Koch), as depicted in the film "The Lives of Others."

The museum is the brainchild of founding director Justinian Jampol, 29, a native Angeleno who attended Hamilton High School and holds degrees in history from UCLA and Oxford University. Jampol's special area of interest was the Cold War, with special emphasis on the political and social regime of the Deutsche Demokratishe Republic, the GDR. The name he chose for the museum incorporates the German word "wend," which means "turning point." But more significantly, it was the word Germans applied to the breakdown of communism.

Jampol was just 22 when he began to amass this collection of Cold War memorabilia, spearheaded by a $300,000 inheritance from his grandfather. Seven years later, the Wende Museum represents one of the most significant collections of artifacts and archive materials on the subject in the world. And as other institutions, like the Los Angeles County Museum, have begun to recognize the historic and artistic significance of the period, the Wende Museum has become a primary source (and clearinghouse) for documentary information and the loan of its amazing objects.

"The museum began here in 2004," said Jampol, standing proudly before a wall covered with decorative plates representing each of the Warsaw Pact nations. "It's grown a lot since then. But the embryo of the collection was developed as an archive and resource for students in the field. When I was a graduate student at Oxford, I was attempting to find these materials, but they were nowhere to be found. This museum was created to fill the huge void that existed."

The museum also represents the embodiment of a new academic discipline, Jampol explained, the study of "cultural history."

"Cultural history is different than other types of scholarship," he said. "It depends on a vast breadth of material sources in order to come up with a more illustrative perception. Cultural historians are interested in what you can see and touch-- objects of all kinds."

In German, the word is gestalt. Literally, it means to shape or form. But to a cultural historian it means bringing together a vast array of objects and documentary evidence that offer a more complete picture of a time and place -- whether it's an oral history, an artist's canvas, or the Sputnik music box that once sat on the desk of a GDR official.

"Most museums and archives are set up in a conventional way, based on acquisition patterns that go back hundreds of years," Jampol said, pointing out a room of Soviet-era sports memorabilia. "Our theme is looking at the way the Soviet and East German system interacted with people's everyday life, visually and materially."

It was during Jampol's tenure as an assistant at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., he said, that he truly came to appreciate the need to preserve objects and records from a period of the past that many people would like to forget.

"In German," said Jampol, "the word is vergangenheitsbewaltigung. It means coming to terms with the past."

Jim Farber, [phone] Ext., 416

[e-mail]

FACING THE WALL: LIVING WITH THE BERLIN WALL

>Where: The Wende Museum, 5741 Buckingham Parkway, Suite E, Culver City.

>When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays beginning Oct. 5, or by appointment.

>Admission: Free.

>Information: [phone] or www.wendemuseum.org.

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(1 -- 4) The Wende Museum in Culver City, established in 2004, leads visitors past a piece of the Berlin Wall to a collection of 20th-century artifacts from Eastern Bloc nations. Founding director Justinian Jampol says it is one of very few Cold War exhibition sites in the world.

SCOTT VARLEY>LA.COM