Personal Papers and Company Archives

Personal Papers and Company Archives form the heart of the Deutsche Kinemathek collection. The archives encompass more than 600 separate collections, including personal estates and living donations from members of all fields of the film and TV industry, private collections from film historians as well as corporate and institutional archives of a particular film-historical importance.

One major collection is built on the private trove of films, documents and objects gifted by one of the museum's founding fathers, film director Gerhard Lamprecht. Another important source related to the topic of Film Exile during the Nazi period comes from the over 160,000 pages of correspondence in the film archive of Hollywood agent Paul Kohner. Significant cultural bequests such as the Marlene Dietrich Collection Berlin and the Ken Adam Archive represent extensive source repositories for film-historical research and are regularly used in exhibits in Germany and abroad. Contemporary collections, such as the pre-mortem bequest by Werner Herzog, supplement the historical archive and propel film and television history forward into the present.