Little did film buffs know, but during the entire Cold War there was a thriving film industry in East Germany that was every bit as accomplished as the German Democratic Republic’s (GDR) vaunted athletics program. While the athletes had the Olympics to exhibit their feats, the state-financed film industry labored in obscurity. Now many of those East German films, some 500 of them, have their own showcase right here at UMass in the form of a study center and archives. Thanks to the persistence of Barton Byg, of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature, the collection of GDR films resides in the UMass Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellscaft (DEFA) Film Library, the only center outside Europe devoted to the so-called “Film Rouge” of the former East Germany. Byg became interested in DEFA in 1975 as a film student. “Here were these East German films,” he says, “as important as anything in West German cinema, and they were being totally ignored. I became fascinated with what they revealed about socialism and the contradiction between utopian ideals and the repressiveness of Stalinism.” Coming from a country and a political system that viewed itself as an underdog, the DEFA films took the opposite angle from many Hollywood movies. A good example is the prolific cowboy and Indian genre in East Germany, which produced a spate of “strudel westerns” filled with fake saguaro cactuses, heroic Indian stands, war-painted German actors, and greedy capitalist cowpokes. The East German westerns invariably took the side of the Native Americans, usually focusing on true incidents in which the Indians emerged victorious. Virtually unknown in this country at a time when the good, the bad, and the ugly Italian westerns of Clint Eastwood were all the rage, the DEFA horse operas were seen and enjoyed by millions behind the Berlin Wall. Now that East German films have been projected through the rubble of communism and found a showcase at UMass, the inevitable has happened. Hollywood, perhaps the ultimate symbol of capitalist excess, is raiding the DEFA films for its fertile archives of stories. For instance, DEFA’s best-known film, “Jacob the Liar,” is presently being remade with a big Hollywood budget and Robin Williams as the star. It is the black-humored story of a man with a rich imagination whose lies get him into a passel of trouble when he lives in a Jewish ghetto in Poland. Professor Byg believes “Jacob the Liar” is only a beginning, as people descend upon the DEFA Film Library at UMass looking for inspiration – begged, borrowed or otherwise. “There’s lots more to be discovered,” he says. “Both artistically and about the Cold War.”