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Schlenther and Lips played decisive roles in the development of their subjects in the GDR for more than three and a half decades through research and teaching. From 1973 to 1979 she headed the “Bereich Ethnographie in der Sektion Geschichte” (Ethnography Department in the History Section). Schlenther had migrated from Hamburg to the GDR in 1956 to work at the Humboldt University in Berlin (East). The ethnologist and archaeologist Ursula Schlenther (1919-1979) specialized in the same field and was also associated with the international networks of Current Anthropology. After Julius Lips’ premature death in 1950 the Institute for Ethnology and the Institute for Comparative Sociology of Law were consolidated and under the name of “Julius Lips-Institut für Ethnologie und vergleichende Rechtssoziologie” (“Julius Lips Institute for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology of Law”) guided by Eva Lips until 1966/68. There Julius Lips headed the Institute for Ethnology, established the Institute for Comparative Sociology of Law and was elected rector of Leipzig University in 1949. Eva Lips (1906-1988), together with her husband Julius Lips (1895-1950), former director of the Cologne Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum (1928-1933) and professor of ethnology and sociology at the University of Cologne (1929-1933), had returned from exile in the United States to Leipzig in the Soviet occupied zone in 1948. The author of the report was Eva Lips, one of the leading ethnologists of the GDR. Shortly before the Cold War culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the American anthropological journal Current Anthropology informed the English-speaking scientific community about “Anthropological and Folkloristic Institutions in the German Democratic Republic”. Based on a broadly defined, dynamic concept of knowledge, attention was directed at the complexity of transnational and interdisciplinary processes of knowledge transfer, which was understood as a motion of people and institutions, objects, concepts, networks and paradigms.Īccordingly, the focus of this article is on the German-German, but above all the transatlantic transfer of ethnological knowledge as well as its transformation, adaptation and reorientation to the social and political concepts in the Soviet occupation zone/ GDR, after the end of World War II during the period of the Cold War, when the world was divided between the Soviet Union and its satellite states (including the German Democratic Republic) and the United States with its Western allies (including the Federal Republic of Germany FRG). Thus, knowledge was considered to be historically and socially situated, process-oriented and dynamic, and elicited in the actions between various actors rather than objectively existing. The analysis distinguished among three dimensions of knowledge, which are constantly connected to each other : ideas and assumptions about the world the media and the representations through which knowledge is communicated and the organized social relationships in which knowledge is disseminated (Barth 2002). In addition to an historical reappraisal of the history of ethnology in the German Democratic Republic ( GDR), the project made use of a broad understanding of cultural-anthropological research into knowledge, including its historical contexts. Zur Wissensgeschichte der Ethnologie in der DDR) (2017-2018), which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and conducted in cooperation between the Department of Ancient American Studies of the Institute for Archeology and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bonn and the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. This article presents partial results of the research project “Actors – Practices – Theories : On the History of Ethnology in the GDR (German Democratic Republic)” (Akteurinnen – Praxen – Theorien.