The DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst was founded by Barton Byg, professor of film and German Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the late 1980s. The signing of an UMass memorandum on September 23, 1993 marks the DEFA Film Library's official founding. Byg's idea was to make films from the East German DEFA Studios more available and widely known in North America and to broaden popular and scholarly understanding of filmmaking in the GDR by critically exploring its aesthetic, political and ideological bases.