Making a Spectacle of Restraint: The Deutschland Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels Exposition

Visitors to Brussels in 1958 thought – as they were meant to – that socialist Germany was nowhere in evidence at the city’s World Exposition. Although the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded in 1949, negotiations leading toward Western diplomatic recognition had remained stalled for two decades. A competing postwar nation, the Federal Republic (FRG) popularly known as West Germany, claimed to be the only legitimate Germany. At the Brussels fair, its chain of crystalline pavilions, designed by architects Egon Eiermann and Sep Ruf, advanced that assertion through a single word, ‘Deutschland’, raised in white letters on black steel. Walking past this exterior placard and into the pavilion’s special events lobby, a visitor could study a map mounted on a tilted slab above the polished floor. It depicted a German nation stretching from Trier, in the West, to Königsberg (renamed Soviet Kaliningrad in 1946) in the East. By conjuring national boundaries dissolved a dozen years earlier, the GDR was made to disappear even while its geographic features were publicly displayed. An inscription, ‘The heartbeat of one people goes through divided land’ (Die Herzschlag eines Volkes geht durch geteiltes Land), stated poetically what was implied by the ‘Deutschland’ sign outside – that the pavilion represented all Germans, independent of cold war borders. By memorializing a broken nation as a community of shared sentiment rather than one divided by politics, the map and building caption proclaimed that unification, however distant, would serve emotive rather than imperialist ends. This system of dual coding, which Rika Devos, a historian of the Brussels Fair, calls ‘double negation,’ attempted to distinguish the ‘good’ postwar Germany from both its National Socialist predecessor and its contemporary socialist rival. ¹

Rather than eliminating any trace of these reviled others, however, West Germany’s self-portrait at Brussels incorporated references to both the past and the East within a complex field of visual and textual allusions that ultimately acknowledged the presence of what the pavilion’s coded messages set out to negate. For example, Hitler’s penchant for stony monumentality, unveiled to the world in Albert Speer’s Deutches Haus for the Paris Exposition of 1937 influenced Eiermann and Ruf as they designed their glass-and-steel structures for Brussels. Intended as the antithesis of the Deutsches Haus, the West German pavilion of 1958 continually invoked comparisons with the architectural legacy it set out to refute, prompting its Third Reich antecedent to resurface in public memory and discourse. Similarly, pavilion displays showcasing design artefacts of modern domesticity and leisure targeted an unmentioned referent, the socialist East, in order to negate it. Furniture, musical instruments, roller skates, a bicycle and clothing said to represent ‘the typical requisites of a family’ established West Germany as the site of an economic miracle that had yet to materialize in East Germany, recapitulating the use of household commodity exhibits as anti-communist propaganda a decade earlier by the Marshall Plan. ²

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Figure 1.

Deutches Haus, Paris World Exposition of 1937, Albert Speer; photograph Heinrich Hoffmann from Deutschland in Paris: Ein Bild-Buch (Munich, 1937).

An East German challenge far more threatening than that of a socialist planned economy informed West Germany’s attempts to extricate itself from the Nazi past. In the late 1950s, the GDR unleashed a ferocious propaganda campaign imputing the re-nazification of its neighbor state. A potent mixture of fact and disinformation bolstered allegations that business, government and military leaders in the FRG were former SS officers and high-ranking Nazis. ³ West German exhibition planners responded by adding a new twist to an established trope of US State Department propaganda, brandishing consumer affluence as not only the antidote to socialist scarcity, but also Nazi militancy. Careful analysis of the Deutschland pavilion and its exhibition strategies unveils the entwined and interdependent identity tactics of the postwar era’s opposing German states and their instrumental responses to a shared and unspeakable past.

An informed reading of West Germany’s performance at the Brussels Fair must take into account the contradictions, dissimulations and narrative feints that marble any manifesto on national identity, whether promulgated textually or architecturally. Eiermann and Ruf’s Deutschland pavilion and its strategic repudiation of National Socialism were contemporaneous mid-century constructions that soon became inseparable companions. In interpreting the building, observers ranging from architectural historians to philosophers have uncritically recapitulated its foundational identity myth for the past fifty years. As glossed most recently by Alain de Botton:

If … we were tasked with producing metaphoric images of Germany in her two periods of history, as a fascist state and a democratic republic, and if we were allowed to work with stone, steel and glass rather than with just a pencil, it is likely we could not better the iconic designs of Albert Speer and Egon Eiermann for World’s Fairs on either side of the Second World War. Speer’s offering, for the Paris World’s Fair of 1937, makes use of the quintessential visual metaphors of power: height, mass and shadow. Without even laying eyes on the insignia of the government that sponsored it, we would almost certainly sense something ominous, aggressive and defiant emanating from this 500-foot neoclassical colossus. Twenty-one years and a world war later, in his German pavilion for the 1958 World Exposition in Brussels, Egon Eiermann would resort to a trio of very different metaphors: horizontality to suggest calm, lightness to imply gentleness and transparency to invoke democracy. So eloquent are materials and colours, then, that a façade can be made to speak of how a country should be ruled and which principles ought to govern a foreign policy. Political and ethical ideas can be written into window frames and door handles. An abstract box on a stone plinth can deliver a paean to tranquility and civilization. ⁴

The accurate transmission and reproduction of this reading half a century after its formulation should be considered a measure of the 1958 pavilion’s success as architectural propaganda. De Botton begins by positing a recent history of Germany in two parts, fascist and democratic – the latter referring not to the German Democratic Republic in the East, but the West’s Federal Republic – eliding any mention of a state-socialist nation, just as was done at the Deutschland pavilion. As for de Botton’s interpretation of the Third Reich’s pavilion in Paris, contemporary emotive responses to its monumental neoclassicism, however strongly felt, constitute unreliable evidence for historical narratives. Omedée Ozenfant, a critic for the Cahiers d’Art in the 1930s, overheard French visitors enthusiastically describe the Deutsches Haus façade as ‘splendid’ (épatant). Speer’s pavilion, as cultural historian Karen Fiss has revealed, was not only beloved by Hitler, but also critics writing for newspapers representing political positions on the left, right and center, who commended its interiors as ‘politically discreet and aesthetically harmonious.’ Speer’s textbook exemplar of Third Reich monumentality won more awards than any other international display at the Paris Fair, including a gold medal and induction into the French Legion of Honor for its architect. ⁵ Period responses to Speer’s 1937 Paris pavilion, baffling to contemporary aesthetic sensibilities, underscore the inherent instability of taste and the hazard of ascribing timeless political attributes to ‘window frames and door handles’ – a problem equally present in historical assessments based on dehistoricized evaluations of Eiermann’s postwar masterpiece in Brussels.

In his introduction to the official guidebook of the 1958 Deutschland pavilion, Theodor Heuss, president of the FRG, recounted that from the moment he learned of plans to hold a World Exhibition in Brussels, he interpreted its theme, ‘Progress and Man,’ as ‘an attempt to draw up the balance sheet of an epoch’ (emphasis in original). ⁶ If so, his nation’s delayed response to an invitation to participate at Brussels fair might be diagnosed as temporary paralysis induced by a fear of bookkeeping. The 1954 letter of invitation from exhibition organizers to West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer remained unanswered for a full year. ⁷ The Bonn government subsequently commissioned a Dusseldorf firm specializing in trade shows to develop the theme for a national pavilion and its displays. The consultants proposed a three-part commemoration of ‘the German contribution to the great cultural achievements of mankind’: one section dedicated to Johannes Gutenberg and his role in fomenting a communications revolution; another exploring Wilhelm Röntgen’s impact upon global advances in health and science; and a final part devoted to the trio of Rudolf Diesel, Carl Benz and Gottfried Daimler, pioneers in promoting spatial mobility and freedom. ⁸ The prosaic and self-congratulatory nature of this history lesson exasperated Hans Schwippert, chairman of the Deutsche Werkbund, a voluntary association calling itself ‘the design conscience of the nation.’ He prepared a counterproposal showcasing everyday life in West Germany. Insisting that few other countries could claim a comparable array of affordable and well-designed products for home and work, Schwippert asserted that in German postwar life ‘oppositions between the dirty, debased world of work and the beloved home, between drudgery and freedom, between factory and idyll begin to fade .… To show how progress among Germans at home is meant for [all] human beings: this could be our special contribution.’ ⁹ His concept received a sympathetic reception in Bonn, and in late 1955 Schwippert and his Werkbund colleagues began planning an exhibition conceived as ‘Living and Working in Germany.’ ¹⁰ Design development proceeded with input from the ambassador to Belgium, Anton Pfeiffer; the General Commissioner to the Brussels World’s Fair, Herman Wenhold and a Werkbund advisory committee. Two members of the latter, Egon Eiermann and Sep Ruf, received the commission for pavilion design. In keeping with architectural historian Peter Blundell Jones’ observation that ‘the reins seem to have been largely in Eiermann’s hands,’ we should regard Ruf as an ‘architect of record,’ the profession’s term for leading support personnel, and Eiermann as the pavilion’s primary author. ¹¹

Neither the West German Exhibition and Trade Council nor the Federation of German Industry (Bundverband der Deutschen Industrie) expressed much enthusiasm for Expo ’58. Both organizations believed trade fairs to be far more effective in generating export sales than the World’s Fairs. Ambassador Pfeiffer proffered an alternative opinion: that his nation could ill afford an absence from the first exhibition representing a new postwar community, Western Europe, within which West Germany craved acceptance. Participation, according to Pfeiffer, would also provide an opportunity to juxtapose the successes of the nation’s social market economy against East Bloc collectivism. ¹² Just as crucial as the issue of distinguishing West from East was that of distancing present from past. The project’s key players understood the problem well, having faced it personally. From 1942–5 General Commissioner Wenhold had served as the Third Reich’s War Industry Leader (Wehrwirtschaftsführer). Eiermann and Ruf had headed architectural firms specializing in industrial commissions that nurtured Hitler’s war effort. Schwippert had designed self-build furniture patterns intended for newly ‘Germanized’ Poles conscripted as a colonial labor force. ¹³ The challenges to national, professional and personal reputations presented by a National Socialist past pervaded West German self-presentation at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, and were made more explosive by a defamatory campaign recently launched by the socialist East.

The induction in May 1955 of the FRG into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a defense pact led by the USA marked the beginning of an internationally supervised re-militarization of West Germany: a prospect that raised anxieties both at home and abroad. Even president Theodor Heuss, who raised eyebrows with his ironic benediction ‘Nun siegt mal schön’ (Happy victories then!) at the induction ceremony for the nation’s first troops, opposed the move for diplomatic reasons. Capitalizing on this unease, the East German Ministry of State Security (Stasi), at the behest of Albert Norden, the head of the Politburo’s Agitation Committee, opened a new front in an ongoing propaganda battle. Accusations that West Germany was an American colony run by former Nazis, a longstanding Soviet propaganda trope, dovetailed neatly with the East Bloc’s self-portrait as a league of anti-fascist nations. A description of one example of GDR propaganda art from the early 1950s provides a primer on the polemic. The poster depicts a queer marriage fantasy in which two West German politicians of opposing political parties, Konrad Adenauer and Erich Ollenhauer (the latter in bridal drag), march down the aisle as US General Lucius Clay scatters coins, rather than rose petals, at their feet. A moloch wearing a dollar sign presides at the altar; standing in the pews are hooded Ku Klux Klansmen, truncheons at their sides. A motley collection of German elders – some in SS uniforms, others in bankers’ tails and striped trousers – bring up the rear with a swastika banner. Borne aloft by a ghostly armored car, the floating cadavers of Goebbels and his Führer look down at the union, registering their delight with ghoulish smiles and Heil Hitler salutes. ¹⁴ Titled ‘An American Wedding,’ the poster image conflates all of the GDR master narratives of the Western enemy enumerated by propaganda historian Monica Gibas: West Germany as a US imperial colony; remilitarization as a springboard for a new wars of aggression; the return to power of Third Reich businessmen, politicians and military leaders through American-sanctioned re-nazification; and the complicity of religion in bolstering the FRG’s ‘clerical-fascist’ regime. ¹⁵ Incorporation of West Germany into NATO, however, catalysed a radical shift in defamatory tactics. Burlesque humor yielded to a tone of foreboding anxiety; the genre of fantasy made way for that of the historical exposé; and a handful of high profile targets expanded to encompass a much broader roster of postwar establishment figures.

The new offensive began in 1957 with the release of an 18-minute film titled Urlaub auf Sylt (Vacation in Sylt). Directed by Annelie and Andrew Thorndike for the DEFA studio in East Berlin, it marked the first instalment of a documentary series called ‘Archive sagen aus’ (The Archives Speak Out). Introduced by a shot of metal film canisters papered with a label stamped ‘secret’ and emblazoned with a swastika, the opening image promises shocking revelations based on archival discoveries. The film begins by mimicking a light-hearted promotion for a holiday on Sylt, a rustic Baltic island favored by vacationing West Germans. The mood shifts when an image of Heinz Reinefarth, the mayor of the island’s main town, cross-fades to an SS officer’s uniformed studio portrait: the jovial Bürgermeister is unmasked as the infamous ‘hangman of Warsaw’ responsible for slaughtering civilians and resistance fighters during the city’s 1944 uprising. A voice-over intones the provenance of the portrait of SS officer number 56634, discovered in the Nazi military newspaper Das schwarze Korps. Images of documents accompany a narrative of the mayor’s wartime atrocities and the ease with which he disappeared into West German civilian life. The recriminations then spiral outward. Like Sylt’s holiday atmosphere, West Germany’s ‘miracle economy’ is portrayed as an idyllic illusion concealing the rehabilitation of ‘capitalist lords of Hitler’s old guard.’ The accusation transforms a tracking shot of new cars jammed in parking lots along the banks of the Rhine from a celebration of consumer modernity to an indictment of a venal, neo-fascist society. Released in German, French and English language versions, the Thorndike’s exposé of the FRG’s ‘militarist clique’ was banned in the UK and resulted in six months of jail time for members of the West German film crew hired to shoot the film’s local footage, an act subsequently condemned as espionage. ¹⁶

The Thorndikes’ use of the cross-fade, an editing technique in which one image dissolves into another, provided an apt visual metaphor for the Soviet practice of ‘unmasking’ (in German, Entlarvung; in Russian, razoblacheno). Its political ritual spread across Eastern Europe with the postwar coordination of Party leadership and culture. Unmasking purportedly revealed the true identity of individuals who collaborated in secret with agents of imperialism to subvert socialism while claiming to act in its best interests. Historian Michael David-Fox has observed that the compulsion to reveal ‘masked enemies’ permeated daily life in the early Stalin era as ‘a fundamental issue around which an emergent Soviet political culture crystallized.’ ¹⁷ Penetrating the artfully constructed façade and divulging its betrayals became honed Eastern Bloc skills. The Thordikes’ documentary redirected the practice westward, where a parallel set of anxieties preoccupied a different superpower patron. The spectre of ‘false democratization,’ a scenario in which covert Third Reich supporters engaged in ‘mimetic performances simply to meet the occupier’s expectations’ haunted the motion picture genre that historian Sabine Hake calls ‘the Hollywood rubble film.’ Movies like Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair advanced the trope of the older German man who, by adhering to his totalitarian beliefs while masquerading as a convert to democracy, contrived a means to hide in plain sight. ¹⁸ East German re-nazification propaganda of the mid- to late-1950s stoked this fear, depicting the same male character a decade later as the privileged subject of an affluent and newly militarized West Germany.

The Thorndikes had a wealth of historical material to work with. Over the course of the 1950s Germany had engaged in an ‘organized forgetfulness’ to establish a Schlußstrich, or cut-off point, after which further rumination about Nazi-era trauma, personal and collective, was seen as unnecessary and disruptive. In 1958, the year of the Brussels Fair, West German prisons released the last of the war criminals convicted ten years earlier as leaders of SS Einsatzgruppen, the ‘special forces’ implicated in Nazi atrocities. ¹⁹ Tracing any of these postwar lives back in time yielded the narrative that the Thorndikes were looking for. When evidence of wartime malfeasance was unavailable, it could always be invented: a task entrusted to Unit Ten of Stasi Hauptverwaltung (Department) A. Its successful cross-border operations included sinking a chest filled with forged wartime documents in Lake Constanz and orchestrating its scandal-provoking recovery; and defacing Cologne’s new synagogue with antisemitic graffiti, thus breathing life into allegations of neo-Nazi activism in the West. In that it has taken historians half a century to identify and repudiate Stasi disinformation devised to ‘run down the reputation of the state of Bonn,’ these so-called ‘active measures’ must be regarded as a triumph of public perception management. ²⁰ Having captured international attention with their first exposé, the Thorndikes announced that research was complete for the next, which would unmask a half dozen more establishment figures. Released in 1958, the year of the Brussels exposition, Unternehmen Teutonenschwert (a title glossed by documentary film historian Matthias Steinle as ‘The Come-Back of the Nazi Culprit’) was seen by 40 million people in 46 countries, if East German statistics are to be believed, triggering lawsuits alleging the use of forged evidence. ²¹ The GDR’s mobilization of doubts about the legitimacy of West German leadership, the nature of the nation’s economic miracle and the wisdom of its rearmament under NATO made fairground depictions of a nation transformed as much a matter of refuting the East as redressing the past.

Given its turbulent cold war context, the commission to design the Deutschland pavilion entailed a high-stakes effort in architectural diplomacy. Eiermann was painfully aware of the impression made by Speer’s super-scaled neoclassical portico and swastika-bearing eagle, having visited the Deutsches Haus in 1937 as a young, up-and-coming architect. ²² Twenty years later, as the primary designer of the West German pavilion for Expo ‘58, he wrote to a friend:

It was very hard for Germany, after the dreadful events that occurred before and since the last world’s fair in 1937, to again appear within the context of an international show of this kind. This nation has burdened itself with such excessive guilt that it was very difficult to hit the right note. ²³

Taking no chances of sounding the wrong chord, General Commissioner Wenhold obtained a reference copy of Deutschland in Paris: Ein Bild-Buch (Germany in Paris: A Picture Book), a commemorative publication featuring illustrations by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s favourite photographer. ²⁴ Speer’s monumental neoclassicism came to define ‘Nazi architecture’ in the postwar West, encouraged by comments from architectural modernists. Former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius, ensconced at Harvard since his self-exile in the mid-1930s, asserted that Speer’s buildings had overwhelmed and indoctrinated susceptible citizens. ‘There is a political corpse buried in Germany’s rubble, and it is the job of reconstruction planners to insure it isn’t revived,’ Gropius counselled in 1947. ‘Stop constructing superbuildings, and there will be no more supermen.’ ²⁵

The Eiermann and Ruf exhibition pavilion could in no way be mistaken for a descendent of Speer’s neoclassicsm. Instead of towering above other pavilions, the buildings for Brussels were low-slung and horizontal; rather than hoisting powerful symbols of state above spectators, they scattered abstract sculpture through a garden. Instead of piling stone upon stone to proclaim a ‘thousand-year Reich,’ postwar West Germany had produced houses of glass. The perception of difference was as inescapable as it was intentional. Eiermann’s crystalline architecture was, in Paul Betts’ memorable phrase, a conscious exercise in ‘visual denazification.’ ²⁶

In order to understand postwar reactions to the Deutschland pavilion, an archaeological dig through layers of architectural discourse about glass is necessary. Revered for its hygienic role in fighting tuberculosis, glass entered the twentieth century as a building material endowed with extraordinary properties, especially in the minds of its German enthusiasts. In the 1880s, social visionary Paul Scheerbart began celebrating the transcendent virtues of glass construction in verse. His stanzas ‘Without a glass palace, life becomes a burden’ and ‘Glass opens up a new age, brick only does harm’ adorned the Glashaus pavilion designed by Bruno Taut, an architect converted to Scheerbart’s world view, at the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. In the early years of the Weimar Republic, Taut’s Crystal Chain (Gläserne Kette) alliance proclaimed that glass architecture would transform collective consciousness, heralding a new age. The powers accorded to this seemingly mundane building material were not just metaphoric, but physiological and psychoactive: Taut went so far as to design colorful glass building blocks to expose children to its spiritual energies. As the German avant garde of the mid-1920s abandoned expressionist passion for the ‘new objectivity’ (neue Sachlichkeit) of a machine-age, glass architecture shed its mystical aura to become an artifact of modernist functionalism: hygienic, high-tech and unsurpassed for dissolving spatial enclosure. In his 1927 competition entry for the League of Nations building, Bauhaus architecture instructor Hannes Meyer proclaimed glass the rational guarantor of transparent governance: ‘No more back corridors for backstairs diplomacy, but open glazed rooms for honest men.’ ²⁷ A lost war and generation later, the architect Hans Schwippert, commissioned to retrofit a pedagogical academy in Bonn as the new West German Parliament, echoed Meyer’s axiom. ‘Politics is a dark affair,’ he wrote. ‘Let’s see that we shed some light upon it.’ ²⁸ Reaching back through decades of crystalline discourse, Schwippert retrieved a tenet of German avant-garde faith for new postwar applications. His 1949 design for the Bundeshaus plenary chamber conjoined parliamentarians with their constituency through a two-story high, thirty-two meter long window wall. Observant citizens perched in outdoor bleacher seating arrayed beside the parliamentary chamber window could hold German legislators accountable for their deeds.

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Figure 2.

Deutschland pavilion, Brussels World Exposition of 1958, Egon Eiermann and Sep Ruf. Photograph courtesy of the University of Miami School of Architecture Slide Library. (See colour version in the plate section).

The West German pavilion at Expo ‘58 applied the ideals associated with transparency to a new and urgent task: displaying the nation’s cultural de-Nazification to ‘the great human community that we long to join,’ as Eiermann put it. ²⁹ His pavilion corrected design flaws that limited the transparency of Shwippert’s Bundeshaus. The windows of Bonn’s plenary chamber, when bathed in direct sunlight, became a gridded, reflective plane rather than a transparent one. By extending the Brussels pavilion’s floor slabs a meter beyond its plate glass skin, Eiermann threw glazed surfaces into shadow, maximizing transparency and imparting a sense of lightness. Instead of resting on the ground, the thin floor plates hovered over a recessed podium of fawn-colored brick, presenting the impression of abstract planes floating above an Arcadian landscape. Illuminated at night, the crystalline volumes became glowing lanterns. A British journalist called the 1958 pavilion ‘without doubt the best … conceived structure, with careful handling of detail and with unerring taste, a ‘glass case’ – or rather an arrangement of glass cases which are put together and penetrate each other very skillfully.’ ³⁰ What better way to counter the East German campaign to vilify the FRG by stripping away a false front than to offer visitors an ‘arrangement of glass cases’ and transparent facades which hid nothing from sight? Eiermann’s design drew upon the utopian tradition Michel Foucault described as ‘the dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness.’ ³¹ The question of whether such a condition is possible (or even desirable) played no part in the formula for national identity that West Germans craved and put on display at Brussels: that of a modern, politically transparent democracy presented in vitro.

The Deutschland pavilion in Brussels differed radically in its internal organization from the 1937 Deutsches Haus in Paris. Speer’s floor plan resembled that of a house of worship. A towering portico opened onto the elongated axis of the main hall, culminating in an elevated dais showcasing stained glass panels featuring an eagle and swastika motif. Eiermann and Ruf opted instead for a garden courtyard framed by dispersed pavilions that were linked by a circuit of pedestrian bridges. While enclosing over twice the floor space of the 1937 Deutsches Haus, the buildings at Brussels retained a smaller scale and more delicate feel throughout. They orchestrated visitor movement as a stroll across airy platforms above a park, rather than an axial procession down a tall, windowless nave. While the low-key handling of architectural massing worked well in Brussels, a parallel approach to its displays left something to be desired, according to critics. Coordinated by Schwippert, an ingénue in the art of exhibition design, the pavilion installations exhibited everyday objects with little fanfare, downplaying the ‘miracle’ of economic resurgence that had yielded the fastest rate of growth in European history. This strategy of self-effacement garnered expressions of scorn from West German journalists who called the displays of ‘lifeless things’ assembled ‘by and for the professors’ a ‘yawner for the masses.’ ³²

Experienced by visitors as elegant and refined, if somewhat enervating, the contents of the Deutschland pavilion exuded an ‘attitude of restraint’ achieved not by accident, but through years of planning and painstaking negotiation. ³³ From the inception of exhibition planning, the prospect of itemizing ‘the balance sheet of an epoch’ for international review sparked a heated and sometimes rancorous debate. Theodor Oberländer, head of the FRG ministry overseeing the welfare of ‘expellees’ – ethnic Germans displaced from former Reich territories at war’s end – insisted that ‘the tripartite division of Germany [into West, East, and occupied Berlin] remain at the focus of the German statement’ at Brussels. ³⁴ Politicians in Bonn lobbied for a display conveying the experiences of citizens forced to start anew amid ruins. Such assertions of victimization infuriated Schwippert, provoking an unflinching position statement directed to the Office of the West German President:

Some enraged pens wished to see mountains of rubble; had other nations no ruins? And caused by whom? If those people wish to display mountains of rubble, I demand that Germany exhibits at the same time six million Jews. (Brussels as an international competition in ruins, deaths, a world competition in refugees, in misery?) I am afraid we would have fared quite badly in this. ³⁵

Forced to memorialize the consequences of war within an exhibition dedicated to seemingly apolitical identity statements, Schwippert employed dilution as a placating strategy. Dispersed within sweeping interiors populated by anodyne objects of everyday use, a few sparse panels addressing wartime devastation and the refugee problem lost much of their emotive impact. ³⁶

More sensitive yet was the issue of Germany’s geopolitical divide. Looking to modernist abstraction as a distancing tactic, the exhibition committee organized a competition for a work of art addressing the nation’s postwar partition in accordance with a highly restrictive brief: ‘The exhibit should make no accusations, should not conjure up political discussions, and as far as possible offer no pretext for any accusation of a political ‘demonstration’ unfit for a World’s Fair.’ ³⁷ The resulting installation by Josef Henselmann, entitled ‘Geteiltes Deutschland’ (Divded Germany), enshrined a blackened structural timber scavenged from a burned farmhouse as sculpture. This ‘found object’ aestheticized suffering in a minimalist tribute to the tradition of the medieval reliquary, rendering in enlarged secular form one of its ‘relics of the true cross.’ Adjacent to Henselmann’s sculpture, a massive, floor-mounted map of Germany configured in 1937 boundaries delivered a less subtle message about the divided nation. As expressed in the exhibition catalogue’s pathos-laden rhetoric:

We will learn from [historians], as we know already, that the … circumstances so favourable for the growth of the Federal Republic excluded the other part of the old Germany, still voiceless and dark; that in the West we chose the better part, that the better share is ours, and that this division was the price we had to pay to enjoy the happiness of our freedom. This leaden weight is bound to our feet, but the responsibility we feel for our compatriots in the Soviet Zone, if rightly understood, can but encourage us to maintain our freedom and to make the best of our free area of Western Germany. ³⁸

This narrative employs the delegitimizing term ‘Soviet Zone’ for East Germany and depicts its inhabitants not only as ‘voiceless,’ but also as stripped of agency: in this account, self-identity as a socialist citizen is simply beyond the realm of possibility. Or put more accurately, agency was only recognized when expressed in acts of resistance, as illustrated by a guidebook reference to ‘the tens of thousands of young people who flee every month from the ‘DDR’ to the Federal Republic.’ The ‘fright quotes’ bracketing the abbreviation of Deutsche Demokratische Republik, (German Democratic Republic) reveal another delegitimizing tactic. ³⁹ East Germans certainly remained voiceless in responding to their depiction in Brussels: diplomatically unrecognized by Belgium, the GDR had no opportunity for self-representation at the 1958 exhibition. An East Bloc neighbour, Poland, however, did. Appalled by the inclusion of a map identifying Silesia, located in postwar Poland, as part of ‘dreamworld Germany,’ a Polish journalist took the installation to task by mocking its revanchist message. ⁴⁰ The committee mandate to avoid ‘any accusation of a political ‘demonstration’ unfit for a World’s Fair’ had obviously fallen far short of intentions.

Located in one of the least visited corners of the Deutschland pavilion and excluded from the guidebook circuit of exhibits, ‘Divided Germany’ was an anomaly in its unequivocal display of Cold War tensions. Other installations conformed to a principle formulated by the West German Foreign Ministry: ‘the effectiveness of any given propaganda can only be increased through a somewhat less direct semblance.’ ⁴¹ Oblique political messages delivered with tasteful modernist panache helped make West Germany’s performance at Brussels a soft power triumph. Many of the propaganda techniques applied there by Schwippert traced their origins to US cold war cultural diplomacy. European exhibitions mounted by the Marshall Plan and the Mutual Security Agency (MSA) pioneered the use of modern consumer goods as anti-communist semaphores. ‘We’re Building a Better Life,’ for example, a domestic design extravaganza unveiled by the USA at the 1952 German Industrial Exhibition in West Berlin, had also promoted International-style modernism as the lingua franca of Western consumer capitalism. The American-produced exhibit featured a model home equipped with over six thousand items, from furnishings and household necessities to leisure goods, all manufactured in Marshall Plan member nations. In subsequent trade fairs across Western Europe, culminating with the Nixon/Khrushchev ‘Kitchen Debate’ at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, consumer domesticity became an ideological weapon that targeted the stoic living standards produced by Soviet-style economic planning and its single-minded pursuit of heavy industry.

Displays of West Germany’s modernist domestic culture at Brussels recapitulated the form and content of U.S. State Department dream home shows, down to details like the light-hearted inclusion of a paddleboat beside the pavilion’s courtyard pond. The casual tableau, in its visually strategic position, underscored the nation’s disdain for muscular identity politics and the turn toward quality of life concerns. Herman Wenhold, the General Commissioner of the Deutschland exhibition in Brussels, took yet another page from the Marshall Plan propaganda playbook in commissioning a newsreel portrait of the Deutschland pavilion. Just as Germans unable to visit America’s ‘Better Life’ home exhibition in West Berlin could experience it through newsreel footage shown in cinemas across West Germany, a documentary intended for the ‘cultural education’ time slot prior to feature-length films provided a vicarious tour of the Deutschland pavilion. The narrative was initially presented though the eyes of an imaginary ‘visitor from the Soviet occupied zone’ – a logical counterpoint to the consumer citizens of West Germany’s economic miracle. Upon viewing a first cut, Wenhold snubbed the film’s ‘pathetic theatricality’ and demanded a new edit eliminating the concocted protagonist. A final cut used architecture and objects rather than inflammatory rhetoric to make its point. ⁴² Abjuring blatant propaganda in favor of the ‘soft sell’ of everyday material culture, the Bonn government pledged its faith in what cultural historian Paul Betts has memorably called ‘the authority of the object.’

With separate displays dedicated to ‘Agriculture,’ Crafts,’ ‘Industrial Work,’ ‘the City and Residential Dwellings,’ ‘Personal Needs,’ ‘Social Tasks,’ ‘Healing and Helping,’ ‘Education and Learning’ and ‘Leisure,’ the West German pavilion at Brussels begs a complete investigation of the way objects were used to convey ‘how much liberty and the social arrangement of economic life [in the FRG] was superior to the collective system, and how progressive it was in the real sense,’ as asserted by a Chancellery official: a scholarly agenda well beyond the scope of this article. ⁴³ Instead, I will limit my exploration to artifacts of architectural and domestic design: a study sample broad enough to demonstrate how a mosaic of material objects framed West Germany within its community of Western allies as a nation purged of Third Reich chauvinism and girded against communism. Separating fact from fantasy came first in the exhibition’s narrative strategy. The ‘City and Residence’ installation, the organizing committee agreed, should ‘focus on concrete exemplars taken from reality; the stress should lie upon reporting rather than hopes and plans for the future.’ Model home interiors would ‘render an account of what has been achieved in the field to date. The issue is not to outshine through peak achievements, but to impart good, fully realized solutions as exemplary for further application.’ ⁴⁴ As a practising architect, Schwippert regarded this portion of the exhibit as his personal contribution. The goal of repudiating propaganda about citizen welfare under state socialism was never far from his mind, as revealed by his planning notes. ‘To describe the living environment (Wohnwelt) … of the so-called common man in Germany, … how Germany not only thinks about its people’s lives, but takes part in actually providing for life among the so-called masses, and not just to assert this but to furnish proof and demonstrate it, would broadly conform to the basic idea of this World’s Fair and at the same time yield a political success.’ ⁴⁵ Schwippert’s references to apparently dubious demographic groups – namely the ‘so-called common man’ and ‘so-called masses’ – implied that ‘political success’ would be measured with respect to counterpropaganda emanating from the socialist East.

West Germany created no fewer than three furnished model residences for display at Expo ’58, suggesting that the Bonn government, like its superpower patron, prized the mid-century modernist home for its efficacy as an ideological conveyance. An oversight produced one of Brussels’ three domestic installations: a small courtyard house located beside the pavilion. Originally intended for a live-in custodian, Schwippert and his design team had failed to note that fairground regulations prohibited on-site residency. By the time the fair opened, the house had become the model home of a prototypical ‘older married couple.’ ⁴⁶ Inside the pavilion, two more domestic stage-sets applied modernist design ideals to postwar living: one addressing the needs of a single resident, the other of a family of six. Considering the aura of elegance purveyed by their appointments, that both model home interiors were presented under the rubric of ‘social housing’ may seem surprising today. The miracle economy’s notion of Wohlstand für Alle, the ‘good life for all,’ as proclaimed in the title of FRG Finance Minister Ludwig Erhard’s bestseller, anticipated a future West German society built upon a hegemonic middle class. ‘The process of levelling incomes by raising the lowest level is in full swing,’ declared one of the pavilion’s exhibition catalogue entries. Another passage went further, announcing in a headline that West Germany was ‘on the way to a classless society. ‘What is known as the middle-class is developing into a standardized class that includes employees of every possible variety. Traditional class barriers are falling before changing patterns of conduct. The uniformity of our way of life adds the final touch.’ ⁴⁷ As illustrations of this futurist social narrative, the elegantly austere interiors displayed at Brussels made perfect sense. Braun record players and kitchens equipped with Bosch appliances would soon be standard issue in the homes of a ‘standardized class.’ Accoutrements of this visionary capitalist egalitarianism included built-in modular cabinets with clean horizontal lines, minimalist furnishings and sleek table settings accented with the occasional Rosenthal vase or craft textile. By comparison, the patterned carpets, lacquered veneers and dust-catching knick-knacks showcased at the model socialist worker’s home in the nearby Soviet pavilion looked disconcertingly petty-bourgeois, even to progressive East German design professionals.

Postwar consumer bounty found yet another ideological application at the Brussels fair, one unprecedented in Marshall Plan propaganda. America’s mobilization of commodity culture to battle the socialist East was no match, in terms of hyperbole, for West Germany’s effort to vanquish the National Socialist past. In the wake of wartime scarcity and social disruption, according to the Deutschland pavilion’s exhibition catalogue, consumer affluence possessed a mutagenic power so irresistible that even Nazi indoctrination evaporated upon contact. The text, a remarkable testament to a worldview defined by economic miracles, bears quoting at length.

Where are the smart youngsters of yesteryear, with their hair closely cropped and daggers in their belts? What has become of the strapping girls with their hair pulled tight in buns or pigtails? Where did all those marchers disappear, moving in columns, six in a row, behind their flags? Today, in the streets that are swarming with girls, even the smallest wears a pony-tail, a tousled, close-cropped boyish hair-do, or a long Parisian fringe; and their legs are clad in narrow, tartan slacks according to fashion .… In the smallest village, one finds young men standing at the street corners whom one might mistake for foreign tourists until one hears their dialect: their hair is brushed upwards, they wear duffle-coats and new shoes with stitched seams, and their shining motor-cycles are leaning against the wall, ready to take young couples to the movies in town. ⁴⁸

The declaration that Nazi subjectivity dissolves without a trace after being immersed in consumer culture might recall an advertising pitch for household detergent. However, the utter absence of irony with which it was stated suggests instead the catechism of a new postwar faith.

The dizzying speed of West German economic reconstruction was made palpable in the nation’s physical reconstruction. Wartime breakthroughs in the technologies of urban annihilation had transformed German cities into lunar panoramas of cratered rubble. American reconstruction consultants like Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius were stunned by the results. In a letter to his wife, Ise, he exclaimed: ‘Berlin is a has-been! A disintegrated corpse!’ Gropius estimated that the task of rebuilding from ruins would take a century to complete. ⁴⁹ As Schwippert planned the pavilion displays in the mid-1950s, urban reconstruction had progressed to an extent unthinkable just a few years earlier. Model redevelopment projects in accordance with tenets of modernist urban planning illustrated in concrete terms the social market economy’s solicitude for public welfare: an ideological field triumphally occupied by socialism, according to East German propaganda.

Despite – or perhaps owing to – its abandoned destiny as a Third Reich imperial capital renamed ‘Germania,’ Berlin held great promise as counterpropaganda to socialist reconstruction, especially with regard to housing. Among the ‘great number of interesting architectural and urban planning works’ offered by West Berlin, of particular interest was apartment housing created for the 1957 International Building Exhibition (Internationale Bau-Austellung), known by the acronym Interbau. Built at inordinate cost (relative to West Berlin’s norm for social housing) through massive federal subsidy, Interbau’s experimental architecture offered Brussels’ exhibition organizers an opportunity to ‘emphasize Berlin in the context of the German exhibition without turning it into a political demonstration and contradicting the fair’s theme and tone.’ ⁵⁰ The inescapable comparison with East Berlin and its heavily publicized Stalinallee, a boulevard lined with residential blocks in the Stalin-era neoclassical style called socialist realism, comprised an unspoken side benefit. That the Reich’s former Haupstadt now sprouted glassy apartment towers amid park greenery – but only in the Western half – was a message perfectly suited to the ‘double negation’ strategy pursued at Brussels.

As a poster child for Cold War anti-communism, Interbau boasted impressive credentials. The housing development was located along the Strasse des 17. Juni, a thoroughfare renamed in commemoration of the suppressed East German national strike of 1953. Rather than expropriating private property, Interbau’s redevelopment involved land purchases and lot reconfigurations made by a privately held joint stock company. In the words of a board member, ‘this must stand as a counterexample to the Stalinallee, one that documents the creative energy of private initiative as opposed to the legal caprice and collectivism of the East.’ ⁵¹ The Interbau site plan, according to its designers, featured housing dispersed ‘in open nature … and through this unforced arrangement, should prove an antipode to buildings designed for dictatorial needs.’ ⁵² The Party-affiliated leader of East Berlin’s Bauakademie responded in kind. ‘Comparing the site plan and sketches [of Interbau] with the Stalinallee, no one of sound judgement could possibly find beautiful this fantasy from a world bound for extinction.’ ⁵³ Interbau’s participating architects, from Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, West Germany and the USA, were said to demonstrate ‘the free world’s technology and strength in its wide variety of forms.’ ⁵⁴ The resulting themes and variations on International-style modernism located the Interbau exhibition site squarely within a geographic imaginary known as ‘the free world,’ despite West Berlin’s insular position deep within East German territory. Along with Eiermann’s glass-sheathed pavilion and its three model home displays, Interbau apartment blocks were presented at Brussels as the artefacts of a new society, one conjoined to a community of Western nations through the shared use of modernism as an architecture of postwar democracy.

More than any other aspect of the West German performance at Brussels, however, it was Eiermann’s ‘wonder-work of elegance and precision,’ in the words of a British architectural critic, that most impressed international visitors and provided compelling evidence of the nation’s cultural transformation. Design, a London-based journal, proclaimed: ‘A country which can produce the best building in the exhibition may justify the support withdrawn from the military image of Germany.’ ⁵⁵ Mia Seeger from the Design Council (Rat für Formgebung) wrote that the pavilion made ‘amends for the German contribution to the 1937 Paris World’s Fair.’ ⁵⁶ A critic for the West German journal werk und zeit announced: ‘We have known since Bauhaus days that we can build in a ‘modern’ way … As the qualified upholders of the Bauhaus tradition, the Germans created an architecturally perfect complex.’ ⁵⁷ The association should have been suspect, in that neither of the pavilion’s architects were Bauhaus alumni, but were instead ‘schooled,’ so to speak, in the machine-age functionalism of Third Reich industrial commissions. However inaccurate, attribution of a Bauhaus ancestry for Eiermann’s pavilion complemented the polemic of style said to differentiate West Germany from both the Third Reich and a socialist neighbor-state that, just a few years earlier, had declared Bauhaus ‘formalism’ to be socialist architecture’s ‘public enemy number one.’ ⁵⁸

The notion that Eiermann had derived his signature style from that devised by the last director of the Bauhaus, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, remains fully subscribed to this day. Architectural historian Hartmut Frank describes the Brussels pavilion as ‘clearly linked … to the Mies tradition.’ ⁵⁹ Less flattering is a recent assessment of Eiermann’s postwar masterpiece as one of ‘a succession of well-disciplined, if somewhat plagiarized examples of the Miesian mode.’ ⁶⁰ However deflating such assessments seem today, during Eiermann’s lifetime the association with Mies further burnished the West German architect’s credentials for postfascist design. Eiermann’s performance at Brussels earned him Belgium’s Royal Order of Leopold and the French Prix d’Architecture, as well as netting major government commissions, including that of the new West German embassy in Washington DC and the design of a Parliamentary office tower in Bonn. These high-profile projects won further distinctions for the architect of the Brussels pavilion, including the Grand Prize of the German Architects Association, the Bundesverdienstkruz and in 1970, the year of his death, West Germany’s Orden Pour le Mérite.

All the while, Eiermann possessed conclusive evidence that his Brussels pavilion, far from being ‘somewhat plagiarized,’ was an outgrowth of his own pioneering exploration of glass and steel modernism. Three images by architectural photographer Eberhard Troger (and today preserved at the Südwestdeutsches Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology) are the only remaining photographs of Eiermann’s factory cafeteria and boiler plant constructed in the late-1930s in Oranienburg, north of Berlin. The building’s client was Märkischer Metallbau, a parts subcontractor for the nearby ARADO military aircraft works. Like Eiermann’s Brussels pavilion 20 years later, the cafeteria took the form of a glazed steel skeleton cantilevered over a masonry-faced base. At Oranienberg, the floor-to-ceiling glass, rather than being recessed from the edge of a projecting floor plate as at Brussels, was flush with it. Glazing at the Oranienburg facility was translucent rather than transparent, with matte window surfaces turned outward to eliminate spectral reflections that could reveal the industrial facility’s location to enemy aircraft flying overhead. At war’s end, the building all but disappeared. Located in the Soviet zone of occupation, heavily damaged, partially dismantled and crudely patched, it had become unrecognizable with respect to its former self – fortunately so for Eiermann. Had his cafeteria and boiler house in Oranienburg remained intact, Annelie and Andrew Thorndike might have conceived a culminating scandal for their ‘Archive sagen aus’ series with a cross-fade from the Brussels pavilion to Eiermann’s building for a Luftwaffe weapons supplier. An ‘unmasking’ of West Germany’s Deutschland pavilion, tracing its architectural ancestry back to a Third Reich armaments manufacturing complex, could have been the propaganda coup of their career.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Märkischer Metallbau factory cafeteria and boiler house, Oranienburg, 1939–41, Egon Eiermann. Photograph by Eberhard Troeger, courtesy of the Südwestdeutsches Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau (saai) at the Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie.

Postwar architectural historians have portrayed the Märkischer Metallbau cafeteria as a work of pure functionalism, devoid of symbolic or ideological content. ⁶¹ In fact, Third Reich industrial modernism was layered with symbolic meaning. Eiermann’s factory canteen echoed the policies of Albert Speer’s Bureau for the Beauty of Labor (Amt Schönheit der Arbeit). It championed sunlit, streamlined industrial facilities for their invocation of German manufacturing prowess and conducted propaganda campaigns calling for ‘clean people in clean factories.’ ⁶² Modernism was indeed an ‘official’ Nazi style, and Eiermann’s cafeteria was its lapidary masterpiece. Rather than a Miesian knock-off, Eiermann’s work in glass and steel was a parallel invention, created just as Mies was experimenting with the glazed steel cage in Chicago, his adopted New World home. Eiermann must have realized that, in order to claim a reputable place in postwar practice, his Third Reich career had to vanish along with its landmark structure. He rose to the top of the West German architectural establishment, condemned to be recalled as one of Mies’ most talented plagiarists instead of one of Germany’s most original talents.

In an introduction to the official catalogue of the Deutschland pavilion, journalist and political scientist Dolf Sternberger reflected on the function of memory. Given Germany’s brutal history, he wrote, ‘our state of mind becomes like that of a man whose face grows tense in an effort to find a sign that might bring back any circumstances of his former life.’ Only by reclaiming memory, Sternberger insisted, could the broken shards of national identity be reassembled, ‘He who has no past, or does not wish to have one, will be promised no future, and the man who is unable to remember must finally lose his identity.’ ⁶³ But was the national identity on display at Brussels the product of a struggle to remember, or its antithesis? Cultural critic Albert Schulze Vellinghausen put the question to Schwippert with brutal directness: ‘Did what we showed there correlate with our reality, or was it just a pretense – Machiavellian?’ ⁶⁴

While what was exhibited at Brussels differed enormously from the triumphalism unveiled at the Paris World Exposition of 1937, both relied on spectacle to convey their message. Speer’s Deutsches Haus was far more conventional in its use of tried-and-true architectural tropes: a super-order of neoclassical piers, dramatic chiaroscuro effects and enduring stone surfaces yielded the self-portrait of a thousand-year Reich. The Deutschland pavilion – low-slung and soft-spoken, its glass walls shimmering with democratic transparency, a showcase for consumer citizenship – leveraged spectacle toward unexpected ends. In effect, the Deutschland pavilion made a spectacle of restraint. Eiermann’s work in both Oranienburg and Brussels represented an inspired, if unlikely, discovery: that glass architecture could be something other than transparent. The translucent matte glass that sheathed the Märkischer Metallbau factory cafeteria helped conceal the building from aerial combatants. But Eiermann’s truly revolutionary use of glass came two decades later, in a pavilion employing the metaphor of democratic transparency to obscure the Third Reich provenance of an architectural career and its postwar masterpiece.