Life in the Midst of Superlatives: Exhibitions in Postwar Rotterdam and Hamburg, 1946-1973

Between 1946 and 1973 political authorities in the cities of Rotterdam and Hamburg, often in partnership with local business communities, organized and hosted no less than seven major national or international exhibitions, as well as a significant number of smaller events, activities, and expositions. This dissertation explores the context, purpose, and cultural significance of these exhibitions in order to reveal insight into the postwar period. In addition to encouraging tourism and increasing trade, the exhibitions promoted the host city’s recovery. Specifically, they highlighted progress that had been made since 1945 and casted a favourable light on the business and political elites under whose auspices these successes had been achieved. This dissertation contributes to our understanding of postwar development and reconstruction in western Europe. I argue that the exhibitions provided a framework through which the material and immaterial aspects of postwar recovery were presented to the outside world. They were the stage upon which the process of recovery was performed and imbued with meaning. An investigation of these exhibitions in two cities and over a period of thirty years shows that postwar understandings of “recovery” were not static, but instead shifted and were interpreted differently at different times. In the early 1950s, exhibitions highlighted collective overcoming and investment in large public infrastructure projects as the main aspects of recovery and as the foundation of future prosperity. By the mid- to late 1950s and into the 1960s, prosperity had arrived in both Hamburg and Rotterdam, and exhibitions stressed private prosperity and individual consumption as the key aspects of postwar rebuilding. After the mid-1960s this changed. Exhibitions in Rotterdam and Hamburg, rather than focusing on radical renewal or economic growth, began to pay more attention to lived experience and quality of life. When looked at over an extended period of time, the exhibitions demonstrate that the “postwar period” was neither static nor monolithic, but instead was fraught with tension, highly locally specific, and full with competing ideas of what was desirable.Ph.D.2019-12-19 00:00:0