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

Abstract

The Deutschland pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair depicted West Germany not only as culturally and technologically modern but also as the antithesis of socialist East Germany and the disgraced Third Reich. International-style architecture and modernist exhibition design were mobilized as instruments of cultural soft power to convey these multiple messages. Hans Schwippert of the postwar German Werkbund choreographed exhibition design, deploying the miracle economy’s modern consumer culture to celebrate the emergence of a post-Nazi society. Egon Eiermann, aided by Sep Ruf, designed the International-style pavilion, celebrated as the architecture of postwar modernity, but in fact derived from a precedent in Third Reich industrial architecture. As an exercise in cold war soft power, West Germany’s Brussels pavilion celebrated the emergence of a West German consumer citizen, while suppressing the presence of a Third Reich past.