Introduction: How to Read an Exposition

Abstract

On 25 July 1896, the Viennese weekly Die Zeit published an elegant and remarkably brief review of the Berliner Gewerbeausstellung, the grand trade show that had opened in the south-east of the German capital a few weeks earlier. Little known today and only one and a half single-spaced newspaper columns in length, this short essay arguably proved one of the most perspicacious and powerful anatomies ever published of the most spectacular mass medium of the urban imagination in fin-de-siècle Europe: the imperial exposition. This astute observer understood that the national trade exhibition, temporarily staged in Berlin’s Treptower Park on the banks of the River Spree, had exceeded its relatively limited scope and, as such, could only be comprehended in the context of much larger international expositions previously held elsewhere, particularly France. Indeed, the author argued that these ‘momentary centers of world civilization’, which assembled ‘the products of the entire world in a confined space as if in a single picture’, were nothing less than a defining feature of modernity. In hosting this trade exhibition, the German capital had managed to transform itself into a ‘single city to which the whole world sends its products and where all the important styles of the present cultural world are put on display’. Berlin had thus transcended the status of a mere Großstadt or ordinary Hauptstadt and, ‘despite everything’, had at last been elevated to a genuine Weltstadt, a world city.²

EXPOSITION: Sujet de délire du XIXe siècle.

(Gustave Flaubert)¹