This Book Says More Than the Entire Exhibition

This article centers on an exhibition entitled "Berlin in the Twentieth Century" put on by the East Berlin tourist office between late 1961 and early 1963. The exhibition opened just two months after the border's sealing through Berlin and drew over 300,000 visitors. Helping to justify the East German communist dictatorial regime's building of the Berlin Wall, the exhibition argued for separate historical roots of East and West Germany. This article uses a rare source-the exhibition guestbook-to show how visitors reacted to the East German regime's strategy of evoking emotion from the public to create historical memory aiming to serve its larger political objectives. Further, the guestbook functioned as an unusual venue for cross-Iron Curtain interaction and as an example of the regime's fixation with portraying the reception of its building of the Wall as positive. Finally, it reminds us that the Cold War was a mutual East-West co-production

Cold war · Communism · Exhibition · German · Iron Curtain · Politics · Tourism · French Historical and Cultural Studies