Engels on the Beach: Popular Science Travel Exhibitions in 1950s Czechoslovakia and East Germany

• In Event: Exhibiting Evolution

Abstract

The paper will look at evolution as an element of state ideology. Following the blockbusting 1952 Prague popular scientific exhibition “The Evolution of the Universe, Earth, and Man,” a travel exhibition toured through Czechoslovakia and East Germany, where it inspired the hugely successful Jugendweihe gift book “Universe Earth Man” (1954). At a time before the television age, the show’s purpose was to spread the dialectical materialist worldview in the form of a colorful atheist history of the world opposed to biblical creation. The paper will discuss the narrative, visual, spatial, and logistic strategies these exhibitions employed while traveling through art and regional museums, being shown in buses and tents between the Tatra Mountains and the Baltic Sea.

Author

• Philipp Kohl, Ludwig-Maximilians-U Munich (Germany)