Preliminary Programme

„A little light, so constant and so sweetly clear it finds his heart across the widest waters and hours of loneliness. That is his diamond on her finger – an ever-fixes beacon, pledge to safe home-comings and fair rewards in their new-day life to be.”

In my presentation I will focus on the production, distribution, and consumption of diamonds from colonial Namibia via Europe to the USA from 1920 to 1950. I will work out how the per-ception of the gemstones changed along the individual processing stages, on the different conti-nents and over time. More specifically, I will analyze why the stones in their raw state were con-sidered to be of such low value, whereas after processing in Amsterdam or Antwerp, they were regarded as valuable gems and bought by American consumers. With the help of the economic theorem of the Veblen effect, I will also show that diamonds have developed into a demonstra-tive consumer object over time. Initially regarded as mere gemstones, more and more buyers opted for the pale stones because they could use the diamonds to flaunt their wealth. After all, diamonds were so expensive that only men and women of the upper class could afford the pre-cious stones.
In my presentation, I will also explain how and why the places where diamonds were sold in the USA have changed. In the beginning, the stones were sold in selected jewelry shops, but later they were mainly sold by large department stores' chains and mail-order companies. This devel-opment had far-reaching consequences for the perception of diamonds: Brilliants were offered more frequently and at lower prices, which gradually led consumers to perceive them as vulgar gemstones. Diamond producers, such as DeBeers, had to spend a lot of money to counteract this impression and to present diamonds as popular consumer objects.
I will also illustrate how diamonds were marketed in the USA. Using archival sources from Washington D.C., I will show that the DeBeers company used a multifaceted advertising strate-gy to reinforce the impression among consumers that diamonds were particularly valuable piec-es of jewelry. This strategy was extremely successful, as the demand for the stones increased year after year in the USA. I will discuss the reasons for this success in my presentation, as well as the complex marketing of diamonds in the DeBeers advertisements.
My presentation will draw from extensive source material and theoretical approaches used in my dissertation on the commodity chain of diamonds from colonial Namibia to Europe and the USA, as well as the latest research on cultural and economic history. For my presentation I will consider sources from African, European, and American archives, with particular reference to the advertising posters of the DeBeers company for the marketing of diamonds in the USA from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. (Show less)

Exhibitions are cultural institutions with public appeal, in which “some of the most contested and thorny cultural and epistemological questions of the late twentieth century were fought out.” This study examines the material culture on display in the International Exhibition of Transport and Communication (IVA 65) of 1965 held in Munich, Germany with a focus on its formative role in the interpellation of gendered subject identity and cultural diplomacy during the cold war era. The Bureau of International Expositions (BIE) sanctioned the exhibition under the category of special Expo on 13 November 1962, fifteen months after the beginning of the construction of the Berlin Wall that reinforced the cold war division of Germany into east and west. In 1965, on the twentieth anniversary marking the end of World War II, the exhibition, spread over fifty hectares in Bavaria part near the city centre, opened on 25 June and operated for one hundred and one days. The official report counted 3,200,000 visitors including 385,000 from foreign nations. Visitor statistics betray gender specificity. While the exhibition was promoted as family-oriented event tourism, its specialist audience comprised mainly adult male visitors. 71 per cent of visitors were adult males. IVA 65 gave form to a masculine modernity with its privileging of large-scale industrial production, display of standardized material objects, and exhibition of productive, physical male industrial labour male labour. Under the leadership of Helmut Fischer, executive president of the IVA, and sponsorship of West German President Heinrich Lubke, planning, development, and organisational control over the exhibition remained in the hands of male officials. Female labour, by contrast, consisted primarily of service work. The display of mass transit and telecommunications, including airplanes, trains, ships, cargo trucks, passenger vehicles, rockets, satellites and space stations betrayed a decidedly masculine imagining of industrial modernity through history and into the future to a contemporary audience. At the same time, the commercially-oriented material culture on display mobilized a shift in perspective toward postmodern consumer society.
A total of thirty-six nations and international participants took part in the exhibition. Officials adhered to the BIE mandate that exhibits be displayed in theme pavilions rather than national pavilion to promote international cooperation. Consequently, the exhibition promoted American-led “bridge-building” policies directing western engagement with European communist countries to foster a cooperative environment to deal with economic and political issues on a global scale. Yet, in its “power of making things visible”, IVA 65 was notable for the near absence of material goods of communist nations. This absence ensured that it secured in institutionalized and material form an official collective ‘memory of the modern’ defined as one of masculine productivity, individual consumption and mass mobility. While the East German press provided scant coverage of the exhibition, reporting on the eve of the exhibition, West Germany’s popular weekly news magazine Der Spiegel teased its readers with the prospects of the exhibition’s “All-out fun!” Above all, Germany’s first international exhibition proclaimed to the world that the nation’s citizens had earned the right to enjoy themselves again. (Show less)