The US diplomat John P. Harrod told his interviewer in 1999:
Poland was, as I described at the time and I still believe, the most pro-American country I'd ever worked in, including the United States. You could do no wrong. We had exhibits in Poland like we did in the Soviet Union, but you never got questions about Vietnam or race relations or anything else because most people believed the United States was perfect.Footnote 1
Versions of this neat image of US engagement with Polish society during the Cold War persist in scholarship and popular imagination, and echo in the historiography of Western–East European relations during the Cold War.Footnote 2 The received wisdom in the West has been that Western governments fought the Cold War with their authoritarian communist counterparts; to the extent they engaged with the East European societies, it was largely through partnerships designed to promote these societies’ pursuit of their own welfare, freedom, self-determination and democracy. This article examines patterns of East–West interactions at the Poznań International Trade Fair in the mid-twentieth century that belie such idealistic narratives. Driven by a sense of superiority, many Westerners who came to Poland regularly promoted their own personal agendas and interests in ways that had little to do with the Cold War ideological struggle. They often leveraged their own privilege vis-à-vis the people in these poorer, more isolated societies, activating regional resentments and insecurities that long predated the Cold War.Footnote 3 These Western visitors effectively perpetuated longstanding power asymmetries between East and West, I suggest, defining the Second World around the notion of second-class citizenship.
Challenges to idealistic assessments such as Harrod's have been mostly oblique. The most powerful of those critiques have been self-consciously framed by the ostensible divisions between capitalism and communism that animated key aspects of Cold War politics.Footnote 4 Cultural historians and anthropologists have pushed back against the binary visions we inherited from the Cold War as they refocused the conversation from contrasting ideologies to international entanglements, exchanges, appropriations and similarities, ultimately showing how East Europeans actively shaped the world of socialism through exchanges, inventiveness and selective borrowings.Footnote 5 Many did so in the contexts of international exhibitions and fairs.Footnote 6 Yet, concomitant with these groundbreaking efforts to restore East European agency has been a noticeable shift of attention away from Western institutions and actors. Scholars continue to recognise the multiple Western sources of ideas, but increasingly they treat them also as residues of Western complacency, as distant spheres, productively mediated by East European possibilities, needs, institutions and practices. Mary C. Neuburger effectively captured this shift in interest when she noted that ‘the West was not the only point on the Bulgarian compass when it came to the making of modernity’.Footnote 7 Between the subtle reiterations of Cold War mappings and understandable reactions to them, questions about distinct individual and national experiences sometimes displace questions about power. In many accounts, the West often figures either as a benevolent or a background force.
The relative neglect of power in the relations between Westerners and East European societies during the Cold War may be the result of our excessive focus on Cold War paradigms. To the extent that scholars of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union engage with longer timelines, they often do so with Cold War problems in mind, tracing the ideological tensions of the twentieth century within the shared possibilities of Enlightenment modernity or the agonistic potential of Russian and US messianisms.Footnote 8 The Cold War certainly defined vast areas of international interactions in the second half of the twentieth century, and especially East–West relations. But it cannot explain everything.Footnote 9 Those studies that examine power relations between the West and Eastern Europe through postcolonial theory focus on the periods before and after communism.Footnote 10
Western emancipatory impulses, East European agency and the importance of Cold War politics must be duly acknowledged. Yet the relatively narrow focus on culture and ideology during the Cold War has also created a blind spot, where the scope of Western power in Eastern Europe has been minimised and its nature has been misunderstood. I wish to broaden the perspective on East–West relations in the mid-twentieth century by situating them in a wider geographical context and in a longer timeline. Attentive to questions of historical layering, I take seriously the local and the global, the short term and the longue durée, discourses and practices, production and reception of meanings, in order to bring out those patterns that may help connect real individuals with global trends, and pre-1945 with post-1989. I show that bringing together business elites, politicians and masses of visitors for weeks on end, at least once a year, the Poznań fair invited global actors to reproduce and renegotiate centuries-long economic and cultural hierarchies rooted in longstanding patterns of knowledge production, social relations and economic exchange. I examine these interactions based on recently declassified Polish documents (mostly files of the communist security police), as well as German, French, UK and US ones, many of which illuminate the roles of both Westerners and East Europeans in forging tangled relationships.
One of several East European fairs re-activated after the Second World War, Poznań became a unique Polish organisation that mixed business with propaganda, while connecting countless institutions with scores of individuals, simultaneously linking the state and the Polish people to the wider world. The relaxation of the Cold War after Stalin's death in 1953 made possible a gradual political, cultural and commercial rapprochement between Eastern Europe and the West.Footnote 11 Eager to re-engage, several East European governments established or revived international fairs at that time, notably East Germany (Leipzig), Bulgaria (Plovdiv), Czechoslovakia (Brno) and Hungary (Budapest). These fairs evolved in terms of area size, numbers of participating countries or firms, and numbers of guests. Out of the East European fairs, Poznań was the friendliest to foreigners: it was the first to host the United States (1957), the only one to allow for a permanent US pavilion, the most likely to welcome US consumer displays, and one of the most likely to privilege Western displays over those from socialist states.Footnote 12 The United States considered Poland the most ‘pragmatic’ and strategically, as well as commercially important, ‘satellite’.Footnote 13 The Cold War shaped the fair; but the fair also mediated contestations between Eastern Europe and the West that both preceded and sidestepped the global conflict of the second half of the twentieth century.
A cauldron of multiple national projects and interests, Poznań was exceptional as a regular mass international gathering in the world of restrictive border regimes. It also underscored continuities with the great nineteenth-century exhibitions and fairs whose ‘comprehensiveness’ was amazing.Footnote 14 At Poznań, democratic leaders engaged with authoritarians and capitalists talked to managers of planned economies, while visitors scrutinised competing forms of modernity embodied by products on display. I rely on two clusters of ideas to tackle the complexity of the international encounters at the fair. The first relates to the concept of the frontier, a fluid space of danger and promise, hardships and potential rewards, a space that not only pulsated with its own unpredictable energy generated by the clash of differences, but also pushed back, remaking the travellers and possibly even rejuvenating the places they called home.Footnote 15 Alfred Rieber has written of a ‘complex frontier’ to denote the multiple vectors of contestation between states and societies in the Eurasian borderlands.Footnote 16 I will use it to highlight the simultaneous, historically fraught power contestations at Poznań, which included Cold War contestations as well as longstanding cultural and economic tensions between East and West. Through Poznań, I suggest, the visitors from the West shaped Poland and the ‘Second World’. They did so in multiple modalities, responding not only to the realities of socialism, but also to ideas that shaped Western thinking about the world in the recent and distant past.
I think about the Poznań frontier as an intersection of local and global histories, in line with scholars who have abandoned the sole focus on transnational flows and explored how distinct cultures in ‘very small places’ meshed with worldly affairs.Footnote 17 Furthermore, as historian Karl Schlögel recognised, ‘the tacit coercion’ of tying a history to ‘a particular time or space’ also enables us to assume greater control over recalcitrant narratives: it ‘implicitly acknowledges the synchronicity of the non-synchronous, the coexistence and co-presence of the disparate’. For Schlögel, the ‘stereoscopic all-round view . . . designed to bring events together . . . is better suited to the disparate nature of the world than is a strenuous, concentrated tunnel vision.’Footnote 18 This approach lends itself to examining the Poznań fair, which, for two weeks every year, condensed global power relations to an area of about twenty Manhattan blocks. Thinking of Poznań as a complex frontier brings out what the focus on the Cold War obscures: the fact that the West played a far more ambiguous role in Eastern Europe in the second half of the twentieth century than had been previously assumed, challenging the communist regimes while simultaneously perpetuating longstanding cultural and economic asymmetries between East and West.
Business and Contraband: Poznań as a Place of Profits
Revisionist scholars of US and Soviet foreign trade have long stressed that business frequently trumped the political imperatives of the Cold War.Footnote 19 While Poznań became a Cold War battleground, it was often the desire to make a profit that drove many Western entrepreneurs to the fair. In 1956, 2,768 foreigners came to Poznań (as exhibitors, visitors, government officials and construction staff); in 1957, the number rose to 4,722; in 1961, Poznań was visited by 8,019 foreigners, and 1966 saw a record of 11,330 guests from abroad, more than half of whom (5,968) hailed from capitalist countries. The Western countries came to dominate the space at the fair: if the exhibition surface allotted to socialist and non-socialist countries in 1950 was 86 per cent and 14 per cent of the total, by 1960 the proportions were nearly inverted, 30 per cent to 70 per cent. The US government began warming up slowly to relaxing the restriction on trade with Eastern Europe from the mid-1950s on. As the country's ‘private businesses began to cast covetous glances at Eastern markets where the West Europeans were busily establishing beachheads’, they began to pressure the US government even more, and ‘by the early 1960s the domestic consensus on the merits of the strategic embargo was beginning to fray’.Footnote 20
‘Trade and commercial power cannot be understood by only examining state-to-state interactions or the intentions of political leaders’, wrote Stephen G. Gross, because ‘at its core, trade is about private transactions, about buyers finding sellers.’Footnote 21 Likewise, early Western reports beamed with a sense of excited anticipation about the fair and where it could lead. In 1955, Tory politician Jack Osbourn penned an urgent report from Poznań to his government. In dramatic terms, he wrote that ‘Apart from the battle of ideas, there was a battle of the markets to be remembered.’Footnote 22 He mused: ‘These Eastern countries will become increasingly large buyers and despite their present lack of currency . . . their influence will I believe become decisive in world trade. The potential is tremendous.’ Osbourn was especially concerned with the competition between the United Kingdom and the United States: ‘When the Americans enter these markets – as any moment now they will – our approach will appear even more pathetic’, he wrote.Footnote 23 Polish secret police reports suggest that envy and competition were palpable between businessmen from the United States and West Germany.Footnote 24 Osbourn expected revolutionary changes; based on conversations with numerous Polish officials, he surmised that ‘East/West trade will soon be entering the realms of the normal business approach.’Footnote 25 The British (and other) governments seemed more cautious, but Osbourn's optimism was by no means an isolated view.Footnote 26
Poznań welcomed new waves of Westerners, but immediate business opportunities that many visitors hoped for were limited. Socialist Poland continued to suffer from the constraints of a planned economy and could not suddenly start to trade in a ‘normal’ way. But the fair-going Westerners remained hopeful and adjusted to the Polish realities in multivalent ways. Some lucky companies may have signed a contract, but the Western governments regularly cooled off the enthusiasm of individual businessmen by explaining that trade was a gamble and the odds of striking a deal were low. For the Western governments, participation in the fair became more complicated. Most showed up though because, as a New York Times correspondent in Warsaw observed in a 1972 dispatch intercepted by Polish security police, coming to the fair was necessary in order to do business with Poland at all.Footnote 27 This was certainly true of Poland's biggest trade partners such as the United Kingdom and West Germany, but also France. The US government from the outset relegated business to the background at the fair, and instead focused on promoting ‘the American way of life’ through historically popular ‘prestige’ shows.Footnote 28 Concerns about profits and access to the Polish market frequently resurfaced in conversations between US agency officials and diplomats. The US government responded to the pressure from private companies and sent trade delegations to the Poznań fair.Footnote 29 The Cold War mattered but US financial interests often relativised its significance.Footnote 30
The communists also wanted to trade with the capitalists. While Western governments and firms competed with one another for markets, East European peripheries competed for attention and resources from outside of the Bloc. One British chemist visiting the fair in 1955 pointed out that ‘in the West, intense competition is taking place between Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania for export markets for chemical products.’Footnote 31 Interested in hard currency, the Poles preferred to lure Western exhibitors by giving them the space previously allotted to the People's Democracies. In 1960, the French surmised that this marginalisation was the reason why countries such as the Soviet Union and East Germany had not even made an effort in putting up a quality show.Footnote 32 The East Germans, in particular, were increasingly worried that, by signing all their trade deals at the Poznań fair, they were diminishing the significance of the Leipzig fair in Western eyes.Footnote 33 West German businessmen complained privately in 1959 about the East German border guards who mounted no obstacles when the West German exhibitors travelled to Leipzig, but ‘for those arriving to the Poznań Fair’, they ‘do everything to extend the control times as much as possible.’Footnote 34 Such practices reflected the extensive but little studied commercial (and ultimately cultural) linkages between the two Germanies, and acute tensions over trade in Polish–East German relations at that time, which the communist officials were eager to hide.Footnote 35 What mattered more than Cold War ideological divisions were economic relations that stimulated competition within the two blocs, while enabling a return to the centuries-old pattern of trade between the advanced West and underdeveloped East.Footnote 36
The black market offered more immediate business opportunities and smugglers saw Poznań as a chance to make extra cash. In a typical example, on 11 June 1957, the security police reported that ‘individuals arriving from abroad . . . bring with them serious amounts of merchandise for trade. So far contraband of sizeable quantities of razors, nylon stockings, silver automatic pencils, stones for lighters and lighters, nine rings, three gold watches, two knitting machines, etc’. In their turn, Westerners, ‘and especially Germans’, purchased on the black market dollars, other hard currencies and gold, as well as diamonds and antiques.Footnote 37 Poles used hard currency to purchase contraband goods, much to the dismay of the authorities, who resented the funnelling of the precious resource abroad.Footnote 38 Illegal economic opportunities beckoned to Polish citizens who acted as intermediaries between foreigners and Polish officials, or who controlled the flow of goods as customs officers.Footnote 39 Some Western entrepreneurs tried bribing Polish officials directly, often at the fair.Footnote 40 Poznań was where Western contraband connected with corruption on the Polish side. Michael Kwass has shown how contraband developed in response to global, national and local forces in eighteenth-century France, highlighting the illegal and often violent onset of Western consumer modernity.Footnote 41 Poznań underscores how these three forces continued to converge, defying formal borders and undermining political regimes whose stability rested on control over hard currency and distribution of consumer goods.
Sex and Romance: Poznań as a Place of Pleasure
Poznań provided opportunities for romantic and sexual pursuits. A tightly gendered space, the fair resembled its Western counterparts: unlike in the Soviet Union, where women worked, in Poznań, men largely took care of business while most women decorated the stands. In their own way, therefore, gender relations dissolved the binaries of the Cold War.Footnote 42 The Polish authorities encouraged this understanding of the event by alluding to the romantic opportunities in Poznań. Thus, a 1959 English-language promotional video, replete with images of automobiles, construction hardware, cigarettes and Krakus hams, also featured up-skirt views of ‘Maria’, the Polish woman who climbs atop a combine tractor as she shows a Western gentleman around the fair. The narrator tells us that he comes to Poznań for two reasons: first, he wanted ‘to see the beautiful city of old historic traditions and visit the famous international fair, pulsating with life, crowded with people from all parts of the world’; second, to see Maria.Footnote 43 At Poznań, Poland's powerful men winked at their Western counterparts: the fair was about business, but it could be about pleasure as well.
‘The Westerner came to Eastern Europe, she could not go to him, and that was freedom too, freedom from reciprocity’, observed Dubravka Ugrešić, adding that ‘Eastern Europe was always there, waiting for him, like a harem captive.’Footnote 44 To Poznań, Western men brought the allure of the imaginary West, exoticism, mystery, hard currency and the freedom to come and go, recreating certain asymmetries that characterised colonial relationships.Footnote 45 They met Polish women through families that provided lodging, through work at the fair, or Polish or foreign contacts. For friendship and more, Poznań offered opportunities galore. Westerners sought out attractive Polish women to accompany them as lovers, prostitutes, teachers and networking agents.Footnote 46 In 1957, one such example was ‘Stefania I, who was employed by Germans whom she'd met at the fair the year before’, and who accompanied several Germans to Katowice with the alleged goal of establishing trade links and, upon their request, introduced them to the director of the Polish National Bank . . . . ‘Said Stefania had “widespread contacts among American and FRG exhibitors, for whom she organizes parties at home”; in exchange, she received from the Germans a gold watch and 500 marks, among other things.’Footnote 47
Some Polish women looked for serious relationships, though. At Poznań, they were looking for a dashing prince who would be both wealthy and charming. As one woman revealed in her 1957 letter to a confidante in Wrocław: ‘We have Swiss guests, they came to the fair. So far there's one gentlemen, our good acquaintance. I live in great friendship with him, we go together everywhere. He is a representative of Swiss watch [companies] . . . he is showering me with presents, is taking me everywhere for dinner, coffee, etc. The guy is loaded’, she wrote, adding that he had invited her to Switzerland and a vacation in Sopot, a resort town on the Baltic sea.Footnote 48 That same year, another woman, Irena, mused about a ‘handsome’, ‘sweet’ and ‘loaded’ French guy from Orleans, who took her address and ‘promised to send packages’.Footnote 49
Polish women shaped the relationships with Westerners towards their own objectives, as women in Western colonies did.Footnote 50 They also formulated their goals in response to the real and imagined opportunities that Western men offered them. Power asymmetries came into relief when women stayed in Poznań, while the men had the freedom to go back to the West. This was the case when Ryszarda T. fell for an employee of the US pavilion in 1959, who then tried to get rid of her.Footnote 51 Liaisons between Westerners and Polish women inflected gender relations between Polish women and Polish men, as in 1957, when West Germans came to restaurants with Polish females, drank alcohol and ‘arrogantly talk[ed] down to and laugh[ed] at the Polish population’.Footnote 52 Historically, sex often complicated imperial relationships defined by racial hierarchies.Footnote 53 At Poznań, it redefined the binaries of the Cold War. The Polish state regularly made use of sex to spy on the foreign guests. Yet most foreigners were rarely aware that they were subjects of police surveillance as they pursued their courtships, friendships and affairs. The communists technically recouped power and agency in this area, perhaps more so than in any other in their quest to challenge the West. But they thus also reaffirmed the notion of local women as just another raw resource easily available to Western men, playing on Westerners’ longstanding assumptions about the non-Western world.Footnote 54
Posen-Poznań as an Imperial Periphery
The fact that the Poznań region lived an afterlife of the German imperial periphery further complicated Cold War contrasts and affected longstanding power relationships. The Poznań fair itself dated back to the 1911 East German Exhibition in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule.Footnote 55 Its chief goals were to show the superiority of the achievements of the Prussian economy in the empire's hinterlands and also to demonstrate that Prussian political power in the ethnically Polish lands was alive and well – thus creating a positive image of the area to potential settlers, who were reluctant to move to these remote, economically underdeveloped and still very Polish lands. In the German imaginary, the Polish lands constituted a ‘wild East’, and theories of race and conquest connected Germany's eastward expansion to its imperial projects in Southwest Africa.Footnote 56 Indeed, visitors to the 1911 exhibition could admire an African village, a typical feature of such events at that time, but one that also reinforced the place of Poles in German global plans and hierarchies.Footnote 57 To assert dominance, organisers also set up a miniature copy of the city's old town fashioned in the German style.Footnote 58 Between the wars, Poland depended on trade with Germany but not vice versa, as Germans shunned the lands they considered barbarous and commercially hopeless.Footnote 59 During the Second World War, the Nazis renamed Poznań ‘Posen’ and incorporated it into the Reich, while transforming the fairgrounds into an aircraft factory. But, in the 1950s, West Germany was becoming Poland's chief trade partner and a preeminent Western presence at the fair. History and memory conspired in a way that, even to those Germans who had never been to Poland, a business trip to Poznań was like a return – one often fraught with memories and expectations of privilege.
During the fairs, memories of the recent war regularly intervened. When a foreman of a West German fitting crew hit a Polish employee in the face in 1957, other West German company reps pounced on him: ‘you could hit under Hitler, but not now’, they said, adding: ‘and especially not abroad’.Footnote 60 Former Nazis participated in West German institutions and some came to do business at the Poznań fair. ‘If that idiot Hitler had me, he wouldn't have lost the war, and German tanks wouldn't have halted on their way to Moscow due to lack of fuel’, said one of them in 1957, according to a secret police report.Footnote 61 Nazis or not, the optics were suggestive as other Westerners also found West Germans publicly overbearing, entitled and rude.Footnote 62 In one incident in 1959, security police reported that four ‘intoxicated’ West Germans dining out provoked the restaurant's personnel by addressing them with the fraught expression ‘you Pole’ (Nazis had used it as an insult). Startled, some Polish guests remarked that, ‘the behavior of these Germans resembles the period of the occupation’.Footnote 63 East Germans, including ‘many SED members’, expressed similar contempt during their visits to Poznań, revealing how much the enduring historical trends trumped present political imperatives.Footnote 64 But Westerners were largely the ones spending hard cash in hotels and restaurants and, in their private letters, even those Poznań residents who enthused about the fair complained about being excluded, just like during the war. As one woman wrote in 1958: ‘Imagine that in the city in which you live, of which you are an integral part, during the fair is not for you . . . Poznań, during the fair, is only for foreigners. The best restaurants, hotels [and] many other things are only for foreign guests.’ Most of them were German, she noted, so ‘it resembles the era of the occupation, when all the best things were “Nur für Deutsche [for Germans only]”.’ She added that visitors from other parts of Poland might not notice this, but Poznanians do, which is why, during the fair, ‘we often go out of town’.Footnote 65
Another friction resulted from West Germany's refusal, before 1970, to recognise Poland's western frontiers agreed upon by the great powers after the war. Of all nationalities, West Germans most often travelled out of town, usually to inspect their lost land and property.Footnote 66 In 1957, a certain Freimann bragged that, before 1939, he used to own a factory of mining lamps in Katowice and was hoping to get reparations for it.Footnote 67 Others travelled around Poland and requested that locals sign petitions for former German property owners to return.Footnote 68 Such activities worried the Polish authorities, especially since some West German exhibitors openly flaunted at the Poznań fair maps that showed Polish territories to be part of Germany.Footnote 69
These Polish–German tensions at the fair may seem unsurprising in the war's aftermath. But recent memories and Polish propaganda notwithstanding, mutual antagonisms were subsiding within the Polish and West German societies. In the 1950s and 1960s, prominent Polish intellectuals travelled to West Germany and shared their good impressions publicly upon coming back. They talked of a society in transition in which ‘the older generation were suppressing their memories of the Hitler period’, while ‘amongst the young people serious questions were being asked and there was even a sense of guilt’.Footnote 70 Ambiguities also defined the Polish–German relationship locally. The brutalities of war and colonisation made a lasting imprint on the memories of Poznań residents. But many Poznanians also contrasted favourably the periods of German rule and their own work ethic that developed in response to Prussian colonialism, with the chaos that accompanied the Soviet liberation of the region and with Warsaw's perceived disorganised and inefficient economic management. Well into the twentieth century, Poznań's robust regional identity struck and surprised outsiders with the contradictory mixture of Germanophilia and Germanophobia, patriotism and anti-Warsaw sentiment.Footnote 71 The farmers at the state farm near Poznań eagerly obliged when asked in 1957 to sign a petition for the return of German owners, preferring these fraught interethnic relations to the management style of Polish communists.Footnote 72 At the fair, these historical contradictions continued to shape the relationships between the First and Second Worlds.
Poznań as a Frontier of Modernity
Most broadly, Poznań channelled longstanding contestations over the form and meaning of modernity – the cultural, political, economic and technological changes that once emanated from Europe's northwest but were now reshaping the capitalist and socialist worlds at varied paces, in different forms and through fraught exchanges. ‘The communist experiment’, historian Ivan Berend wrote, ‘was part of a twentieth-century rebellion of the unsuccessful peripheries, which were humiliated by economic backwardness and the increasing gap which separated them from the advanced Western core’.Footnote 73 As business and propaganda events, the East European trade fairs such as the one in Poznań became important elements in the historically underdeveloped region's challenge to the West. Poland had an additional stake in the fair because it allowed local and central authorities to reinvent Poland's identity around business and trade, and away from the Romantic ethos of armed struggle and resistance, which defined the country for many people at home and abroad.Footnote 74
At Poznań, Westerners responded to this challenge in several ways. Leftist journalists predictably delighted in the offerings of the socialist countries, but many others remained underwhelmed by their discoveries. In 1955, Jack Osbourn described to the Foreign Office his experience of eating out. ‘In restaurants . . .’, he noted with dry humour, ‘prices were high, quality of meat good, fresh vegetables almost non-existent, potatoes were served in vast quantities, bread was of poor quality, pepper was rare, salt was crude, service was hopeless.’Footnote 75 Westerners generally defined the socialist Second World by the absences of features typical of market-based, consumer economies, mainly the availability of choice.
Quality and originality mattered. And compliments implied contrasts, as those the French often issued in regard to Polish textile displays or pavilions, which ‘easily withstood comparisons’ with the Western ones, and about East European effort, progress, and taste.Footnote 76 In 1959, the French found the Czechoslovak displays of machinery, automobiles, consumer goods (fabrics, glassware, etc. . . ) ‘incontestably the most successful’; they gave ‘the impression of a higher technological level that one didn't always find on the exhibits of other countries from the Eastern Bloc’.Footnote 77 Czechoslovakia always impressed with superior technology and attractive designs, while East Germany showcased top-notch photographic equipment and precision tools.Footnote 78 Immediately after the war, the USSR intrigued even the sceptical observers with their grand-scale steel machinery on display. But, by the mid-1950s, perhaps because Western economic recovery generated better products, in the eyes of Osbourn and others, Soviet exhibits were losing their allure.Footnote 79 Overarching chasms between capitalism and socialism mattered in these evaluations. What counted just as much, however, were the differences between the countries within the socialist and capitalist blocs. Revealing contrasts characterized the evaluations of Western observers: while US reports focus on technological advancement of exhibits and their entertainment value, the French and British ones stand out in their concern about the aesthetics of design and display. The conservative British politician John Tilney may have voiced exceptional praise of the Soviet pavilion, but his criteria confirm the trend: he liked its ‘quiet taste . . . with its furs, caviar, smoked salmon (he said it looked like a selection of the best that Harrods and Fortnum & Mason could offer)’.Footnote 80 These cultural differences between West European and US observers also failed to align with the strictly ideological divisions of the Cold War.
These immersive discussions at Poznań about modernity and backwardness resonated strongly with centuries-long conversations about global cultural hierarchies and power relations between East and West. Larry Wolff has argued that the eighteenth-century Western philosophes and socialites ‘invented’ Eastern Europe through their writings, finding significance in the cultural differences and economic disparities between the continent's East and West. They re-forged their impressions, judgments and generalisations into a deceptively stable cultural construct of ‘Eastern Europe’, a place that was economically backward and culturally semi-barbaric, poor and passive, dirty and derivative, confusing and coarse. In doing so, they reified the idea of the superior, cultured ‘West’ while simultaneously claiming the mandate to shape East European affairs.Footnote 81 Wendy Bracewell further showed that East European writers actively adopted these Western discourses in order to improve their own societies through criticism. East Europeans co-defined ‘the limits of Europe’ to pursue their own ends, and they did so on West European terms because ‘the alternative to an imitative Occidentalism could only with difficulty involve any sort of rejection of Europe as such’. As Bracewell noted, ‘geography implied that these were European societies; it followed that they should be judged by European norms’, even as these norms derived from experiences of a small fragment of European society.Footnote 82 Wolff and Bracewell's insights can help to situate the encounters at Poznań in three ways. They enable us to see the Cold War as a moment in longstanding, more fraught exchanges between East and West. They underscore the enduring economic and cultural dilemmas within Polish society. And they also bring out the dual process of cognition and construction, on which Westerners relied in co-creating the socialist Second World. Jack Osbourn's comments to his government were filled with disdain about the country he visited and thus amplified the longstanding image of Eastern Europe as different from the West. But to the extent that communist restaurants served lousy food, his experience of East European backwardness was real.
In practice, these cognitive and constructive processes were entwined. In their 1958 letters home intercepted by the Polish security police, Westerners tended to ‘state that life is very expensive in Poland, that salaries are very low, that the quality of goods is low and conditions are primitive. They talk about the striking alcoholism’, informed one police report.Footnote 83 A letter to the United States described Poznań as a city that's ‘big but unattractive’; one that ‘subsists, rather than lives, and the same is true of the people’. Others expressed pity: based on conversations with ‘dozens of Poles’, one author found them despondent, as ‘first the Germans tried to oppress them, and now the Russians are leading them to their slow death. They say that they don't know freedom, and it is just so.’Footnote 84 In 1957, a security police informant reported that ‘“foreign exhibitors . . . state that we are poorly dressed and live modestly”’, though he also added that ‘they praise the weaving machines and machine tools.’Footnote 85 Such glimpses of personal correspondence illuminate what Westerners saw in Poland at the time. But they also suggest how Poznań helped Westerners shape the understanding of themselves. In Ugrešić 's words, Eastern Europe ‘confirmed the Westerner's conviction that he lived in a better world’.Footnote 86
The US Pavilion and the Pushback of the Frontier
US participants in the fair generally saw themselves as purveyors of freedom and fun, shaping their prestige shows to contrast with the ‘lifeless rows of machine tools and tractors exhibited by other countries’.Footnote 87 But the cultural emphasis of US shows also opened up a Pandora's box of awkwardness, causing frictions with Poles that other countries could avoid. The United States made its East European premiere in Poznań in 1957. City residents watched Buckminster Fuller's rising geodesic dome with anticipation. It rose quickly in comparison with the sluggish construction tempo of the Soviet pavilion. Structurally based on the first geodesic domes, it consisted of a triangulated plastic frame covered with cotton fabric and represented the cutting edge of architectural modernism.Footnote 88 It has been argued that Western institutions such as museums, panoramas and expositions ‘ordered knowledge’ and ‘organized citizenry’ through arrangements of visual displays.Footnote 89 For some, Fuller's dome epitomised these functions perfectly. Admired earlier at the 1956 Kabul fair and in Milan, it is said to have represented America's ‘declaration of sovereignty’ and might, in which audiences acted as ‘witnesses whose presence was just as essential to a display of power’.Footnote 90 Fuller's dome, argued Andrew James Wulf, had the power to seduce foreign visitors because it could be ‘understood both as a structural and cultural marvel’ and ‘another structural descendant of the great Crystal Palace’.Footnote 91 Although East German officials dismissed the US pavilion as ‘the circus tent’, the dome captivated the Poles’ imagination with its modern looks, further amplified by the anticipatory atmosphere of novelty, colour and exoticism that surrounded the preparations for the fair.Footnote 92 In his letter sent to someone out of town, ‘W.Z.’ described the US pavilion as an embodiment of the new possibilities of the future, unlike the Soviet hall, ‘built with enormous cost and opulence’. But today, he added, ‘these no longer define modernity’.Footnote 93
The US exhibitors expected to impress Polish visitors, especially anticipating the textiles to be a hit. ‘U.S. Fashions Go to Poland for Exhibit: Spring Tints Are Muted in Flowering Cottons’, ran The New York Times headline on 5 April 1957. The author, Nan Robertson, predicted optimistically that ‘This spring, even the Poles may be saying, “I can get it for less at Ohrbach's”’, referring to the inexpensive garment chain, which was chosen as ‘the average American store’ to deliver all the fashion items for the US pavilion that year.Footnote 94 Such hopes hinged on Americans’ knowledge of notoriously expensive clothing in Poland coupled with confidence in the power of Ohrbach's prices, and perhaps US marketing prowess as well. ‘We don't want to give them glamour. We want to show them practical, attractive fashions at down-to-earth prices’, reported the chain's spokesman in the New York Times.Footnote 95 The Americans banked especially on synthetics. The company's stylist said that ‘we take these “miracle fabrics” for granted here, but most Poles would consider them truly miraculous.’Footnote 96 The Department of Commerce is said to have opted for inexpensive garments in order to differentiate the Americans from the Soviets, who were expected to be showing furs.Footnote 97 Ohrbach's vowed to save Poles from socialism with affordability and choice. But, to many Poles, the company's language and its offerings also broadcast assumptions about poverty, class and taste. In so doing, it raised uncomfortable questions about Poland's peripheral place in the world, which long preceded the Cold War.
Based on 1950s US periodicals, scholars have argued that the show was a great success.Footnote 98 But Polish secret police reports reveal that, once inside Fuller's dome, many Poles felt profoundly let down. While crowds stormed the building when it opened (images that dominated the US coverage of the event), many found the exhibits not to their taste. Zygfryd W. wrote from Poznań to Stefania W. in the village of Pyzdry: ‘they made so much noise about the American pavilion, and I went there and saw that the Polish one is better and richer, and the prettiest and richest one is the Soviet one.’Footnote 99 Another visitor thought Polish exhibits were the best: ‘The famed American pavilion is a huge letdown. There's nothing in there. Our Polish one is the prettiest one, America wouldn't be ashamed of such beautiful fabrics.’Footnote 100 The pavilion, he added, ‘is distinctly propagandistic, as opposed to commercial in nature, which is evidenced by distributing special brochures about life in the USA’.Footnote 101 And from a letter to Gdynia: ‘US showed only ugly stuff: ugly fabrics and faux jewelry. I was cursing as I was trying to get in, because there was a crowd of people who expect miracles, but it's an exhibition for Africans [dla murzynów].’Footnote 102 Others also used racialised language. ‘American pavilion was especially a flop. All visitors leave it with disappointed faces. Apparently they brought a few fabulously colourful chiffons, extremely tasteless, gaudy. As though for savage Africans [dzikich murzynów]. There was so much interest around the nylon pavilion, but except for the plastic roof, there was nothing interesting’, someone wrote.Footnote 103
There are several ways to read the crowd's critical reaction to the highly anticipated US show. It revealed American misreading of the Polish context, where the textile industry was strong. Designers carried the momentum of the interwar era by reinventing original patterns within the broadly understood official doctrine of ‘socialist realism’, while production also proved less dependent on regular factory retooling and reorganisation than other branches of industry.Footnote 104 Garments and fabrics were scarce, but women managed to dress well – for instance, by making their own clothes from private dressmakers who had obtained materials from relatives abroad. This, reported a UK Embassy official in 1961, made Polish women more elegant than in any other ‘satellite capital’.Footnote 105
Polish reactions further spoke to the US understanding of Poznań solely as a Cold War battleground, a frontier between the abundant West and poor, isolated East. Mary Nolan drew attention to the different ways in which US and European notions of modernity failed to mesh, juxtaposing the US ‘consumer republic’ grounded in ‘family-centered mass consumption and consumer choice’ with European (including East European) ‘“consumer citizenship” [that] involved not only choice but state regulation and extensive state social benefits’. These separate transatlantic trajectories translated into contrasting conditions of domesticity, tastes and approaches to usage of consumer goods, and often rejections and re-appropriations of American products in Europe. As a result, Nolan noted, ‘everyday modernity was national and European more than Americanized’, while ‘intra-European circuits were more important than transatlantic ones.’Footnote 106 At Poznań, US exhibitors assumed that the consumer goods on display would dazzle the local visitors because they were diverse and affordable. But, reaching over the iron curtain for the first time, Americans downplayed the linkages between the shared European context of Polish preferences and tastes.
The indignant, racialised language of the Polish fairgoers revealed their longstanding national complex of inhabitants of the Western periphery, which would become manifest at other international shows.Footnote 107 At Poznań in 1962, an exasperated Polish visitor expressed admiration for the US pavilion, but also noted: ‘It's a pity only that we here must look at all this as “white slaves”.’Footnote 108 As in other precarious European states, elites in Poland embraced whiteness in subtle, often appealing, ways through ethnography or adventure novels for teenagers and even children's comic books, as a way of resolving potential ambiguities about Poland's place in the world. Social anthropologist Ulla Vuorela called this ‘complicity’ a process whereby semi-peripheral communities try to approach the centre by promoting hegemonic discourses.Footnote 109 Historically, whiteness mitigated the stigma of Poland's marginality vis-à-vis the developed world and helped to reaffirm a national presence in the absence of a formal state. A short-lived Polish overseas colonies project developed between the wars.Footnote 110 At Poznań, falling back on whiteness in response to the American exhibit filled with inexpensive and flashy goods echoed these complexes and compensatory mechanisms. Throughout the Soviet bloc, racism predated state socialism that stressed solidarity with the formerly colonised. Officially at odds, both coexisted after 1945, reflecting longer, unique patterns of the countries’ national and imperial histories, and the newfound need to maintain difference in newly reconfigured power relationships.Footnote 111
US exhibitors objectified the visitors in a way that helped to activate the deep-seated Polish insecurities. In a letter written in 1957, the author recounted how ‘the American pavilion is besieged (even though there's nothing special inside besides cars)’, noting that:
Americans use that interest in a particular way, namely they close the door, then they let a small crowd inside, and people storm inside with the clanking of the windows. [The Americans] film the crowd, and then they distribute photos, which creates an even greater curiosity, but for a self-respected person these are distasteful things.Footnote 112
‘To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed’, wrote Susan Sontag in her classic essay On Photography. ‘It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and therefore, like power’.Footnote 113 Consistently with the model that Mary Nolan aptly characterised as ‘America came, Western Europe succumbed, and Eastern Europe envied’, the US exhibitors appropriated those images, inaccurately depicting Polish visitors as uncritical recipients of US modernity.Footnote 114
Some Poles felt further humiliated by being co-opted into a show that involved US giveaways of frozen potato pancakes. One witness wrote to his family in the countryside: ‘The Polish boys who worked there went on telling people “aren't you ashamed, don't you have potatoes in Poland, this stuff isn't good at all”.’Footnote 115 Potato pancakes, Poland's traditional meal, were being promoted in a frozen form at a time when only 0.6 per cent of all Poles owned a fridge.Footnote 116 (Barbara Sampson, a home economist who distributed individual frozen peas to perplexed onlookers in Poznań, realised as much after she visited some homes: ‘refrigerators are as rare in Poznan as they are at the South Pole’, she said.)Footnote 117 Westerners, mostly Americans and West Germans, often staged such scenes, sometimes driving around Poland and distributing food to people and filming them.Footnote 118 Clearly, local responses to the US shows were diverse and unpredictable, but US editors chose the images to suggest that the public unanimously admired the vision of capitalist America, often with captions such as: ‘Starved for consumer goods, the visitors often tried to buy the displays.’Footnote 119 Differences between East and West existed but, as they were not always clear or self-explanatory, they needed to be regularly amplified and maintained.
To compare these interactions to racially charged, violent encounters in the imperial colonies would be to exaggerate. Yet there were certain resonances about the extent to which nativism and imperialism, having shaped the US culture of exhibitions and world fairs, also informed the practices at Poznań and throughout the communist world.Footnote 120 Ann Stoler usefully problematised power and citizenship as a dynamic spectrum of possibilities often negotiated on the micro-level, rather than defined around legal boundaries. She saw ‘imperial formations’ to be informal devices of domination, ‘graded forms of sovereignty’ and ‘sliding and contested scales of differential rights’.Footnote 121 The US trade fair project aimed primarily to befriend East Europeans and promote US business and political interests, and it sometimes succeeded. But to the extent it also held a promise of participation in a Western version of modernity, it proved to be more ambiguous because it packaged emancipatory ideals with practices that assigned roles and imposed hierarchies that reminded many visitors about Poland's perpetual failure to leave the Western periphery.
Conclusion
The Cold War has shaped the Western imaginary so much that it is difficult to think about the second half of the twentieth century without falling back on the global conflict between the superpowers as the default trope. But the story of the Poznań fair highlights the extent to which the Cold War served as a backdrop to even more enduring contestations over power and privilege between groups of Westerners and sections of the Polish society under socialism. The iron curtain existed, but the fair exposed cultural boundaries between the First and Second Worlds that were simultaneously less stable and more layered than those staked out by the Cold War. Poznań represented a resource, a place where Western men could make profits and meet women away from home. It was an echo chamber of Poland's past, entangled in the histories of Soviet expansionism, German imperialism, Western colonialism and Polish exceptionalism. Thinking about Poznań as a complex frontier brings out these many faces of Poland. Two historians argued recently that ‘the revolutions of 1989 came to mean different things in different settings: they were always refracted through the prism of long-term trends, local conditions, and political concerns.’Footnote 122 Poznań shows how centuries-long processes shaped the Cold War, and also how some mid-century tensions were hardly about the Cold War at all.
The fair can be understood as part of Eastern Europe's broader challenge to the West, designed to contest the country's peripheral position in the world. In Poland, the fair helped reframe Polish national identity around pragmatic ideals such as good organisation, efficiency and hard work. The Western response to this double challenge was far more ambiguous than the strictly political story we know so well. Westerners came to Poland with diverse agendas and attitudes. Most wanted to do business, take care of personal affairs or genuinely empower Polish society through their clandestine support for anti-communism. Yet the way in which some of them also engaged with the world behind the Iron Curtain – how they approached, understood, interacted with and described it to the audiences back home – relied on longstanding assumptions about global power asymmetries, hierarchies and notions about what Eastern Europe was or should be. In that sense, these Westerners re-invented Eastern Europe, to borrow from Larry Wolff, but did so within the conventions of mid-century modernity. Recent scholarship has emphasised how the authorities behind the ‘iron curtain’ used political, economic, scientific and cultural institutions to create the ‘socialist Second World’. Its unique modes of governance, blueprints of economic development, cycles of industrial production and cultural exchange, it is suggested, evolved into a distinct civilisation shaped by alternative globalising trends.Footnote 123 This important, fascinating story is incomplete unless we also recognise that Westerners co-created the socialist Second World by defining it around absences of certain freedoms, practices, technologies and possibilities. Many Westerners, against the grain of emancipatory rhetoric, helped redefine the Second World around the notion of second-class citizenship. This is not to say that most Westerners meant ill in some way. But to the extent that Poland gave them access to markets, women and flattering visions of self and self-redemption, it gave them certain freedoms that were denied to them at home.
If these contradictions are hard to reconcile, it is perhaps because we have yet to address fully the longer histories that connected the different local contexts and international realities in the second half of the twentieth century. The Cold War continues to be understood as a clash between distinct versions of modernity; reflective of this assumption are discussions about the ‘convergence’ between the two systems in the context of exhibitions and fairs.Footnote 124 But what if we're looking for a coherence that simply isn't there? Historian Paul Kramer observed that Western colonial empires and fairs – and expositions that represented them – were less coordinated and more contradictory than has been assumed.Footnote 125 Western visitors behind the ‘iron curtain’ likewise followed multiple impulses and the promise of material gain, privilege and pleasure mattered as much as, if not more than, the political and ideological imperatives of the Cold War.Footnote 126 As agents of capitalism and democracy at Poznań, they challenged Poland's communist dictatorship. But these Westerners also eagerly took advantage of centuries-long power asymmetries between the First and Second World, enabling practices and narratives that naturalised these asymmetries, effectively rekindling the resentments that had shaped the emancipatory visions of socialism in the first place.
Acknowledgments
The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation generously funded the research for this article in 2017–19. The article slowly matured thanks to constructive feedback from friends and colleagues at the following events: the Dallas Area Social History network meeting in late 2018, a seminar at the Imre Kertész Kolleg, the University of Jena in 2019 and Portland State University's History Colloquium in 2020. I am especially grateful to Alexis McCrossen, Scott Palmer, Paul Conrad, Jochen Böchler, Paweł Machcewicz, ChiaYin Hsu, Joseph Bohling, Evguenia Davidova, Bill Comer, Sandra Freels and Friedrich Schuler for really helpful comments and suggestions, as well as to the journal's editors and two anonymous peer reviewers for constructive feedback.
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