Party like it’s 1958

Since the tour ended, I’ve spent a total of one whole weekend in Brussels. So last weekend I decided to get a better idea of what this place is about. As I mentioned before, I spent Saturday at the library and hanging with the guys. But on Sunday, we took a trip to 1958. That’s right, you read correctly, 1958. We went to see the Atomium, a 335 foot steel sculpture of a molecule created for the World Expo when it was held in Brussels in 1958. It is located a bit far out, but still on the subway—the second last stop on the west side—and when the car came out of the tunnel and we got a glimpse of it, there was an audible gasp in the car. It was hilarious. I don’t want to sound as if I’m above it all, because I’m not. I was one of the people who gasped.

The Atomium is one of those tourist traps that actually lives up to its reputation. Yes, the Manneken-Pis was good, but he’s just a kid peeing. There’s nothing to it: just a statue. The Atomium is a statue and so much more. It’s a museum and a restaurant (the top ball is a restaurant and there’s a café in one of the other balls).

We hit the museum first. Each of the nine “balls” was a room in the museum showcasing the Expo. The theme of Expo ‘58 was technology and science and the Atomium represents that theme quite nicely. The Atomium is an iron molecule, further underling the push toward technological advancement and the future--iron being a symbol of industrial strength. The museum pointed out (quite rightly) that it's ironic that there was such focus on the greatness of science and technology, completely ignoring the fact that thirteen years earlier, science had brought the world the atomic bomb and chemical warfare. But 1958 was supposed to erase all of this and so the Expo focused on science's more positive developments.


The ’58 Expo was the first world exhibition after World War II and therefore was dominated by Cold War tensions. The two biggest pavilions were those belonging to the USA and USSR. In 1958, the two countries were in the height of the Cold War and from what I read, that dynamic was carried into the Expo most aptly illustrated by the fact that the two pavilions were across from each other.


Then there was the German pavilion. According to the museum, after WWII, the German government was reluctant to “celebrate German accomplishments” and so they focused on making the German pavilion as “average” as possible. Now, I understand the reasoning for this (German war guilt and the Holocaust), but it's a bit sad. Thirteen years after WWII and Germany hadn’t begun to come to terms with the legacy of the war—a process which many say still plagues Germans to this day.

What was really interesting was to learn about what was going on in Belgium at the time. The Expo coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the annexation of the Belgian Congo. If you know anything about the history of colonialism, Africa or the Congo (and I’m by no means an expert), you know there isn't anything to celebrate. The Belgians were particularly brutal to the Congolese: enslaving them to work in the rubber industry, cutting off limbs when production was not proceeding speedily enough, diamond excavation, etc (read the Poisonwood Bible for other atrocities). It wasn’t good. Anyway, for Belgians, the Congo was a symbol of Belgium’s colonial might, and so they tried to showcase the Congolese in a positive light, hoping it would reflect well on them. At the same time, the exhibit tells how for many Congolese, the trip to Belgium showed them how much better the lives of Belgians were than their own and helped to drive home the injustice of their own situations. So just as the Belgians were celebrating "the taming of Africa," the Congolese were attempting to shed their colonial overlords.


That was it for the museum, but next was the Exhibition of Temporary Happiness (its real name). It was a small building made out of Jupiler beer crates (I'm not making this up). By far the best was the movie about the 58 Expo and how recently Expos have had an environmental theme.

Another great part of the Exhibition was the History Makers section, which were little cubbies with audio and transcriptions of famous speeches: JFK’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech, Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech, Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream where the big ones. But there was also Mao Ze Dong, Albert Camus' Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Robert Schuman’s EU speech (just to throw in some EU content) and a speech by Patrice Lumumba (leader of the Congo’s independence movement). This last speech was beautiful. As a history student, this was my favourite part. As a result I spent about half an hour curled in the cubbies listening or reading the speeches.


All in all, I experienced some temporary happiness here. Especially when we were the only ones left in the exhibit and we went outside to find a random bottle statue. We were feeling pretty silly as the following photos illustrate.