A consideration of the phenomenon of international exhibitions in the political and
cultural history of central-European powers as opposed to the models represented by the
London and Paris great exhibitions offers relevant insights into this topic. The Exposition
organized in Vienna in 1873 – the first in the German language area – should be studied
in the light of the strategic urgency which impelled the Habsburg Empire to fashion
or redefine a representation of its multinational formation, in the wake of the military
defeats it suffered on the French-Piedmont and Prussian fronts. As will become apparent
in the later Berlin exhibition of 1879, the Wiener Weltausstellung already makes clear its
desire to exhibit the network of global relations in which the central-European Empires
were also trying to gain prominence, despite the essential irrelevance of their extra-
European colonial enterprise, as compared to British and French imperialist ventures.The essay comprises a critical reassessment of the existing historiographies specifically
devoted to the Viennese Exposition (the most significant of which dates to 1989), to be
revised in the light of updated interpretive paradigms, and a further analysis which aims
at a first systematic taxonomy of the most significant literary and journalistic echoes of
this first central-European Weltausstellung. More specifically, the investigation will focus
on the hundreds of articles, correspondence and notes which appeared in the Triester
Zeitung, the principal newspaper in German in Habsburg Trieste. These textual sources
have not as yet received scholarly attention and they make it possible to investigate
the reception of the Exhibition within the geographical and cultural context of the
multilingual and multicultural port of Trieste which, despite its peripheral position, was,
nonetheless, of primary strategic importance to the central Austrian government.
