Kassel 70 years ago. It is July 14, 1955, a warm Thursday. The final preparations are underway at the Fridericianum. As the sun is already low in the sky, the last transport from the European art capital Paris rolls in. A so-called Culemeyer - a special Bundesbahn vehicle for the road transportation of railroad wagons and heavy loads - transports the freight from the main railway station directly to the landing in front of the portico of the Museum Fridericianum. The assembly team unloads the delivery in a race against a gathering cloud front. Inside the provisionally renovated exhibition building, an exhibition had been created in the previous days from loans from Germany and abroad that would go on to write art history: the first documenta.
 

The time remaining until the opening is short: On July 15 at 5 p.m., Mayor Lauritz Lauritzen (SPD) and the supporting organization “Abendländische Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts e.V.” (“Western Art of the XXth Century”) led by Arnold Bode as well as representatives from the worlds of culture and politics have invited guests to a cocktail reception at the Schlosshotel Wilhelmshöhe. This will be followed by a preview with the lenders and artists. By then, all paintings must be hanging on their nails and all sculptures must be placed on their designated plinths.

The official opening of the exhibition will take place the following morning, on Saturday, July 16, at 11 am. Hesse's Minister of Culture Arno Hennig (SPD) will give the keynote speech. He will speak to an audience filled to capacity in the Fridericianum's Painting Hall. The “backdrop” is Fritz Winter's six-metre-wide “Composition against Blue and Yellow” (1955), which has been back in Kassel since 2022 as a collection piece of the Neue Galerie.

It is also worth noting who is not among those present in Kassel this morning: the most well-known and high-ranking political representatives on the guest list. Vice-Chancellor Franz Blücher (FDP), Foreign Minister Heinrich von Brentano (CDU), Interior Minister Gerhard Schröder (CDU) and Federal Minister Jakob Kaiser (CDU) from the Ministry for All-German Affairs withdrew their participation at short notice in order to pass the controversial Volunteer Act in the Bonn Bundestag - two months after the Federal Republic's accession to NATO - and thus decide on the re-establishment of the Bundeswehr. The patron of the exhibition, Federal President Theodor Heuss (FDP), made up for his documenta tour ten days later.
 

The historical and political momentum of the summer of 1955 was a special one. And nowhere was the democratic spirit of urban, cultural and social reconstruction in all its political interdependencies more clearly manifested than in the interplay between documenta and the garden show in the middle of the war-destroyed and newly emerging city in the so-called “Zonenrandgebiet”. Between the floral attractions of the Karlsaue and the works of art in the Fridericianum, not only spaces for encounters and exchange were formed, but also the foundations for the new emergence of the public sphere. It was not for nothing that decades later the exhibition historian Walter Grasskamp pointedly described the first documenta (and its subsequent editions) as a “fragment of the cultural history of the Federal Republic of Germany”.

“This exhibition is the event of the year,” wrote art critic Will Grohmann in the Berlin Tagesspiegel a few days after the opening. Nothing like it had been seen since the 1927 “Internationale” in Dresden. However, Grohmann can hardly contain his astonishment at what he has seen and experienced: “As a Berliner, one wonders why little Kassel, of all places, can organize such an undertaking.”
 

By the end of the exhibition on 18 September, almost 135,000 visitors had streamed past the rows of ornamental palms into the Fridericianum and into the largest art show since 1945. Wafting around the smell of the freshly produced plastic curtains, the Heraklit panels and the concrete floor that had just been laid, the groundbreaking works of modernism were for most visitors accessible to the public for the first time (again) after the years of Nazi dictatorship and destruction.
 

An original quote from a 1955 report in the Frankfurter Hefte sums up the impressions of the time in a particularly poignant way:
 

"The word ‘documenta’ has been a buzzword these weeks. 'Have you been to Kassel? You must have seen it! The success of this exhibition was sensational. In a single day, a thousand catalogs were sold for 5 DM each. Sometimes the police had to close the building due to overcrowding. All estimates of the number of visitors were far exceeded. There was nothing of the aloofness of some art events, nothing museum-like, nothing of the noble boredom of certain educational events. Something happened inside the Fridericianum, something really happened..."