Mr. Rosenberg’s dissertation Exhibiting Sovereignty: Modern Art and the State in Postwar West Germany addresses the artistic and social climate that contributed to West Germany’s transition from occupied territory, reeling from the traumas of its recent past, to sovereign nation, and the ways in which Documenta contributed to the liberal-democratic, sometimes historically-opposed values that undergirded the fledgling state and the new West German citizen. Documenta exemplifies a modern exhibition format—the large-scale perennial mega-exhibition—that, in its recurrence, is both institution and event and therefore becomes a hybrid entity within modern societies: it is simultaneously transitory and stable and uniquely involved in the process of national identity building through location, national self-display and the international attention it garners.