Postage Stamps completed (first round)
2700 postage stamps have been entered into the SPIN/ERNiE database to demonstrate the international proliferation of banal nationalism in the twentieth century. The stamps were selected for commemorating a personality also commemorated by a monument or on a banknote. The geographic visualization of the dataset shows how the iconography of these (European) figures proliferated far and wide across the world. The network visualization shows how the national canons of the various countries are tied together by certain transnational icons (Leonardo da Vinci, Marx, Charlemagne, Schiller) and by small countries with a large philatelic industry (Vatican, San Marino, Monaco). When tracing developments across time with the aid of the time-slide one can register how the coalescence of memory figures into national philatelic pantheons went hand in hand with the reticulation of these pantheons into a transnational network. The GDR played an important role as a conduit between German culture and the Communist world. The process starts c. 1925.