West German President Heinrich Lübke’s 1963 trip to Indonesia was the first official visit of a Western head of state to the island nation. An official German photograph shows him paying his respects in a war heroes’ cemetery. This chapter explores the political significance of the ceremonial and deconstructs this photograph. The chapter is a thick description of this state visit as an interaction between West Germany and Indonesia at the time of decolonisation. The chapter departs from the realist paradigm of the history of diplomacy and interprets the visit in terms of the cultural history of diplomacy. Cultural aspects of diplomacy create political meaning and shape political outcomes. Style and substance of diplomatic encounters mutually condition each other. These insights provide the basis for a cultural history of global diplomacy, one that helps us break down boundaries between binary categories such as East and West, while at the same time displaying an awareness of global asymmetries.

Why should we take visual sources more seriously in our study of global diplomacy? The innovative approach presented in this volume involves using a wide range of visual sources, such as photographs, paintings, films, and material culture, to reveal how these sources can help to illuminate symbolic aspects of diplomacy that textual sources alone may not be able to do. Visual sources can reveal hidden stories and, importantly, help to de-centre the prevailing preconceptions about the nature of global diplomacy and its power dynamics. The unravelling of symbolisms can add cultural depth to the staging of global diplomacy. The approach introduces a host of diplomatic actors often neglected by scholars, including Southeast Asian leaders, female personalities, and crowds of onlookers. Each chapter, which includes examples of intra-Asia diplomacy as well as Asian diplomacy with Western societies, demonstrates the critical role played by visual sources to the field of diplomatic culture.