A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination 9780674037380

Citation preview

A

NATION OF FLIERS

Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

1992

A NATION OF FLIERS GERMAN AVIATION AND THE POPULAR IMAGINATION

PETER FRITZSCHE

Copyright © 1992 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress cataloging information is on last page of book.

For my parents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is impossible for me to look at this book without thinking of the collective efforts, private silences, and unexpected encouragements that shaped its completion. Karen Hewitt and Andy Markovits prompted me to turn funny ideas into grant proposals, and the generous support of the Wiener Library in Tel Aviv allowed me the time to read books and the intellectual companionship to sort out ideas. Saul Friedlander, Shulamit Volkov, George Mosse, Gordon Horowitz, Mario Sznajder, and Elisabeth took my ideas seriously and returned them much improved, I think. Support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Research Board and the Program for Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security at the University of Illinois enabled me to travel to Germany and conduct archival research in 1989 and 1990. Librarians and archivists helped me in all sorts of ways; my thanks to Herr Werner Bittner of Lufthansa's Firmenarchiv, Herr Buschmann of the Duisburger Stadtarchiv, Dr. Flamme of the Staatsarchiv in Hamburg, Manfred Sauter of Metallbau Zeppelin, Dr. Schneider of the Stadtarchiv in Frankfurt, Dr. Wustrack and John Provan of the Luftfahrthistorische Sammlung at Frankfurt airport, and the staff of the Staatsarchiv in Bremen. Great efforts were also made by the genial staff of the interlibrary loan office at Illinois. It would have been much more difficult to write this book had it not been for a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois in 1990. I am also very grateful to Chip Burkhardt, Tom Childers, Gerald Feldman, Jonathan Huener, Rolf Italiaander, Mark Leff, John Lynn, Walter McDougall, Maria Makela, Henry Cord Meyer, Wolfgang Natter, John Provan, Werner Strumann, Frank Trommler, Bill Widenor, and Robert Wohl for all their help. Additional thanks to Victor Libet, Harry Liebersohn, and David Prochaska for early readings. Victor Libet, in particular, enhanced the book in all sorts of important ways, and I am very much in vii

his debt. Aida Donald and Camille Smith of Harvard University Press were extremely helpful and encouraging; authors and books need editors and publishers who care. Around Monticello, at the Embassy, and elsewhere, Karen discussed this project with me, put me in a glider, showed me things that I did not see, and recalled to me one reason for creating things, which is love. That history cannot be written without judgment and partisanship I know from my father and mother, Hellmut and Sybille Fritzsche, to whom this book is dedicated.

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1

GIANT AIRSHIPS AND WORLD POLITICS

9

The Miracle at Echterdingen I I The Meaning of the Zeppelin Craze 22 Popular Nationalism and the Zeppelin 30 To a Place in the Sun 35 The Zeppelin in Combat 43 2

THE IMAGE OF THE WAR ACE Building the Ace 64 The Folklore of the Ace Chevalier of the Skies?

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74 82

GLIDING AND THE REVIVAL OF NATIONALISM Origins 103 The Discovery of Thermals Small Nationalist Republics

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113 119

MODERNIST VISIONS, NATIONAL DREAMS

133

The Spectacle 135 The Century's New Person 153 Germany Reenvisioned 162 A Nature Subordinate? 170 The Geopolitical Eye 173 5

THE NAZI DISCIPLINE OF AIRMINDEDNESS Airmindedness and Community 190 Educating an Airminded Generation 200 Civilian Mobilization and Civil Defense 203 ABBREVIATIONS NOTES 223

222

BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 279

263

185

ILLUSTRATIONS page 10

The zeppelin over Lake Constance. From a book entitled Das Zeppelin 1ferk (1913).

19

Crowds around the zeppelin. From Das Zeppelin 1ferk.

21

Berliners greet the LZ 6 in 1909. Ullstein photograph.

26

The zeppelin races a train. From Das Zeppelin 1ferk.

28

Photograph emphasizing the length of the zeppelin. From Das Zeppe-

lin 1ferk. 39

The zeppelin's shadow over England. Simplicissimus, 16 November 1908 .

42

The kaiser inspects his zeppelins. From Ulk, 18 June 19°9. Staatsund Universitatsbibliothek Hamburg.

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"Barbarian girls." Simplicissimus, 1June 1915.

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The zeppelin hovers over wartime London. Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek Hamburg.

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Zenith advertisement: air raids sell carburetors. Deutsche Luftfahrer Zeitschrift, 15 March 1917.

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The Deutschland wrecked near Dusseldorf in 191 I. Suddeutscher Verlag.

68 Fokker advertisement: the ace as killing machine. Deutsche Luftfahrer Zeitschrift, 22 October 1917. 77

Boelcke. Die Gartenlaube, no. 45 (19 16).

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Boelcke's death. Simplicissimus,

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Richthofen. Die Gartenlaube, no. 16 (19 17).

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An evening with Richthofen. Bundes-Militararchiv.

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"Burned!"

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Richthofen's death. Simplicissimus, 14 May 1918.

II

July 1916.

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"Versailles

19 1 9."

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War planes being dismantled. Staatsarchiv Hamburg.

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Consecration of the Ring of German Fliers memorial.

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The glider as guardian of German national dreams.

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Illustrations

116 Thermals over the Wasserkuppe. I

17

Thermals at the edge of a forest.

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Glider flights across Germany. Flugsport, 1938.

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Gliding at its height.

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The group pulls a glider into the air.

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The communal spirit of gliding.

140

The ZR III. Photograph by Lazlo Moholy-Nagy. Luftfahrt, October 1924.

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148 A warning against transocean flights. Simplicissimus, 16 April 1928. 159

Marga von Etzdorf. Miinchner Illustrierte Presse, 13 September 193 I. Photo Deutsches Museum Munich.

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The new air person depicted in a 1932 advertisement for the flying club Fliegerhorst Nordmark in Hamburg. Staatsarchiv Hamburg, 37 1- 1 I, A49/6.

167

The zeppelin over the city. Die Woche, 13 October 1928.

168 The airplane symbolizes modernity. Reclams Universum, 20 June 1935· 180 Luft Hansa's 1937 route map. Die Luftreise, October 1937. 182

The zeppelin over the South Atlantic.

188 The Hindenburg under construction in the Third Reich. 192

The Nazi sun over the Wasserkuppe. Flugsport, 10 January 1934.

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The militarization of gliding.

201

Maps show Germany's supposed vulnerability to air attacks. Lufifahrt und Schule, no. I (1935). Photo Deutsches Museum Munich.

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Schoolchildren during an air-raid drill. Die Gasmaske, May-June 1937. Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin.

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An incendiary bomb on public display.

216

Airminded vigilance. Die Gasmaske, February 1931.

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NATION OF FLIERS

INTRODUCTION Of the newfangled machines that heaved and whirled across the long and prosperous industrial century after Waterloo, the airplane enjoyed special favor. Its qualities were deeply spiritual, as well as obviously practical, because it seemed to make possible a previously unknown freedom from earthly limits. Aviators took giant leaps that cleared physical confines, social labyrinths, and emotional prisons, motions of transcendence that myth-makers had imagined in the flight of birds since antiquity. Modern flying machines realized age-old dreams about power and freedom in the unbounded airspace. In Greek legend, Icarus desired to fly unhindered among the gods but was cast down for his hubris; he flew too close to the sun, his wax and feather wings melted, and he tumbled into the sea. In the newspaper copy and sentimental poetry of a more contemporary generation, however, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Louis Bleriot, and Charles Lindbergh all accomplished what had eluded Icarus. Motoring in the air, twentieth-century aviators avenged the legendary aeronaut and thereby redeemed what had been the sin of human pride in the spectacular triumph of Western technology. Machine flight restored a Promethean dimension to the individual. Lifting off from the face of the earth, flying over mountain ranges, traversing vast oceans, and thereby upending conventional notions of distance and time, airplanes expressed the very consequence of the modern age. This technological capacity reaffirmed what so many turn-of-thecentury Europeans cherished: confidence in their singular ability to remake the world. That aviation's red-letter dates clustered around the century's turn (the first glider flight by Otto Lilienthal took place in 1891, Graf Zeppelin's motorized lighter-than-air tours began in 1900, the Wright brothers' heavier-than-air takeoff at Kitty Hawk occurred in 1903, and Louis Bleriot crossed the English Channel in 1909) seemed to underscore the future promise of technology. Airplanes announced that the new century would be a century of plenty and its mechanical sons

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and daughters the most capable masters of the natural world. Beginning in 1908, airshows broadcast this gospel across Europe, from the Irish Sea to the Sea of Marmara, featuring a colorful international fraternity of aviators, including the American Orville Wright, the Peruvian Geo Chavez, and the Frenchmen Louis Bleriot and Adolphe pegoud. But the banners and parades of the aeronautical millennium were diverted into nationalism. Competition and contest quickly came to regulate the advance of aviation. Against the background of European disputes in the Balkans and growing tensions between France and Germany after the 191 1 Moroccan crisis, airshows became increasingly patriotic affairs. Performances by foreign stunt fliers such as Pegoud, perhaps prewar Europe's most able pilot, were harshly criticized in Germany, for example. More ominous were the first steps European powers took toward arming their air forces. In the name of national defense, Germany, France, and Russia launched public subscriptions to purchase airplanes and train military pilots. In Germany, the massive Nationale Flugspende or National Air Subscription, headed by Prince Heinrich, the kaiser's brother, collected more than 7 million marks in six months during 1912, invoking as it did the menacing aerial threat allegedly posed by France. Even though airplanes played only very subordinate parts at the outset of the Great War-their tactical and strategic roles were improvised and enlarged only as the war dragged on-aviation had become a matter of obsessive national interest by 1914. From behind the figure of Icarus, the solitary dreamer, emerges that of his father, Daedalus, the master builder, who designed weapons for King Minos of Crete before he fell out of royal favor and constructed wings to flee to Sicily. Daedalus serves to remind us that aviation is not simply an inspiring story about the release from earthly bounds. It is also a rough chronicle about state building and nationalist ambition. This was particularly so in Germany, where Graf Zeppelin's marvelous airships were quickly depicted as the Wilhelmine Empire's "wonder weapons"; where chivalrous aces ended the First World War as ruthless killing machines; and where even the youthful and unpretentious gliding and soaring movement of the 1920S eventually served as an appealing model for Nazism. I Metropolitan newspapers in imperial Berlin worried about dazzling flying performances by Pegoud because they took aviation to be an index of national vitality and thus national destiny. Nationalism and technology

Introduction

reinforced each other; progress was widely perceived as a great scramble among states in which there were unmistakable winners and losers. The various aeronautical world records-height, speed, endurance, distance, load~which Germans strained to capture from the French in the pre1914 period, provided an exact tally of national performance. If machines were the measure of men in the modern era, as Michael Adas argues, airplanes and airships were the measure of nations at the beginning of the twentieth century, distinguishing not only European genius from an African or Asian mean, but also the truly great powers among the European nation-states. 2 The histories of modern nationalism and modern technology are inexorably intertwined. Far from diluting nationalist passions, once thought to be ancient and mean, industrial prosperity and rational purpose gave them shape and sturdiness. Aviation, perhaps better than any other field of technology, clarifies the links between national dreams and modernist visions. And Germany, the least satisfied among the great powers and the most dynamic capitalist state in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, is the most suitable ground on which to explore this troubled intersection. To account for the unexpected affinities between technology and nationalism we must understand how the belief in universal progress remained qualified and distorted after the Enlightenment. Confidence in Western progress rested on the conviction that the world could be shaped according to the industrial arts. This was the heritage of Francis Bacon, whose seventeenth-century science, in d~_e words of one scholar, marked "the death of nature." Bacon's mechanistic worldview overlooked nature's nurturing aspects, undertook the subordination of its threatening obstacles and storms and uncertainties, and prepared for the domination and alteration of the earth by design.3 Enlightened Europeans busied themselves with projects and ventures of all kinds. Sure that their efforts served the general cause of improvement, they dug mines, dammed streams, drained swamps, cleared forests, and surveyed wilderness. But this confidence could easily give way to unease. To recognize the plasticity of the material world or the historicity of circumstance was, at the same time, to ascertain the enduring instability of all things-material edifices, market relations, moral persuasions, national security. The constructive optimism of Bacon did not seal off the darker, more nihilistic realism of Charles Baudelaire. Nineteenth-century Europeans worried

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obsessively about the imminence of revolution, the breakability of the social order, the disease and poverty of the new cities, and the degeneration of the individual as much as they loudly celebrated the application of scientific laws or cheered the exploitation of nature. The eye that identified improvement also discerned destruction. For this reason, the acknowledgment of instability-Karl Marx's sobering vision, "all that is solid melts into air"-rather than belief in the march of progress-"up and up and up and on and on and on," in the words of Ramsay MacDonald-is the more accurate hallmark of modemity.4 Instability did not preclude reform or improvement, however; on the contrary, it gave those projects their impulse and sense of urgency. In the face of cholera epidemics, social upheaval, and military challenge, the modern experience added up to a relentless struggle to regulate and to renovate civil society. According to the nineteenth-century reformist agenda, cities had to be cleaned up and redesigned, populations educated into virtuous citizens, and hinterland empires won. At the end of the nineteenth century, forward-looking statesmen envisioned society as a factory in which all hands worked together for the common good. They accordingly propounded ambitious programs of national efficiency, protectionist economics, political enfranchisement, and social hygiene. Not to embark on liberal reform was to renounce economic prosperity and even to risk social disintegration. Insofar as technological change was seen in terms of struggle it seemed to validate the contest among nationstates. There is even reason to believe that states were the most economical units to carry out reforms. 5 Thus it was the dangerous future which bound technology and nationalism together. Nation-states were invigorated not so much by the accountable benefits of machines as by the apprehension of their costs. This ceaseless activity of renovation and dismantling-the operations of the architect, the engineer, the social reformer, and the geopolitician-properly belongs to the modernist tradition, alongside the more well-known representations of painters, novelists, and poets. What distinguishes Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the technocratic imagination, the impulse to work on and tinker with society in order to forestall disaster and to meet opportunity. Aviation made this venture more imperative. The coming twentieth-century "a:ir age" was regarded as at once prosperous and perilous. The precision and power of the engine, the sophisticated instrumentation in the cockpit, and

Introduction

the durable yet lightweight streamlined metal frame all described the vast potential of the second industrial revolution. Transocean flights anticipated a new era in global communication and transportation. But, at the same time, the reach and load of multiengined bombers foreshadowed unknown wartime horrors. Aviation introduced a previously unimagined sense of vulnerability and hopelessness to the age. Those nations which did not meet its harsh demands, by putting in place extensive air defense measures, building deterrent air forces, and teaching technical competence, would miss the imperial opportunities that global aviation extended and would play merely subordinate roles in the world order. Not to have an air capacity was to lapse into passivity and dependency. A host of new "scientific" nouns and classifications, which mixed Darwinian imperatives with technological positivism, described this brave new world. National survival in the twentieth century seemed to be a matter of accepting the novel terms of the "air age," preparing for the prosperous "air future," fashioning a new generation of clear-thinking "airmen," and adhering to the tough prescriptions of "airmindedness." Seen in this way, aviation is a crucial part of the modernist experience. Because of the fearsome dangers it posed and also the unexpected opportunities it presented, the "air future" was inscribed with all kinds of reforms, plans, and projects. What Detlev Peukert has termed Machbarkeitswahn, that heady sense of possibility at the turn of the century, spurred the technocratic impulse. One hundred years of rapid technological change made the nation-state the subject of its own renovation and of its own ambition. National history became a matter of self-construction, and technological achievements, in turn, upheld a durable sense of common national purpose. The doctrines of the air age found a particularly fertile ground in Germany. The Nazi slogan "We must become a nation of fliers," broadcast repeatedly by Air Minister Hermann Goering to generate public support for the Third Reich's military buildup, suggests the way Germans talked about aviation from the beginning of the century. Aviation suited the bold ambitions of the recently unified German Reich. Rather than a disadvantaged latecomer to the exclusive club of great powers, Germany, once outfitted with technologically audacious machines, belonged more properly to the "young" nations, an emerging generation ofworld leaders better able to fashion themselves as prosperous states than an "older" Great Britain or France. For this reason, the colossal zeppelins that began to

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make their appearance in the southwest German skies in 1900 generated immense patriotic fanfare. In the most fantastic visions of Wilhelmine nationalists, battleships would give way to airships, naval powers to air powers, the established British Empire to its insurgent German challenger. Even after Germany's defeat in the First World War, the promise of aviation continued to preview the grand technological future by which Germany would spite the Allies. Gliding, an immensely popular movement in the 1920S, came to symbolize Germany's resistance to the Treaty of Versailles. And once Allied restrictions on German civil aviation were lifted in 1926, a new generation of technically superlative airplanes and airships charted the revival of Germany's national fortunes. "Airmindedness," that buzzword of the interwar years, was based on the premise that Germany could prosper in a dangerous world if it accepted the harsh strictures of the technological age. Both the diagnosis of the modern age-instability and malleability-and the therapy applied-restless technical renovation-served to legitimize and spur German ambitions. A study of German aviation suggests how broad the intersection of nationalism and technology was both before and after World War I. A new breed of German nationalists recognized that world power required embracing a modernist vision, as the well-researched example of the importance of Admiral Tirpitz's oceangoing navy shows for the pre-1914 period. 6 Indeed, in the last twenty years, more and more historians have rejected the notion that Wilhelmine Germany was exceptional for its preindustrial political and social structure and have emphasized the modernity of the empire. Given its achievements in science and technology and its experiments in municipal reform, social welfare, and state administration, Wilhelmine Germany was considered by many European contemporaries to be the most modern state in the world. 7 That national unification and industrialization came only at the end of the nineteenth century gave Germany the additional advantage of building itself anew more easily. The Germany which Zeppelin's airships and Junkers's airplanes surveyed was not a Biedermeier patchwork of farms, heath, and forest-the bucolic landscape of Blut und Boden has been overworked by historiansbut a vast Faustian workshop of machines and masses. In a fundamental, if still largely overlooked, shift, twentieth-century German nationalism became more and more compatible with industrialism and more and more popular in scope and temperament. It outlined vast imperial ambi-

Introduction

tions, to be sure, but it also rejected the social hierarchies of the Hohenzollern monarchy or the Prussian conservatives, celebrated the efforts of workers and artisans, and foresaw a more inclusive community of patriots based on a stern order of loyalty and discipline. To become a nation of fliers was to move toward this German future. The story of German aviation begins in 1891, the year Otto Lilienthal first launched a primitive rigid-wing glider that he and his brother had constructed in Lichterfelde, near Berlin. Lilienthal's flying machine eased his free-fall descent and thereby carried him forward in the airstream. It was the first controlled glider flight. Lilienthal, who died from injuries suffered in a crash in August 1896, is all but forgotten today, although aeronautical pioneers such as Orville and Wilbur Wright and Octave Chanute carefully studied his essays and acknowledged their considerable debt to him. Even at the time, Germans paid little attention to the careful but undramatic experiments of the Lilienthal brothers. Like so many other inventors, Lilienthal kept his passion for flight private; he did not seek public support and did not try to fit his endeavors into the larger purposes of the state. The sport of gliding, which was Lilienthal's legacy to aeronautics, became popular only in the context of the spirited revival of German nationalism after World War I. It was not until the first airship flights after 1900 that aviation caught the interest of the German public, and then only gradually. After a decade of technical preparations, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin, a retired Wiirttemberg officer in his sixties, successfully flew a long cigar-shaped rigidhulled dirigible on 2 July 1900. The flight lasted twenty minutes and barely made progress against a light headwind. Before the year was out, Zeppelin undertook a second and a third flight. A stringer for the Frankfurter Zeitung observed the last launch on 18 October and described the event as a nonevent, a diverting provincial comedy but not a practical invention: 8 To be sure: the "airship" proved dirigible. It ascended majestically and quietly over the hurrahs of Friedrichshafen, which had assembled itself along the shore. It hovered purposefully and nicely in the air, made little twists on its vertical axis, perhaps even small turns. It also executed small turns on its horizontal axis, but pretty much stayed happily in the same place. There was no evidence of real movement back and forth or of ascents and descents to higher and lower altitudes. I had the sense that the airship was delighted to balance so

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nicely up in the air; and the spectators shared this enthusiasm, for the nice balancing act was the only successful part of the whole affair.

Dismissive assessments like this one and mounting financial worries forced Graf Zeppelin to dismantle the airship in the spring of 190 I. It took Zeppelin another three years to persuade the king ofWiirttemberg and several industrial sponsors to fund further trials. Once again the airship, the LuJtschijfZeppelin or simply LZ 2, featured a rigid 128-meter duraluminum hull inside which sixteen smaller internal gas cells were hung, a contrast to the single semirigid or nonrigid gas bag that constituted French dirigibles at the time and anticipated the present-day Goodyear blimps in the United States. The rigid frame was Graf Zeppelin's singular contribution. He believed it was what made the airship easier to control and more durable in inclement weather. Yet heavy winds forced the new zeppelin down near Kiesslegg, in Bavaria, on only its second flight on 17 January 1906, and later that night destroyed the crippled ship completely. Fragile construction and persistent mechanical breakdowns plagued the zeppelin project from its inception. That Graf Zeppelin eventually built two more airships, the LZ 3 and LZ 4, is testimony to his perseverance. Still zeppelins were not taken seriously by most competent observers until the long-range trial flights of the LZ 4 in the summer of 1908. Only in August 1908, when the LZ 4 attempted a twentyfour-hour circuit of southwestern Germany, the successful completion of which was the condition for military purchases, did Germans conversing about technological progress and national prowess energetically take up airships and airplanes. It is in 1908, then, that this book about how and why Germans found aviation so good to think-to paraphrase LeviStrauss-properly begins.

GIANT AIRSHIPS AND WORLD POLITICS

1

Tuesday, 4 August 1908: the German nation was putting on a production on a scale seldom seen before. Old-timers compared the patriotic hoopla to the excitement that had accompanied the declaration of war against France in the summer of 1870. The two, three, and even four daily editions put out by metropolitan newspapers at the time narrated the unfolding drama in the breathless prose that suited the brash new century. Telegraph reports on the front page of the Wiesbadener Tageblatt tracked the progress of a giant gas-filled airship as it made its way north. Accumulating "like a brush fire," telegrams were posted outside the newspaper building as soon as editors received them, giving passersby almost instantaneous coverage of the historic flight. After leaving Friedrichshafen, on Lake Constance, LuftschiffZeppelin or LZ 4 passed over Basel, Miilhausen, and Colmar, then over the small towns of Lahr and Markotshain, and finally over the Alsatian capital, Strassburg. Wiesbaden's burghers, who lived just beyond the northern end of the zeppelin's twenty-four-hour circuit around southwestern Germany, devoured news accounts that told about thousands of onlookers who crowded Strassburg's streets and clambered onto the city's roofs. Touches of detail drew attention to the tumultuous activity: apparently "even chimneys had been scaled" by excited sightseers. Wiesbadeners wealthy enough to own a telephone but not patient enough to wait for the evening edition harassed newspaper editors with their calls, asking for the latest news, busying the lines almost uninterruptedly. 1 As the zeppelin approached-appearing over jubilant crowds in Mannheim, Worms, Darmstadt, and, "just now," in neighboring Nierstein, on the Main River-as many as a quarter of a million Germans streamed into Mainz, where city officials expected a sighting between four and five o'clock in the afternoon. In Bieberich, a Wiesbaden suburb across the Rhine from Mainz, thousands of curious onlookers formed a compact "wall of people." Toward Mainz "the crowds became denser." Ludwig 9

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Flying over Lake Constance, the zeppelin was a strange and immense addition to German machinery.

Anders, a Wiesbaden reporter, stood on the Rhine bridge and "took in the huge parade of people, trolleys (all full! all full! all full!), cars, vehicles of all sorts." A happy carnival mood prevailed. Sadly, the zeppelin never arrived. A defective motor and the loss of hydrogen forced the airship to land near Oppenheim, about fifteen kilometers upriver. But for Anders, standing on the bridge at Bieberich, this day, even though it had passed without a view of the zeppelin, had not been a disappointment. In automobiles and on streetcars, the faces in the crowd looked familiar, but they also expressed something uncharacteristic and unusual. As Anders put it, "all materialistic sensations" had been overwhelmed by a prevailing "spiritual enthusiasm." 2 Publicists, politicians, and academics repeatedly returned to this imagined moment of idealism. For them, the zeppelin became a national treasure that was far more appealing and better suited to Germany's indus-

Giant Airships and World Politics

trious burghers than the Hohenzollem crown or the Prussian army. The immense public excitement in Bieberich and Strassburg and even beside the damaged airship in Oppenheim, where burghers rallied throughout the evening singing the national anthem, "Deutschland, Deutschland tiber Alles," celebrated not only the imposing technical accomplishments of the zeppelin but also the construction of a heart-felt and popular nationalism. Zeppelin enthusiasm served the grand idea of a nation in which all social classes were reconciled. Just as the Eiffel Tower stood as a monument to French republican virtue and the Brooklyn Bridge attested to the excellent industry of ordinary Americans, the great duraluminum dirigibles displayed the technical virtuosity and material achievements of the German people, not the German state. At the same time, the people's zeppelin was an affirmation of German prowess and overseas expansion. For Wilhelmine Germany's middle-class nationalists, empire went hand in hand with reform at home. Even as it was stranded near the village of Oppenheim, surrounded by marveling sightseers, the zeppelin was a proud restatement of the thirty-odd prosperous years since unification and also a boisterous statement of intentions and ambitions to come. The Miracle at Echterdingen The next day, Wednesday, 5 August, with the ship's motors repaired and its gas cells refilled, the festive scenes of the previous day repeated themselves as the LZ 4 finally passed over Mainz and then returned south. A triumphant flight was planned over Stuttgart, the capital ofWiirttemberg, whose king had steadfastly and often alone supported Graf Zeppelin's aspirations for more than a decade. "The streets filled" with people, reported Stuttgart's leading newspaper, the Schwiibischer Merkur. By now a zeppelin story without prominent reference to crowds and crowding was unthinkable: 3 The streets filled up, people clambered onto rooftops. And one waits, patiently waits for another hour! And then after the long silence, the crowd cries out. Above the hilltops, just to the right of the Bismarck Tower, a silver, glimmering, wondrous entity appears. At first it seems to stand still, but then pushes itself slowly but steadily against the fresh morning breeze. One feels its power; we are overcome by a nervous trembling as we follow the flight of the ship in the air. As only

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with the greatest artistic experiences, we feel ourselves uplifted. Some people rejoice, others weep.

But the crowds were not simply composed of passive onlookers and sightseers. By their own testimony, Germans were also changed by the zeppelin, as Wiesbaden's Gustav Anders had suggested at the Rhine bridge in Bieberich. Seen from the air, the crowds below assumed an active, even leading role in this national drama. In city after city, Germans seemed to be revealing themselves as an indivisible, patriotic whole. The story unfolding below, frame by frame, must have appeared extraordinary to the LZ 4's crew: farmers stopped and waved from their fields; villagers greeted the passing zeppelin from paths and lanes in the rural countryside; townspeople crowded onto market squares and gabled roofs. Georg Hacker, an airshipman, remembered: ''At 12:08 we glided past the tower, just below the spire, on our port side . . . The tower and spire were adorned with flags, to the very top. People crowded on top of the tower. Handkerchiefs, parasols, hats, and flashing sabers were waved to and fro ... The entire city was filled with people." Despite the hammering noise made by the LZ 4's two los-horsepower Daimler engines, the dull explosion of mortars and the shrill whistles of steamers and factories were clearly audible. "Rows and rows of white dots illuminated the streets ... as people turned their faces up to greet us." Lines from a poem by Alfred Wolfenstein caught the same image: ''Airship over the city, covered with hot faces." 4 The view from the zeppelin as it passed overhead showed Germans coming together in common purpose. Both Hacker and journalists such as Anders sawall this excited activity as the spontaneous expression of national unity. After an hour of motoring above Stuttgart on the morning of S August, the LZ 4 disappeared behind the Degerlocher hills to return southeastward to Friedrichshafen. As soon as the ship passed from sight, journalists scrambled to file their stories. "Not without first looking through the available extra editions for specifics on the trip so far," the reporter for the SchwiibischerMerkur worked quickly to meet the deadline for the noon edition. 5 Noon editions, extra editions: newspapers provided an almost uninterrupted narration, which wove a single flyover into an emerging and larger story of national achievement. Another glance at extra editions, as the reporter walked to lunch, revealed the airship's forced landing just south of Stuttgart, near the village

Giant Airships and World Politics

of Echterdingen. In a single motion, "all of Stuttgart" seemed to be on its feet to reach the crippled ship: At 2 o'clock a train departs. So off to Echterdingenl With a little bit of shoving I still manage to get a seat on the crowded steetcar ... At the train station, everything is jam-packed as well, but I get one of the last tickets and just then the train pulls in. I am the last one to be shoved onto the running board ... In Degerloch more agitation; with pushing and shoving, and almost coming to blows, I reach the train to Mohringen. In Mohringen the same scene: the quickest way to get to the train to Echterdingen on the next track is right through the windows ... Echterdingenl You don't have to ask where the airship is stranded, a stream of humanity clearly shows the way. It is difficult to move ahead in this unbelievable confusion of people and cars. At the church square, the masses make for the country road. We march along a lane, across fields and meadows, always in the same direction.

The stream of curious sightseers making their way to Echterdingen that afternoon recalled the thousands who had taken extra trains to Oppenheim the night before to examine the disabled ship. Indeed, it was really only on the ground that the monumental size of the ship-the LZ 4 was 136 meters long-could awe observers; Wiirttemberg's congenial policemen allowed visitors, perhaps as many as 50,000 at Echterdingen, to approach the ship quite closely. 6 As Stuttgart's reporter walked through Echterdingen's cabbage fields to the landing site, a "not inconsiderable wind" suddenly kicked up dust and dirt, which irritated his eyes and ears. A kilometer away, the same wind ripped the anchored LZ 4 from its moorings. Spectators watched in horror as soldiers gripping the anchor ropes were lifted up into the air before they jumped to safety at the last moment. The huge airship rose higher and higher and raked its anchor through the crowd. At the same time, it began to keel over, stern over bow. After a few moments the dangerously inclined ship slipped to the ground. A dull thud sounded and then "flames shot up from the hull, a second, a third detonation . . . a column of fire rose to the sky, immense, horrible, as if the earth had opened up releasing the flames from hell. Huge flames ate their way up the balloon, piece by piece ... an enormous cloud ofblack smoke marked the spot where the elements had sacrificed the creation of man. It was all over in three minutes." 7 Fortunately, only one airshipman was slightly hurt.

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The LZ 4 was a total wreck. Rips of twisted aluminum recalled a prehistoric dinosaur, unfit, oversized, incommensurate with the cabbage patch. The zeppelin's intended military purchasers, whose main condition, an uninterrupted twenty-four-hour flight, had not been met, agreed that the disaster revealed the rigid airship's unsuitability to adverse weather. 8 Surrounded by confused well-wishers in holiday dress, Graf Zeppelin's airship venture had come to a pitiful end. The fiery destruction of LZ 4 was the Graf's third disaster in as many years. All of Zeppelin's hopes and confidences had been invested in the destroyed LZ 4. At Echterdingen, the trajectory of government commissions, military evaluations, and preliminary funding had finally come to an end. As he inspected the wreckage, there was no reason for the seventy-year-old Graf to expect to continue his life's work. Tentative motors and delicate construction made the zeppelin flights always uncertain adventures, as the forced landings in Oppenheim and Echterdingen testified. The ships' vulnerability to storms and high winds was apparent as well. But the crowds gathered on the Echterdingen meadow did not regard the explosion as the logical conclusion of faulty design, as did military calculators in Berlin. On the contrary, witnesses to the "misfortune" 9 cried out in "wild frustration"; "curses, sobs, tears, threats" followed. Io Stuttgart's reporter, arriving at the scene late, observed "teary eyes" and a quiet, broken demeanor. The disaster at Echterdingen was a tragedy because it was at odds with the airship's dazzling performance, first across Switzerland on 1 July in a trial flight and then over southwest Germany on 4 and 5 August to meet the army's conditions; thus "frustration," "curses," "threats." At a time when the very first airplanes had only just begun taking off from European soil (Henri Farman had won 10,000 francs for staying in the air a mere twenty minutes in early July) and when the pretensions of the rickety Drachenfiieger or dragon fliers were widely mocked (it would be several years before this term gave way completely to the more trustworthy Flugzeug or Aeroplan), the leisurely, self-assured flight of the lighter-than-air dirigible over hundreds of kilometers made a powerful impression. Even before the explosion, the authoritative voice of the Frankfurter Zeitung credited Graf Zeppelin with solving "the problem of airship travel." 11 "Friend, brother ... do you completely understand," the Schwiibischer Merkur buttonholed its readers, human flight, "the dream of millenia!" had been realized. 12 As news of the catastrophe spread, the first sense of desolation gave

Giant Airships and World Politics

way to unprecedented public commitment to sustain Graf Zeppelin's airship project after all. A spontaneous and popular subscription was launched virtually overnight, a massive patriotic effort that put the zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen on a firm financial foundation. After nearly a century, the scope of public reaction still seems remarkable, "improbable," in the words of one historian. 13 According to the sober Frankfurter Zeitung, "to a man, the nation stood behind the inventor." 14 What quickly came to be called the "miracle at Echterdingen" disclosed not only broad public confidence in zeppelin technology and its "conquest of the air" but also a vigorous public spirit at the grass roots which few observers had previously identified. Without the encouragement of the state, stepping in when the Reichstag and the War Ministry had been reluctant to do so, the German people proved to be at once self-reliant and patriotic. According to inflated press reports and popular histories, it was at Echterdingen that a broad, grass-roots nationalism revealed itself. Ernst Heinkel, a twenty-year-old witness to the Echterdingen disaster who later, after war and revolution, became one of Germany's foremost aviation designers, recalled in his memoirs that as Graf Zeppelin inspected the wrecked airship a workingman shouted "courage, courage" and threw a purse of money into the open car. This small act set off a flood of contributions: "This word 'collection' rang in my ears all the way to the train that took me back to Stuttgart," Heinkel remembered. IS Within twenty-four hours enough money had accumulated to replace the LZ 4. Heinkel's story is probably apocryphal; local newspapers in their reports from Echterdingen do not mention collections taken up at the disaster site itself. But the fictional incident is instructive. The accent on the workingman and his spontaneous gesture points to the effort to cast the spirit of Echterdingen as an embracing people's nationalism that included all social classes. Stuttgart's Schwiibischer Merkur took the lead in sponsoring the "Zeppelin-Spende" and the morning after the disaster reported that it had already collected 5,359 marks. 16 Although the influential Frankfurter Zeitung at first hoped to prod Reich authorities to provide Graf Zeppelin with the necessary funds to rebuild, the paper changed its mind and no longer addressed the state so as not to obstruct the "beautiful efforts" of the German people. The paper quickly launched a municipal fund drive, to which it contributed 2,000 marks and its publisher Leopold Sonnemann another 3,000 marks. Businesses and individuals added donations,

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swelling the fund to over 62,000 marks in four days.17 At the same time, the Wiesbadener Tageblatt, which two days earlier had reported the Mainz flyover so enthusiastically, opened a collection with 500 marks. Whoever had "all-Germany" as a friend need not despair, the editors boasted, because "town and village" stood faithfully behind the Graf. 18 Newspapers organized collections across Germany: in Cologne, Munich, Braunschweig, Leipzig, Osnabriick, Pforzheim, and Plauen. Elsewhere, municipal representatives took the lead, offering thousands of taxpayer marks to Graf Zeppelin. Dozens of cities throughout southern and western Germany and beyond sponsored civic collections. Even the tiny Hessian village of Haigen earmarked 50 marks for Graf Zeppelin. 19 At first glance the airship appears as iconic of Wilhelmine manners as the infantryman's Pickelhaube, but at the time zeppelin enthusiasm registered how bourgeois and metropolitan Wilhelmine public life had in fact become. By all accounts, Germans gave readily. In Cologne, for example, more than 33,000 marks had been collected by the liberal Kolnische Zeitung at the end of the first day, 6 August. This total had increased to over 80,000 marks three days later. Twenty thousand marks were collected in Osnabruck, a smaller city of only 60,000 inhabitants. Long lists published in the newspapers reported daily totals, named patriotic contributors, and narrated touching faits divers: a Wiesbaden bowling club, for example, made do without its annual summer outing and turned 150 marks over to the Graf; a "woman and child" in Bremen gave 7 marks; employees at Bremen's Old German Bierstube collected 2 marks; the weekly Stammtisch Schlagseite in the same city added 56 marks; a hastily organized "Zeppelin-Konzert" raised funds in Darmstadt on 10 August. In Hessian Friedberg, children collected 2 marks simply by playacting on the local schoolyard. A poor boy from a proletarian district in northeast Berlin contributed 10 pfennigs, a newspaper reported. Indeed, it was not the thousand-mark contributions but the small pfennig donations to which newspaper editors happily drew Graf Zeppelin's attention. 20 Ambitious in scope but attentive to detail, the entire campaign was cast by patriotic boosters as an appealing display of civic spirit and national unity. Within six weeks, the German public had contributed 5 million marks, twice as much as the army had initially offered Graf Zeppelin and many times more than the paltry 8,000 marks collected in an earlier subscription effort in 1905. Work began almost immediately to repair the drydocked LZ 3, which had been badly damaged in a storm in December

Giant Airships and World Politics

1907, and to construct a new ship, the LZ 5. Thanks to the public subscription, the zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen were reorganized and incorporated. The financial future of the zeppelin venture looked secure for the first time. Graf Zeppelin received not only money but an outpouring of everyday supplies and neighborly cheer that any disaster victim might expect. According to Alfred Colsman, business manager of the zeppelin enterprise, sundry sausages, hams, liqueurs, and even woolen socks piled up at Friedrichshafen. Bremen's Ratskeller delivered a selection of its finest wines. Ordinary Germans also sent hundreds of poems and songs, a cultural side of the Volksspende that anticipated the immense literary production generated by the onset of war in August 1914. A favorite subject in the people's prose and on ten-pfennig postcards, Graf Zeppelin emerged as one of the most recognizable faces in Wilhelmine Germany. The kaiser himself, on a November 1908 visit to Friedrichshafen, where he awarded Graf Zeppelin Germany's highest civilian decoration, the Order of the Black Eagle, referred to Zeppelin as the "greatest German of the twentieth century." In the eighth year of the new century, this declaration illustrated typical Wilhelmine overconfidence, but Zeppelin was certainly the most popular personality in Germany at the time, possibly rivaling the late chancellor, Bismarck, and surely overwhelming Kaiser Wilhelm II in the public's affection. With his bald head and walrus moustache, Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin cut an agreeable figure that invited private admiration and public commercialization. Almost overnight, quick-witted entrepreneurs marketed Zeppelin postcards, Zeppelin medallions, and other Zeppeliniana. Graf Zeppelin himself strenuously resisted commercialization. He refused to permit the manufacture of Zeppelin cookies, Zeppelin perfume, or Zeppelin beer. Nevertheless, in marketplaces and carnival fairs, hundreds of cigars, pencils, spoons, suspenders, firecrackers, cheeses, cleaning agents, and even cans of boot polish bearing Zeppelin's name and displaying Zeppelin's face were hawked and sold. At Christmastime of 1908, one Berlin baker manufactured an edible airship out of gingerbread, wafers, and chocolate, confidently linking his own culinary arts with Zeppelin's technical achievements. An amusement park featured an "airship carousel" with rides in the familiar cigar shape. Zeppelin became an all-purpose adjective denoting "grand," "superlative," and "reliable." It was to this sort of zeppelin kitsch that one appalled art critic pointed to indict Wilhelmine

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Germany for its bad taste, but Germans-street hawkers, trinket buyers, and carnivalgoers-claimed the airship as their own. Graf Zeppelin and his dirigibles had literally become Volksgut. 21 The Graf had become that recognizable modern figure: a celebrity. By summer's end of 1 g09, two new airships, the LZ 5 and the LZ 6, had been completed. In the years before the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, twenty more zeppelins were built. Most of these were delivered to either the army or the navy, but six were built solely for commercial purposes and sold to the newly founded German Airship Company, which booked leisurely day journeys from major cities. More than 17,000 wealthy but otherwise ordinary Germans flew in zeppelins before the war. Like the first models, the new zeppelins remained fragile titans and required frequent repairs. Three ships were lost in just three years, 1910-1912, but thereafter the fortunes of the company revived. 22 On national tours, the zeppelins often limped along at 20 kilometers per hour, a far cry from the 120 or more kilometers per hour achieved by airships later in the 1920S. Even so, huge crowds collected to watch the zeppelin's progress and tens of thousands assembled wherever it landed. The first big airship display after the Echterdingen disaster took place in early April 1909, when Graf Zeppelin flew the newly repaired LZ 3 to Munich. Both the size and the behavior of the crowds were remarkable. On 2 April 1 g09, thousands of Bavarians gathered and waited for hours to view the giant ship. Infantry and cavalry units cordoned off the landing site, but as the airship descended and the prince regent moved forward to greet Graf Zeppelin, anxious sightseers broke through the barriers. The prince suddenly found himself closely surrounded by an excited populous, which pushed cavalrymen so far forward that their lances threatened to poke the ship's hull. The unseemly incident unsettled authorities. Police reports condemned Bavarians for showing a "loss of discipline" and displaying the "psyche of the masses." A number of spectators had been trampled; bicycle riders, it seems, were especially reckless. 23 Against these indictments, however, city editors, championing the civic enthusiasm rather than criticizing the lack of social deference of their readers, pointed out that it had been the German people, not the German monarchs, who had rehabilitated the airship project. Ordinary Germans had a justifiable "right to the streets" to see "their zeppelin," the newspapers concluded. 24 Munich's Neueste Nachrichten reported seeing only "joyous appreciation" and "upstanding enthusiasm" among

Giant Airships and World Politics

the crowds, and applauded the social mixing that the zeppelin landing had unwittingly created. 25 The rough zeppelin enthusiasm witnessed in Munich contrasted with the usual order of Wilhelmine festivity that prevailed on the Reich's Founding Day or the kaiser's January birthday. So when Graf Zeppelin announced a visit to Berlin, Prussian officials were especially careful. Millions of Berliners were misled when police officials remained purposefully evasive as to where the LZ 6 would land on 28 August 1909. Many chroniclers still have the zeppelin landing at Tempelhof, where immense crowds viewed the LZ 6, which passed over the site several times, but the ship actually landed near Tegel, where the imperial party and a select group of dignitaries waited. At Tempelhof the mood was festive: "what all creeps and crawls, huffs and puffs" was on its way to the meadow; "what life!" The "huge expanse" of Tegel, on the other hand, was occupied by "only a small group of the privileged, journalists and people with good connections." And whereas there had been very little military presence at Tempelhof-only a few guards directing traffic-at

Germans crowd to see "their" zeppelin, stranded here in Goppingen in 1909.

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Tegel "Prussianism was apparent ... The military surrounds [the kaiser] like a fortress." The newspaperman's point was obvious: the people's nationalism was not the same as Wilhelmine patriotism, but rather more populist, more spontaneous, more valuable; and Graf Zeppelin was not a stand-in for the kaiser, but a popular figure in his own right. Indeed Wilhelm II never attracted the crowds that greeted Zeppelin and was reportedly disturbed by the Graf's sudden stardom. 26 On Berlin's main thoroughfares, Zeppelin pictures and Zeppelin busts peered out of shop windows. Toy stores stocked hundreds of miniature airships; one department store even featured a replica of the LZ 3 fifteen meters long! Street peddlers sold Zeppelin hats and Zeppelin ties, as well as pocket watches with a portrait of the Graf, commemorative scarves that were "too colorful," and cheap cigars, in which one witty biographer imagined "lots of air." A songwriter composed a zeppelin song, which sold briskly. Perhaps Berlin's municipal band included the new arrangement as musicians played their brass instruments on top of the Rathaus tower to greet the airship. Zeppelin Day was a holiday, a time for marketplace hucksters and Sunday outings and brass bands and, as the Berlin police warned, an international gang of pickpockets that allegedly followed the zeppelin to ply their trade among the crowds that invariably gathered. 27 Zeppelin Days punctuated the summer of I gog. The LZ 5 visited the International Aviation Rally in Frankfurt at the end ofJuly and made a triumphant landing in Cologne on 5 August. But it was not only big cities that saw popular enthusiasm spill unregulated into the streets. Across Germany, schoolchildren quit school when the zeppelin flew by, taking their own "Zeppelinfrei." 28 One humorless legislator in Hamborn wanted to prohibit the zeppelin from passing overhead; local industrialists had lost thousands of marks when workers walked out of factories to view the airship.29 A series of postcards entitled "Zeppelin kommt!" depicted the hilarious tumult that supposedly ensued whenever the airship flew by; burghers appeared on the streets half-dressed to witness nighttime flights; daytime traffic snarled; and on weekends, overawed grooms had to be forcibly returned to their wedding ceremonies. 3D "Zeppelin tiber Plauen ... bringt alles aus clem Gleise," went one poem: 31 the soup is getting cold, the dumplings are hard the roast is bu rnt to a crisp!

Giant Airships and World Politics

Curious Berliners greet the LZ 6 in August 1909.

the housewife runs, the cook jumps, the milk spills into the fire, that great disrupter, Graf Zeppelin, it's all quite unbelievable!

Perhaps a cheerful and frivolous mood prevailed at zeppelin mishaps because the unexpected landing allowed people a happy opportunity to inspect their airship in unrestricted intimacy, without police cordons or civic fanfare. After the LZ 5 made a forced landing in Goppingen on 30 May 1909, for example, the local paper remarked that the "workday had turned into a holiday," but one dominated by "colorful carnival bustle" rather than "Sabbath quiet." 32 Had Graf Zeppelin's public demonstrations taken place only a few years later it is not certain that his airships would have commanded the attention they did. By the end of 1908, a year often called the annus mir-

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abilis of flight, heavier-than-air craft were taking Europe by storm. The Kitty Hawk flight, which had been initially dismissed on the continent as a tall American tale, had long since been superseded by hugely successful airshows near Washington, D.C., and by 10o-kilometer flights across France, accomplished not only by Wilbur Wright himself but also by the French pilots Henri Farman and Louis Bleriot. Only a year later, on 25 July 1909, Bleriot crossed the English Channel to immense public acclaim. By the time the Brescia airshow was held in September 1909, with Gabrielle D'Annunzio, Max Brod, and Franz Kafka among the spectators, airplanes had captured the imagination of European intellectuals. These aeronautical accomplishments, however, did not completely overshadow the airships in Germany, which over the same period ferried dozens of passengers, imperiously visited one metropolis after another, and could stay aloft for a day or more at a time. Given this superior record, German observers could be excused for seeing zeppelins as the most technically expert means to conquer the air, an achievement "inscribed in the guest book of eternity," although most scientific commentators, unwilling to be partisans of either airplanes or airships, temporized and agreed that both heavier- and lighter-than-air craft had vital roles to play in the mechanical future. 33 That German pilots and German airplanes performed poorly at Frankfurt's 19°9 international air rally only reinforced the German public's preference for airships over airplanes and for Germany's aeronautical Sonderweg over other ways. The Meaning of the Zeppelin Craze

The zeppelin craze was as interesting to contemporaries as the giant airship itself. Standing along the Rhine, Ludwig Anders made the excited spectators the subject of his dispatches to the Wiesbadener Tageblatt. Stuttgart's reporters could not keep their eyes off the rushing crowds. And just a month after the disaster at Echterdingen, the first "mass psychological study" on "zeppelin enthusiasm" appeared. 34 Most observers agreed that some combination of awe at the immense size of the ship, satisfaction that the air had been conquered, and pride in Germany's achievement drew people to the zeppelin's side. The sheer physical impact of the gargantuan airship was noted again and again. Its "marvel" drew out and seized the crowds. As it appeared over the heights above Stuttgart on 5 August 1908, the cries of spectators were followed by a "powerful still-

Giant Airships and World Politics

ness." 35 The zeppelin's languorous speed-five to ten seconds passed before it made up its own length-did not detract from but enhanced the sense of its power. It glided overhead "slowly, as becomes a ruler who reveals himself to his people." 36 Unchecked, purposeful pace seemed naturally to accompany dominion. Hugo Eckener, in 1 goo a skeptical reporter of the first airship ascents for the Frankfurter Zeitung but by Ig08 a close advisor to Graf Zeppelin, remembered the queer fascination with the zeppelin: 37 It was not, as generally described, a "silver bird soaring in majestic flight," but rather a fabulous silvery fish, floating quietly in the ocean of air and captivating the eye just like a fantastic, exotic fish seen in an aquarium. And this fairylike apparition, which seemed to melt into the silver blue background of sky, when it appeared far away, lighted by the sun, seemed to be coming from another world and to be returning there like a dream-an emissary from the "Island of the Blest" in which so many humans still believe in the inmost recesses of their souls.

For Eckener, the zeppelin acquired its force by suggesting the supernatural and otherworldly. The ship was singular, as exotic to humankind as it was to nature. Yet these descriptions of earthbound spectators, awed by the airship's dimensions and enchanted by the appearance of something completely foreign, obscure the immediacy with which Germans seemed to recognize the zeppelin, as if they followed common scripts that revealed basic turn-of-the-century dispositions about the power of humans against nature and also about the power and ambition of the German nation. Eyewitnesses habitually referred to the zeppelin flights as elements of a great "drama" in which humankind was locked in battle with nature. The terms of engagement were often physical and strenuous. But the ultimate decision, which was the victory of the human spirit over unruly natural elements, was not in dispute. The first decade of the twentieth century was a time when Europeans still happily attached active, heroic verbs to technological undertakings such as the opening of the Panama Canal, the journeys to the North and South Poles, and the electrification of the cities. In this regard, German celebration of the zeppelin was thoroughly conventional. Without any sense of foreboding about the mingling of technology and power, the populace quickly came to see zeppelins as familiar extensions of the sovereignty of culture over nature. Just twelve

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hours aloft in the zeppelin on a summer's day in July 1908 was enough to convince Emil Sandt that the biblical notion "you shall subdue the earth" had been largely realized. The flight was one in a series of cultural accomplishments that gradually empowered humans: "To crawl along the earth was the beginning. To crawl into the depths of the earth was only an extension of this. But now we are on our way to achieve the greatest: to fly in the air." As a result of this advance, nature lost its terror and its awesomeness. In the coming air age, "impassable expanses, desolate plains, inaccessible plateaus" would disappear; humans would "come to feel at home on earth." In very much the same vein, Kurd Lasswitz, Imperial Germany's most popular science fiction writer, pointed to the August 1908 flight as "the most longed-for advance" in the "domination of nature." Lasswitz depicted a future in which nature would become entirely familiar. What previously had been blind forces would be transformed by technology into humankind's purposeful creation. 38 The prospect of a completely humanized nature gave Lasswitz "a giddy sensation of power." 39 Repeatedly, Lasswitz and other observers testified to feeling empowered and enfranchised by the zeppelin. The literary image of the landscape giving way to human advance, "unfolding" below the passing airship, now commonplace, must have seemed audacious at the time. 40 Machine-making people were striding over a previously inaccessible landscape with a new swagger. "Sonn' auf," by Casar Flaischlen, put this confidence to popular music: 41 Laugh, laugh if you want! It doesn't bother me! I am doing it, and will do it, If it doesn't bend, then it breaks, but I bend it. I get it. I am flying after all! I say: it flies! it flies to the right and it flies to the left! I wager my last money and persevere and make it work.

Bending nature to human design, people had finally become the properly realized subject of history. This heady sovereignty found its epigram in Sophocles-"There are many powerful living things, but nothing so powerful as man" -and did so without a trace ofirony that might indicate

Giant Airships and World Politics

how far the empire of human folly extended into the realm of technological achievement. To be sure, some narratives lingered at the site of battle between people and nature, describing the disaster at Echterdingen as an incident in "the ceaseless alternation of wild offensives and bitter defeats." 42 The popular designation of the zeppelin as "Bezwinger der Luft," or subduer of the air, evoked the physical effort necessary to restrain nature. It struck a more ominous and embattled note, but at the same time drew attention to the muscular, almost visible subordination of the elements. In the end, however, the result was invariably the same: the "happy end" of progress saw nature conquered and a new quality of power delivered to humankind. Once this narrative was learned, then catastrophes such as the explosion at Echterdingen could easily be accounted as the price of progress. This was acknowledged quite explicitly by the Viennese writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who recognized Echterdingen as a necessary dramatic device: 43 A completely unblemished success could never have crowned the genius of this man in the same way as this stranger-than-fiction combination of triumph and catastrophe. Only the half-minute burst of flame was able to impress millions with the heroic figure of this brave, old man and the pathos of his struggle. The material, over which he triumphed, knew how to honor him: there is no other way to describe it.

Of course, Hofmannsthal beheld the dramatic suitability of Echterdingen in hindsight, after the airship had been destroyed and the public subscription launched. But he drew attention to the ways in which accidents were comprehended and invested with meaning. Echterdingen was not only seen as part of a strenuous struggle that would eventually be won; the disaster itself identified the (difficult) road to progress. A monument erected at Echterdingen soon after the explosion served as a signpost along this road. It quickly became a popular destination for Sunday outings. Two years later, when the Deutschland (the LZ 7) crashed at Bad Iburg, local civic leaders knew exactly what to do. They marked the site with a small stone and the confident inscription "Forward, despite all." It is not surprising that one child, asked to draw the stranded LZ 5 in a Goppingen art class, depicted the damaged zeppelin in commemorative postcard form. 44

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The zeppelin expressed the last word in technology, a "sure sign" of "the ultimate triumph of rationalism," according to Germany's Social Democrats,45 but, at the same time, it unified the disparate claims of the arts and technology. Commentators expressed their satisfaction on two counts. On the one hand, the airship achieved the technical mastery of flight and thus ranked as one of the great accomplishments of the modern era, an act of will and idealism. On the other hand, the airship demonstrated that the price of technological progress was relatively benign. Those who condemned the "age of technology" as decadent and superficial earned the ridicule of one Stuttgart journalist. The beauty and power of the airship represented not "just technology," he asserted, "as if something like that is nothing more than energy ... and work." "This deed was envisioned by an artist ... with intuition." An age with zeppelins in the sky could never be "impoverished," the newspaperman con-

Racing against a train, the zeppelin is depicted as the last word in Wilhelmine technology.

Giant Airships and World Politics

cluded. 46 Elegant and simple in design, the zeppelin married technology and art in a happy, uncomplicated union. The zeppelin even conformed to the new century's stem eugenic prescriptions. Its "virginal and blinding cleanliness and beauty" made the machine a welcome harbinger of the healthy hygienic future. 47 One enthusiast found the sound of zeppelin motors comforting and pleasing, so much so that in cafes he always sat near the ventilator, "which tries so pleasantly to imitate that lovely sound of motors." 48 For a fin-de-siecle generation troubled by the aesthetic and spiritual poverty of modernity, airships provided a powerful affirmation that the path of German industrial development was agreeable, even wonderful, and led unmistakably toward a new dominion over chaos and nature. Lines from a poem by Hans Brandenburg convey an image of restless power: the "giant, slender torpedo ... lances the subdued air." 49 Hans Brandenburg, and also Kurd Lasswitz, Emil Sandt, and dozens of journalists, produced an array of evocative images of dominion and manipulation. But these pictures of power over nature were not simply celebrations of an Enlightenment ethos in which all peoples and cultures could share. The images were drawn in Germany and spoke to more exclusively national concerns about the sovereignty of the German people and the global ambitions of the German state. The zeppelin realized universal hopes and technical aspirations, but also enlarged Germany's arsenal and stoked Germany's fantasies. The real miracle at Echterdingen was not the technical achievement of the mastery of the air, but the fullness of public spirit which German citizens displayed in their subscription of the zeppelin project. Stuttgart's Neues Tageblatt editorialized a day after the popular campaign had gotten under way: "The miracle has occurred: German idealism, long since pronounced dead, is alive and well, and is taking our fatherland by storm." Germans had left behind their daily worries and parochial conflicts to stand up for Graf Zeppelin and his dreamy idea. The image was as ordinary as it was prevalent: the flame at Echterdingen burned brightly against the grey everyday world. But Stuttgart's editors continued. From one sentence to the next, the beautiful, wondrous moment was armed and dangerous: "For us it is a moment of deep moral value; abroad, it is a warning." Suddenly readers were reminded that German idealism had international relevance and a military aspect. Zeppelin enthusiasm provided a glimpse of the "power that our fatherland will mobilize if it has to

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Photographers loved to accent the sheer length of the zeppelin. This camera angle became virtually prototypical over the years.

struggle for its survival!" The editors then turned their attention to statesmen at home. "The iron-clad armament of our people is good and necessary, but would be only a plaything if it were not animated by people's power [Uilkskraft], if a spirit higher than that of uniforms and drills did not move the sons of the fatherland." 50 In these last lines, what seemed to be a conventional restatement of Wilhelmine hurrahpatriotism suddenly gained complexity. The declaration of Uilkskraft against Germany's enemies abroad was also directed against Prussian authoritarians at home. The three elements comingled and reinforced one another: the quick flash of idealism and national unity; the bold assertiveness of the people

Giant Airships and World Politics

against the official state; and the intemperate statement of German ambition in a dangerous world. Poets used fewer words to forge the same links. Strassburg's Friedrich Lienhard opened his poem with a greeting to "the masters who glide over the parties' narrowness and discord" and "spray the peoples with bright thoughts." These happy images gave way to rougher talk, however: "The smoke of this iron century surrounds us / the threat of the armored fist surrounds us." In this hostile world, the zeppelin provided a powerful deterrent: "Show us the Third Reich! / Tear through the clouds!" 51 As the inhabitants of the capital craned their necks to watch the zeppelin passing overhead, Adolf Petrenz imagined that all "Berlin has only one single neck today ... one cheering mouth, one eye, one heart." But this German unity did not simply cheer a "silver fish" or a "skyscraper on its side," newly minted wonders of the industrial age, but also the "steel-blue fortress," the "Luftlohengrin," and the "Air Field Marshal," which was distinctly German weaponry.52 All this talk about Germany's Luftlohengrin was characteristic of the time. The twenty years before the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a growing nationalism and chauvinism in Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II's resolve to find "a place in the sun" struck a responsive chord, particularly among Germany's prosperous and confident commercial classes, though they did not always approve the methods he chose. Even a critical thinker like Max Weber saw Germany's global aspirations as an index of bourgeois self-confidence. An increasingly powerful radical nationalist movement championed both expansionistic Weltpolitik and political reform at home. After the turn of the century, an array of middleclass nationalist associations and special-interest groups struggled to attain greater political voice in what remained an authoritarian, elitist state, to dissolve the codes of privilege and deference that still determined social standing, and to construct a genuine people's nationalism out of the achievements and efforts of the Yolk itself. Historians have typically pointed to groups such as the Navy League to distinguish the crystallizing political ambitions of Wilhelmine Germany's radical nationalists. Unfortunately, they have neglected popular enthusiasm for the zeppelin, which is a particularly instructive symbol. It expressed Germany's international ambitions in an imposing way, but, since the zeppelin itself was a product of public subscription, the airship also congenially represented the insistent claims of a popular, people's nationalism. 53

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Popular Nationalism and the Zeppelin Ernst Heinkel's story about the humble workingman throwing his purse to Graf Zeppelin is almost certainly apocryphal, but it adhered to a widely followed view of Echterdingen as casting a fundamental unity among the German people, embracing commoner and aristocrat. Even though it constituted a highly distorted and simplistic reading of political attitudes, the belief that this basic unity existed suggested the wide appeal of the idea of a more solidaristic, fraternal Germany. Even after forty or fifty years, contemporaries attested to the popular exuberance and sense of public spirit that the zeppelin disaster pulled together. Theodor Heuss, a prominent German Democrat in the Weimar period and the first president of the postwar Federal Republic, recalled that during the public subscription '''the Yolk' felt itself as a single whole." He added: "Nothing like this had ever happened in Germany before." 54 Heuss, like many other witnesses, hinted at the novel sense of nationhood which the zeppelin generated. Popular nationalism introduced a new aesthetic sensibility and staged the prominent role the masses played in overrunning police cordons and crowding streets and airfields to view the zeppelin: "People of Berlin," wrote the Berliner Tageblatt on the morning after the zeppelin visit in the summer of I gog, "yesterday you were simply beautiful, you as a mass, as a whole." 55 Zeppelin Days were almost plebiscitary affairs, composing as they did a mystical union of the people that resisted official Wilhelmine management. The supposed unanimity of zeppelin enthusiasm impressed observers no end. "'Zeppelin,' one person screamed, soon it was thousands, soon a whole nation of sixty million screamed." 56 The Frankfurter Zeitung agreed: "to a man, the nation stood behind the inventor." 57 And we know that under the zeppelin Petrenz's Berlin was a single outstretched neck, a single cheering mouth. Small villages tucked into remote valleys were caught up in the zeppelin drama in August I g08 as well. "One takes the district newspaper from the hands of the sweating postman as soon as he reaches the first house in the village and as if on signal the curious collect-zeppelin, and again zeppelin." 58 This all-German chorus of approval had finally assembled the nation's diverse and contesting classes. "In this endeavor" to raise funds for Graf Zeppelin, the Kolnische Zeitung remarked, "the differences between parties, and religions, and estates have faded into the background," a "completely singular" occurrence.

Giant Airships and World Politics

Even Social Democrats cooperated, the paper added. Again and again, socialists and workers, so often tarred as the internal enemy of the Reich and denounced as "journeymen without a fatherland," served bourgeois commentators as happy affirmations of the genuine and popular character of the public subscription. 59 It is not difficult to deflate the self-satisfied estimations of Germany's metropolitan press. The entire nation did not stand behind Graf Zeppelin. Predominantly liberal and well-to-do contributors in southwestern Germany were not representative of the nation as a whole. Given the prominent role of daily newspapers, business associations, and civic clubs in the subscription (ffort, zeppelin enthusiasm was surely more developed in metropolitan precincts and more tepid in rural Prussia, which was far removed from the airship's illustrious circuit. 60 Along with museums, zoological gardens, and charities, the zeppelin fund flourished mainly in cities. Its contributors were mostly though not exclusively middle-class Germans. Depictions of zeppelin enthusiasm among socialist workers and proletarian children were especially valuable to bourgeois commemorators. They indicated that Germany's divisive class differences could be bridged and thus suggested a new social quality to the nation. Despite the disdain of Germany's leading socialist newspaper, Vorwarts, which found the "fever of contribution" after Echterdingen "laughable" and remarked that German militarism would make sure the zeppelin project survived even without public subscription, there is considerable evidence pointing to working-class support for the airship, especially in southwestern Germany. Local socialist newspapers in Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, and Heilbronn, for example, established fund drives, and Social Democratic Landtag deputies in Baden and Wiirttemberg lent their names to the effort. Zeppelins could be found as popular emblems on working-class calendars and handbills, and they figured in the verse and song of proletarian folk culture. 61 Enough workers must have joined the exuberant crowds for socialist newspapers to take special pains to explain the "real" motives for the massive scale of zeppelin enthusiasm. Again and again, at the time of the initial twenty-four-hour flight of the LZ 4 in early August 1908, during the April 19°9 visit to Munich, and on the occasion of the LZ 6's triumphant arrival in Berlin in August 1909, socialist editors underscored the pacific basis of the zeppelin's popular appeal. Stuttgart's socialist Schwii-

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bische Tagwacht persistently defended the zeppelin on the grounds of its "postimperialist" future: "What remains undeniable is that an invention which enables us to sail through the air is cultural progress, under any circumstances, even if the bourgeois class state claims it for militarism for the time being." Eventually Vorwiirts came to admit the airships' wide cultural appeal.62 For some Social Democrats, the upward and free motion of the zeppelin evoked social emancipation and ultimately the victory of socialism itself. According to one, the zeppelin "teaches us the contingency and ultimate untenability of limits, even more than steam or electricity." Indeed Graf Zeppelin battled elements of nature which were "as insidious as a beast and as cunning as a reactionary." 63 With Graf Zeppelin's airships flying about, socialists imagined a new empire of the air without policemen, tax collectors, or border guards. 64 Socialists also pronounced Zeppelin Day in Berlin, 28 August 1909, "a genuine people's festival" and made the most of its "anti-Prussian" aspects; it did not resemble "a military parade or an imperial inaugural ceremony." Breaking the "official order," the crowds represented an authentic "people's movement." 65 There is a great deal of wishful thinking to this socialist appraisal, but it is not entirely off the mark. To both bourgeois and socialist commentators, the zeppelin appeared to reassemble the nation on a new, populist ground, a patriotic union which made the most of the contributions of ordinary people and mocked the elitist pretensions of Wilhelmine notables. Workers as much as burghers were drawn to this patriotic ground. To understand Wilhelmine Germany's "zeppelin cult," Bernd Jiirgen Warneken reminds historians of the "divided loyalties" of many workers. Workers felt allegiance to a Social Democratic subculture, as has been expertly documented, but also to the nation, a bond that is often overlooked. Like the integrating nationalism of August 1914, the popular patriotism behind the German zeppelin, Warneken postulates, resolved this conflict. It did not compel workers to abandon their political identity as socialists. At the same time, it allowed a celebration of the nation without requiring the adoption of authoritarian and monarchical designs.66 Critics on the Left and the Right distinguished the genuine people's movement from Wilhelmine officialdom, and both were enthralled at the free, spontaneous movement of citizens. Of course, bourgeois commentators went on to laud German imperialism while socialist critics looked forward to social emancipation and world peace. Nonetheless, the ideal

Giant Airships and World Politics

of a more egalitarian amd self-reliant polity, in which ordinary Germans composed the dramatic centerpiece, tugged at the affections of bourgeois and socialist observers alike. This unusual and powerful vision of political community is what makes Germany's raucous zeppelin craze particularly noteworthy. Zeppelins revealed the multiple identities of burghers and workers and underlined how tenuous official Wilhelmine patriotism had become. The populist aspect to the zeppelin movement was drawn out sharply by Berlin's attempt to manage the subscription effort. Two days after the Echterdingen disaster, when the extent of public support had become clear, newspapers reported the formation of a "Reichskomitee zur Aufbringung einer Ehrengabe des gesamten deutschen Volkes ftir den Grafen Zeppelin zum Bau eines neues Luftschiffes," under the protectorate of the crown prince. "Reichskomitee"-the haughty signature of the imperial court was evident already in the cumbersome name. The royal family's protection, a typical means of validating the legitimacy of public endeavors during the Second Empire, along with the long list of prominent Germans drawn from the aristocracy, the civil service, and the business world who agreed to serve with the crown prince, underscored the official character of the committee. At the same time, proposals were made to the kaiser, probably by Walther Rathenau, the chairman of Germany's General Electric Corporation, to establish an experts' "Kuratorium" to administer the millions of marks collected on Graf Zeppelin's behalf. 67 News of the crown prince's Reichskomitee and Rathenau's Kuratorium loosed a storm of indignant criticism throughout Germany that revealed a defiant, unexpectedly republican political opposition. A long letter by "Doctor W. R." in the liberal Bremer Nachrichten spoke for many Germans dismayed by the imperial court's uncalled-for sponsorship of the zeppelin subscription. What was so "beautiful, glorious" about the Volksspende, the correspondent asserted, was that rich and poor gave money "without being asked." In their spontaneous gestures, the German people had shown "confidence in their own power." And what was Berlin's reply, the doctor asked? "You pathetic entrepreneurs; you want to have a collection? Without proper leaders? You want to give expressions to your feelings? Without directives from above? No!" The spirit ofPrussia prevailed, wrecking the joy of the undertaking. All that was left now, the doctor continued sarcastically, was for the Reichskomitee to organize

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"charity balls for the upper ten thousand," with "low-cut gowns" and "gentlemen in tuxedo a la Ostmarkverein." An unprecedented national demonstration had been cut down to the size of a "normal German fundraiser with honorary presidents and protectorates." Those "at the top" simply never understand, the doctor concluded, that "it works without them too, if the people want." 68 This passionate declaration of popular sovereignty, made in the typically anti-Prussian Hansa city, was intemperate in tone but representative in substance. According to Frankfurt's Das freie Wort, the fact that there are "a few people in Berlin who believe that nothing is worthwhile ... if they don't have their say" provoked "endless bitterness and rage." Reichskomitee and Kuratorium-these were "textbook examples" of how to generate "bitterness" among south Germans. Frankfurt's message was loud and clear: "Berlin: hands off." 69 The influential SchwiibischerMerkur honored the spontaneous patriotism and resolution of zeppelin enthusiasts and noted that the subscription had taken place without "help from above." Germans want to feel "self-reliant" in their patriotic activity, the editors concluded. Critics also blasted Rathenau's suggestion, which "all of public opinion opposes." What did Graf Zeppelin need experts for, after seeing his plans rejected by technical commissions in 1894, in 1900, and again in 1905, the Konstanzer Zeitung asked incredulously. "Who is this Rathenau who intervenes in a glorious demonstration by the people in order to reduce the people's enthusiasm to the level of bureaucratic tutelage?" On this point there was unanimity: nothing should obstruct the people's wish to fund the zeppelins without conditions. 70 Once Graf Zeppelin incorporated the airship works in Friedrichshafen, talk of an experts' Kuratorium ended abruptly. But the claims of popular sovereignty were not exhausted and would take even more hazardous political form three months later in the Daily Telegraph Affair, in which the kaiser came under sustained attack for his erratic and highly personal style of government. In the shadow of the zeppelin and in patriotic associations such as the Navy League, middle-class Germans experimented with new notions of sovereignty and new ideas about what constituted national glory. Graf Zeppelin, the septuagenarian aristocrat, came to incorporate these populist aspirations. Promotional pictures and advertisements generally showed a genial man. Instead of the stern eagle-like gaze with which so many other Germanic heroes were outfitted, Zeppelin's eyes twinkled

Giant Airships and World Politics

playfully.71 Zeppelin's disdain for Prussian officialdom added to his volkstiimlich, man-of-the-people image. Numerous biographers made the most of Zeppelin's troubled relations with the Prussian War Ministry. Anti-Prussian attitudes attached themselves easily to the zeppelin. Portrayed in the popular press as a man of enormous energy and resolve, Graf Zeppelin was quickly elevated to the rank of Volksliebling, "the people's favorite." 72 Die Woche declared him "the most popular man in Germany" in 1913.73 Even Social Democrats portrayed the indefatigable Graf Zeppelin as an exemplary worker, who despite defeats and setbacks always looked forward. 74 At a time when court scandals and the kaiser's erratic foreign policy dismayed the German public, Graf Zeppelin took on the proportions of a ganzer Mann,75 a new Bismarck,76 and even a "people's emperor." 77 Far more plausibly than the somewhat comic kaiser, Graf Zeppelin represented what many Germans took to be their national virtues: skill, purposefulness, and idealism. Zeppelin the Tatmensch more nearly fitted the aspirations and ambitions of the young empire. Perhaps no contemporary in Wilhelmine Germany enjoyed as much public esteem, as countless Zeppelin plays produced by small-town literary societies, Zeppelin poems published in provincial newspapers, and Zeppelin songs sung on playgrounds attested. One day, on Niirnberg's Aegydienplatz, schoolgirls played a German version of London Bridge, rhyming zeppelin verses, circling this way and that, falling down and getting back Up:78 Zeppelin to, Zeppelin fro, Zeppelin has no airship more. Zeppelin up, Zeppelin down, Zeppelin has his airship now. Zipp-Zapp-Zeppelin The airship's down again.

In the people's archive-in children's games, family magazines, songbooks, advertisement layouts, and tavern photographs-only Bismarck occupied as much room as did Graf Zeppelin.

To a Place in the Sun Genial patriotism at home did not exclude adventurous nationalism abroad. The robust political roles that Wilhelmine populists sought in-

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eluded acquiring and developing colonies and extending German influence worldwide. Middle-class nationalists regarded the technological and economic achievements of the Second Reich with pride-the gleaming white airship proudly announced that "Made in Germany" now stood for quality; the oceangoing Imperial Navy was an additional source of satisfaction-and consequently grew more assertive in their demands for political power, which still remained securely in the hands of Wilhelmine notables and a small upperclass of industrial and financial elites. At the same time, they vigorously supported the assertion of German power around the world. The objects of lavish praise by Berlin's smart boulevard newspaper, BZ am Mittag, which readers snatched up along the busy streets of the capital at noon, zeppelins registered the technological prowess and political enterprise of the Second Reich. The populist commotion in support of Graf Zeppelin served as a heartening demonstration of patriotic resolve that would enhance Germany's capacity to wage war. Just a day or two after the Echterdingen disaster, big-city newspapers were already issuing warnings to the enemies of the empire. Zeppelins revealed a furor teutonicus. The drama of European international relations, made increasingly tense by the Boer War and the first Moroccan crisis in 1905, was rarely off the front pages and easily admitted Graf Zeppelin and his airships as new factors in the hostilities. It was not only public demonstrations of German patriotism that added to German military might. The airship itself promised to provide the Reich with a weapon of unprecedented mobility that could challenge the continental might of Russia or the sea power of Great Britain. It was a heady feeling of sovereignty, conceded zeppelin passenger Emil Sandt, to know that "high or low, north or south, east or west, we are where we want to be." 79 In the mind's eye, the trajectory of airship flights around Europe and into the North Sea provided a radius of action, a projection of power, so many hundreds of square kilometers of Raumbeherrschung or dominion over space. The airship allowed strategists to conceive of France, Great Britain, and Africa as plausible theaters of German operations in a way that not even Admiral von Tirpitz's navy allowed. The shifting scale of zeppelin parlor games is revealing. An early board game (1906) featured Lake Constance, around which players would "fly" their airships. After the August I g08 flight, a game called "Conquest of the Air" rehearsed the LZ 4's loop from Lake Constance to Mainz; al-

Giant Airships and World Politics

ready much of western Germany lay at the feet of the players. The same year, another board game asked players to choose from among various modern conveyances, including a train, a ship, an automobile, and a zeppelin, to compete in a race around Europe. (By 1929, players moved zeppelins across the entire globe in the "Zeppelin Game above the World," for which the geographical center was the North Pole.) Over Friedrichshafen, to Konstanz, to Luzern, to Mainz, to the North Sea, zeppelins steadily reduced the world to a more human scale. A journalist rushing from one zeppelin story to another reflected on this diminishment: 8o During the most recent zeppelin flight, it was not only reporters but also photographers and anxious spectators who rushed ahead to get an early look. Things can't happen quickly enough ... That is what the public wants. It has been trained by rivalry and competition. Things that occur in the morning halfway across the globe are discussed offhand in taverns in the evening. There are really no distances anymore. Given the conquest of the air, it will not be long before the whole world becomes one big village.

Rearranging global perspective and promising to reduce the world to the size of a village, Germany's zeppelins facilitated Germany's Weltpolitik. Already in his earliest reports, Graf Zeppelin promised his patrons unprecedented global mobility. Again and again, Zeppelin raised the possibility of exploring the polar regions and the African interior and linking far-flung colonial outposts. His examples, drawn halfway across the globe from Germany, are explicit references to the geography of European imperial rivalry at the time (Africa, China, the race to the North and South Poles). In a speech to scientists in 1908, the Graf maintained that his airships could operate within a radius of 850 kilometers. This area included all major European capitals. Zeppelins, he suggested, could also link Germany's colonies in East and West Africa. 8t More ambitious estimations Graf Zeppelin left for secret sessions with military strategists. On 13 February 1909, he spoke of an "action radius" of 1,200 kilometers. Given this "conquered space," what exactly would the airship would do? Here he was quite explicit. Airships would be able to operate deep within enemy territory and hamper mobilization efforts. Hovering above railway stations, for example, the zeppelin would bomb entraining troops and rolling stock and destroy barracks, arsenals, and factories. Although his airships would be vulnerable to counterattack, Graf Zeppelin conceded, direct hits were "improbable" because small-engined airplanes

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could not attain the altitudes of the airship. He did not allow for the possibility that this might change. 82 Energetic, resourceful, and often hyperbolic as he was, Graf Zeppelin was not alone in imagining vast operations for his airships, which were nothing less than Wilhelmine Germany's wonder weapon. "Zeppelin! Zeppelin! Why not fly over to France," went one children's song, published in 1912: "Why not fly over to Serbia," and to Russia, London, and Japan, places which composed a rather accurate list of Germany's enemies two years later. The zeppelin should "drop something on the head" of whoever "scolds Germany," the lyrics concluded. 83 Fantastical forecasts of how the zeppelin would reorder great-power politics circulated widely in the popular press as well as in popular song. Rudolf Martin, a government councillor and a prolific essayist, published a wide array of promotional articles in influential journals. Even before the triumphant flight to Mainz in August 1908 or the appearance of the German translation of H. G. Wells's hugely successful War in the Air the next year, Martin was fighting the next European war with imaginary zeppelins. Highly mobile and presumed largely immune to attack, a fleet of airships could menace the slower battleships and cruisers of the English navy. They would provide superior reconnaissance, threaten hostile ports, and break the sea blockade which Germans anticipated in a coming war. Moreover, Martin argued, airships were relatively inexpensive: eighty could be built for the forty million marks that it cost to build a single modern battleship.84 The impact of a fully developed air arsenal would be nothing less than revolutionary, claimed Martin. It would tip the European balance of power in Germany's favor. In boldface type, Martin presented his main thesis: "To the extent that motorized air travel develops, England will cease to be an island." As a result, England would be forced to invest in an air force, which would put Germany and England on an equal strategic footing. In addition, as an air power, Germany would be able to apply pressure around the globe-Persia, Turkey, and Morocco were Martin's examples-without running the risk of British naval intervention. Indeed Martin came back to Morocco again and again, in both his essays and his novels, as if German zeppelins could undo the shame of the Algeciras Conference and revive German influence in North Africa. Martin envisioned a future in which German airships would permit the global extension of German power and secure the Second Reich its coveted "place in the sun."

Giant Airships and World Politics

~uf

bem

6ur'l'al~'

~u(\)erfClB jtonfam.'.'fb

The zeppelin's shadow looms ominously over England as early as 1908 in this Simplicissimus cartoon.

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Two years later, in 1909, Martin elaborated his thesis in a novel, World War in the Air. The novel takes place in the near future, but zeppelin technology is already so advanced that regular air service links Berlin and Peking. China has evidently fallen into the German sphere of influence, which is protected by the hundreds of airships which Friedrichshafen builds annually. This air arms race takes place against the background of growing imperial tensions in Morocco, which finally lead to war between France and Germany. But German victories against both France and Russia leave Europe financially wrecked and Germany vulnerable to rising socialist agitation. Economic and political collapse is averted, however, by the successful air invasion of England. Huge "vacuum airships" ferry thousands of men to England and destroy the British navy in the channel. In a matter of days England sues for peace, and London bankrolls a German empire in Europe. 85 Martin gives loving attention to the bombardment of Paris: The most important task after the destruction of the airship field was the destruction of the War Ministry, at Boulevard St. Germain 231. Admiral Graf Zeppelin steered his ship to the ministry ... the rest of the 150 airships were deployed over army barracks, the Bank of France, the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Finance, and the presidential palace, the Palais d'Elysee ... A minute later, the immense block housing the War Ministry, from the Boulevard St. Germain to the Rue St. Dominique, lay in ruins.

The airships move across the Seine toward the Place de l'Opera. Moments later, "most of the French infantry was lying bleeding on the street. Buildings on Avenue de l'Opera began to collapse." Martin does not fail to add a human touch: "Even at the high altitudes, I heard the sound of hundreds of people crying for help." Place de l'Opera, Palais d'Elysee, Boulevard St. Germain 23 I-this sort of detail accented Martin's immense confidence in the technical precision and overwhelming power of the zeppelins. They were truly Wunderwaffen, wonder weapons. At the same time, the closely examined destruction of Paris seemed to reflect a German fantasy, turned over in the mind's eye again and again. One imagines Martin bent over a map of Paris spread out on his writing desk: ''As the German airships, at an altitude of 1,200 meters, took up an eastward course, the whole of the inner city of Paris was in flames. Not a single house was standing from the Magasin du Louvre to the Opera and from the Opera to the Palais d'Elysee." 86

Giant Airships and World Politics

The defeat of England was less specifically gory, but no less prominent in German air fantasies. It provided the dramatic centerpiece to Martin's novel, to a short story by Graf Bernstorff about an unsuccessful enemy blockade that is clearly meant to be English, and to the dangerous musings of Graf Zeppelin's numerous correspondents. ''Albion-Check Mate!" screamed the title of a January 1912 appeal in which Leonar Goldschmied urged the aerial bombardment of London in the event of an English attack on the German navy. Whereas Martin saw the need for at least eighty airships and perhaps as many as five hundred, Goldschmied believed that ten would do the trick: "Using radios, a force of ten zeppelins could hover over London with a cargo of death." Other fantasts were more specific. At the end of 1912, the year in which the great powers were almost drawn into war in the Balkans, a Leipzig correspondent emphasized the need to "load the zeppelins with bombs so that railway bridges, railway embankments, and even whole railway stations are reduced to a rubble heap." To make sure no one would be left alive on the field of battle, "it is our duty" to manufacture "poisonous atmospheric" or gas bombs. 87 In England itself, zeppelins loomed in overheated imaginations. Civilians reported a rash of zeppelin sightings over the English coasts, beginning with one near Cardiff on 19 May 1909, and consumed countless stories with titles like "The Airship Menace," "Foreign Airships as Nocturnal Visitors," and "The Black Shadow of the Airship." 88 Fantasies such as these were the stuff of serious conversation. Martin, for example, received considerable publicity and held numerous public meetings throughout 1909. Even more alarming were the arguments presented by Alfred Colsman, business manager of the zeppelin enterprise, who negotiated the Imperial Navy's purchase of airships with Admiral von Tirpitz in the summer of 1912: "I asked Tirpitz to imagine not one but twenty airships hanging over London in the case of war." This show of force would force England to accede to German ultimatums, Colsman argued. Tirpitz was not convinced, sure that the zeppelins would provide easy targets and simply be shot down, but he eventually bought two ships.89 On the whole, Tirpitz was unwilling to sacrifice additions to his "risk navy," which was measured in gun power, to purchase airships, or to contemplate the benefits of superior scouting against superior firepower. The army's General Chief of Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, was not an enthusiastic supporter either, although after 1913 he regarded the zeppelins more positively and continued regular purchases so that at the out-

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U/k, an illustrated newspaper, pokes fun at the airborne kaiser inspecting his arsenal of zeppelins and battleships.

Giant Airships and World Politics

break of World War I in August 1914 the army possessed six working airships, in addition to the three remaining commercial ships that could be requisitioned during mobilization.

The Zeppelin in Combat Before 1914, the ambitious designs of the zeppelin supporters contrasted with the cautious and, to some extent, unimaginative plans prepared by the military establishment. Indeed, military historians indict both naval and army officials for failing to recognize the strategic usefulness of the zeppelin, particularly in reconnaissance. A small number of zeppelins were acquired but not put to proper military use. 90 Although there were dissident voices in the military, most farsighted zeppelin supporters were exuberant civilians, who were enthralled with the ship's range, mobility, and potential bomb load and virtually convinced that the immense airship provided Germany with a weapon of "singular" power. 91 After 1914, these ambitious forecasts would be tested in practice, as patriotic enthusiasm steadily overwhelmed military caution and eventually generated the energy and funds to build more than one hundred wartime airships. The immense popularity of the zeppelins confounded sober military calculations. This was the case in August 1908, when military observers were prepared to terminate further support of Graf Zeppelin, and again in August 1914, when military strategists hesitated before using the airships offensively. It frustrated Graf Zeppelin no end that in the early weeks of the First World War his zeppelins did little more than scout enemy positions in northern France. In his view, the only suitable field of action for the dirigible was England, and he urged the General Staff to initiate a ruthless bombing campaign against the island kingdom. 92 According to Oskar Wilke, who played chess with Zeppelin on 29 July 1914, the old man repeatedly emphasized that Germany had to push England into war. Not to do so would be to permanently block Germany's political ambitions. 93 It was as if the Graf completely believed the fictions of Rudolf Martin. Not to break English sea power would leave the airship venture incomplete and unrealized. Graf Zeppelin, who emerged as a feverish annexationist and leading critic of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg, might be ignored by the high command, but the public, which clamored for zeppelin attacks on England in the face of the Allied sea blockade and which subscribed to war

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bonds, was more difficult to dismiss. Germans expected great things from zeppelins-a weapon "only we Germans possess"; "airships can do the impossible. In one moment they are in the extreme west, the next in the deepest east."94 In 1914, a new song could be heard on German playgrounds: 95 Fly, Zeppelin, fly Help us win this war, Fly to England, Burn down England, Fly, Zeppelin, fly!

Throughout the autumn of 1914, the General Staffwas inundated with fantastic plans for the aerial defeat of England. Diplomats and politicians added their voices. Already at the end of August 1914, von Reichenau, Germany's ambassador in Stockholm, envisioned a string of airfields and airship hangars "from Cherbourg to Ostende" from which German bombs would keep England "in continuous quaking terror." Walther Rathenau and the Catholic Center Party leader Matthias Erzberger added pressure as well. 96 Armchair strategists reckoned that given its overpowering navy, Britain could only be defeated "under water," by submarines, or "in the air." 97 According to Ernst Lehmann, the proposition of air attacks against England "progressed to such a point that it was subjected to expert opinion." Lehmann does not give a date, but it seems that before 1915 "a plan for razing London was worked out in unofficial quarters." Twenty zeppelins would be armed with 300 incendiary bombs each. Even given the loss of six or seven, the remaining airships would ignite thousands of fires. "When asked for my technical opinion, I agreed that it was entirely feasible," Lehmann remembered. 98 Growing pressure from the public, which for six years had carried on a romance with the sleek, powerful zeppelins, was critical in forcing the hand of the high command, which authorized the first zeppelin raids in early 1915. An anonymous Ullstein book, Zeppelins over England, described the public mood after the first air raids: "The German people have waited patiently for the day when an airship would drop the first bombs on England's 'sacred' soil ... Now the war in all its horror will be brought home to this land of lies and slander." 99 What would have happened if the raids had not taken place? Would the patience of the people have worn out and, given the Allied blockade of German ports and French bombing along

Giant Airships and World Politics

~or6orenmab~en

"Barbarian girls." In this 1916 Simplicissimus cartoon, German women pore over a map of London, pointing to St. Mark's Square, which will soon be bombed by the zeppelin. One callously mourns the loss of pigeons, but not people.

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the Rhine, ended in demoralized grumbling about Germany's disproportionate share of the domestic horror of the war? It is impossible to know, but domestic propaganda, composed at once to stiffen homefront patriotism and to pressure the General Staff, contained a veiled threat. Zeppelins were vital weapons of war, explained Gottlob Mayer, not simply because of the blows they inflicted on the enemy but also because the German people believed in them and made "the continuation of patriotic enthusiasm and willingness to sacrifice dependent on their ruthless deployment against England." 100 Raids on England sold the war. One airshipman imagined the boost to morale after a successful raid: 101 "Bucharest successfully bombed," and the response "message received" returned from the reception station. Lieutenant R. composed and coded the telegram with joy and extra care. He imagined the news in big letters headlined in the German morning papers. How pleased the German fatherland will be with us.

Zeppelins were widely regarded as Volksgut, and the popular confidence and enthusiasm they inspired on the home front were vital factors in the formation of Germany's zeppelin strategy. "You just have to listen to the common people-what kind of zeppelin miracles they report and anticipate," noted Adolf Saager in his wartime biography of Graf Zeppelin. 102 Zeppelin himself justified the raids against England because their magnitude and horror would bring the war to a more timely end. This was the reasoning he provided in the famous 1915 interview with Hearst correspondent Karl von Wiegand. 103 But the popular appeal of the bombing missions lay elsewhere. Patriotic Germans badly wanted to bring the war home to England. For "the first time in England's thousand-year history, English blood will flow on English soil ... that is the main accomplishment of the zeppelins in the world war!" wrote one enthusiast. 104 Naval strategists agreed that airship raids would destroy vital war materiel, undermine the morale of the English people, and, most important, force Great Britain to maintain large numbers of troops at home. 105 All the components of total war already figured in the calculation of air raids, particularly the psychological and propaganda aspects which were intended to assuage German patriots as much as to terrorize English civilians. One of the first big raids against England was carried out on 8 September 1915, under the command of Heinrich Mathy. Carrying thousands

Giant Airships and World Politics

of kilograms of bombs, the navy zeppelin L 13 scored direct hits in the warehouse district north of St. Paul's and elsewhere in the City. Although Mathy, who had visited London for a week in 19°9 and recognized the geography below him, missed his targets (the Bank of England and other financial houses), the damage toll was the largest of any of the wartime raid and added up to one-sixth of the financial cost inflicted by zeppelin air strikes during the entire war. As the German press quickly learned, mostly through neutral sources in Sweden and Holland, Londoners reacted to these first attacks with shock and anger. Substantial damage

In a picture postcard, the zeppelin appears to be a creature from another planet as it hovers over wartime London.

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had been inflicted by just a single airship. Presumably the toll of a concerted attack would be even greater. German strategists were jubilant and imagined for subsequent raids the singular success of the L 13. 106 Germans took what had been panicky responses to an unprecedented attack to be revealing displays of civilian vulnerability and what had been lucky hits to be the result of precision bombing. Since then considerable scholarship has established that the overall damage inflicted by the zeppelins was light (about £3 million) and that the attacks boosted rather than diminished civilian morale. But German proponents of air power misled themselves and committed scarce wartime resources to build more and more ships, each class larger, more powerful, and better able to reach the extraordinarily high altitudes necessary to evade pursuing enemy fighter planes. A raid in April 19 I 6 earned a special report prepared for the kaiser: At Grimsby, in addition to the post office and several other houses, a battleship in the roadstead was heavily damaged by a bomb, and had to be beached. At Kensington an aeroplane hangar was wrecked, near Tower Bridge a transport ship damaged, in Great Tower Street a factory wrecked, and north of the Tower a bomb fell in George Street only 100 meters away from two anti-aircraft guns. It was reported that a big fire had broken out at West India Docks, and that at Tilbury Docks a munition boat exploded (400 killed).

At first glance, the fiery destruction was impressive. However, according to Douglas Robinson, an expert on zeppelin attacks, the report was a complete misrepresentation. No such damage was ever inflicted. "But the fact that it was believed," Robinson comments, "not only by the deluded populace, but also by the Supreme War Lord and his responsible advisors, underlines the role of wishful thinking in determining national policy. Count Zeppelin and his giant creations still held the adoration and devotion of the German people." 107 After more than a year of raids, Peter Strasser, the commander of the naval airships, was only strengthened in his "conviction that England can be overcome by means of airships, inasmuch as the country will be deprived of the means of existence through increasingly extensive destruction of cities, factory complexes, dockyards ••• "108 Strasser's sober military reports soon came to resemble wishful propaganda tracts. In this war of machines, zeppelins were depicted as Germany's wonder

Giant Airships and World Politics

weapon. For seaman Richard Stumpf, the turnip winter of 1917 was bleak. As he was putting his thoughts to paper on 8 February, one of our zeppelins flew over with a thunderous noise. It blew away all my sad thoughts and worries. Its proud shape refreshed my heart and renewed my courage. let the enemy copy this plane (if he can)! ... our factories have excelled themselves in producing something so grand and overwhelmingly powerful ... I fluctuated between two extremes. My imagination and the power of suggestion changed what had earlier seemed so difficult and depressing into dreams of victory. o Zeppelin, please come more often to banish my sadness!

Seamen like Stumpf often saw zeppelins on their way to England and, standing along the rails of their battle cruisers, regarded them as most valuable helpmates. "The enemy is as good as defenseless" against zeppelins and submarines, averred a confident Gottlob Mayer. 109 "Wind raging-waves crashing-motors thundering-machines stamping": the rendezvous of these two killing machines at sea was a favorite image to convey the technological face of the war and the awesome power assembled by the German Reich. 110 Deeper, farther, faster, higher, "tiber alles in der Welt," Germany's arsenal of machines declared German superiority. Pictorial counterparts to already colorful prose, paintings by war artists such as Zeno Diemer depicted zeppelins as virtually invincible weapons. Reproductions in Illustrirte Zeitung, the popular Leipzig weekly, or Illustrierte Geschichte des Weltkrieges, the annual editions ofwhich accompanied the progress of the war, showed the distinctive zeppelin shape looming, hovering over the field of battle. In one Diemer painting, the zeppelin completely dominates the foreground. It is an immense floating platform from which machine gunners easily shoot down attacking biplanes as if simply swatting dragonflies. The town visible below appears utterly helpless. That the streamlined zeppelin itself seemed inaccessible, closed, without showing even a trace of the crew, added to the sense of unknowable, possibly extraterrestrial power. Its path of destruction lit up by glaring one-eyed searchlights, a zeppelin on the cover of Luftwaffe appeared to German readers otherworldly, all-seeing, all-powerful. 111 The reality of the airship venture was much more prosaic than the colorful images of wartime propaganda suggested. Bombing raids were separated by long stretches of inaction while zeppelin crews watched for

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better weather. Airshipmen mostly waited. All the German navy's bombing missions against England, France, and Belgium over the course of the entire war took place on just forty days. lIZ The huge expense of maintaining mostly grounded ships fed growing doubts in the army as to their overall efficiency. Losses at sea due to inclement weather mounted as well. And even at 4,000 meters, zeppelins remained vulnerable to the night-flying pilots of the Royal Air Force. On the night of 1 October 1916, for example, Mathy's high-altitude L 31 was shot down over London and the famous commander and his crew killed, a particularly demoralizing blow. By the end of the year, the army wisely decided to cut its losses, and eventually it discontinued zeppelin attacks entirely. The navy, however, embarked on an ambitious program of outfitting the zeppelins for even higher, more extreme altitudes, up to 5,500 and finally 7,000 meters. More vulnerable to the vagaries of storms and temperature, the colossal "height climbers" inflicted a horrible toll on their shivering, oxygen-starved crews, but did little damage to Britain. Moreover, planes still reached the airship's dizzying altitudes. At 5,500 meters, a twoseater De Haviland 4 shot down the monstrous L 70 at twilight on 5 August 1918; Strasser was aboard and among the 22 men killed. 113 When the war ended, the navy had lost 389 men and 53 of 73 airships, the army 52 men and 26 of 52 ships. About 1,000 men served on airships during the war. The death rate was therefore closer to one-half than one-third; almost as many airshipmen were killed as English men, women, and children (556, according to the London Times of 13 January 1919).114 Given these death rates, which were worse than those among submariners or airplane crews, and the minimal damage inflicted on the enemy, the balance sheet for Germany's airship service was dismal. Few military observers in the 1920S gave the effort high marks; Ernst Lehmann was an exception, arguing that damage to Allied railroads alone justified wartime expenditures on zeppelins. He added an ominous note: "had Germany been set on the wholesale extinction of the British people, had she concentrated her energy upon more zeppelins and submarines, she would have ... very nearly accomplished that purpose." 115 The suggestion was that the overly cautious Bethmann-Hollweg or an irresponsibly temperate Reichstag had blocked an all-out offensive against Allied supply lines and industrial centers. Although a series of concerted surprise attacks might very well have caused considerable damage in 1915, when English defensive measures were limited and the service ceilings of

Giant Airships and World Politics

airplanes still quite low, the potential impact of bombing on a city was greatly exaggerated in the First as in the Second World War. As a strategic air weapon, especially in northern Europe, the zeppelins were not so much the "aerial leviathans" of Lehmann's assessment as fragile, oversized giants, vulnerable to puny "dragon fliers" and North Sea storms, useful only at the beginning of the war as long-range scouts. Most scholars are in substantial agreement with General Ernst von Hoeppner, who was appointed commander of Germany's air force in mid-1916 and quickly dismantled the army's airship service, and suggest that Strasser should have done the same. Perhaps the most ambitious postwar survey was written by Georg Paul Neumann in 1920. Though Neumann was careful to honor the strenuous efforts of airshipmen, he underscored "the vast waste of materiel and personnel" which stood "in no relation to the success that could have been achieved" after 1917. Zeppelin bombing added up to a heedless and wasteful campaign. But Neumann refused to state this explicitly. In his conclusion, he expressed the hope that the tragic story of the zeppelins would show "what German courage and will, (Jerman strength, German endurance and German ability" had achieved. For Neumann and many other postwar commemorators of the airship venture after 1914, virtue gathered only where technology failed. 116 The war years badly frayed the image of the zeppelins as technically perfect (vollkommen) instruments of control. A brave front was maintained. Patriotic sketches rehearsed the confident lines of the prewar years: "This mass! This size! This power! This security! This invincibility!" 117 And as before the war, manufacturers anxiously linked themselves to the technical accomplishments of the zeppelin. "During the most audacious air raids, the absolute reliability of the Zenith carburetor leaves you feeling completely calm and secure," the Zenith Carburetor Company promised in 1917.118 But the actual record of the airships led more and more experts to doubt their military usefulness and technical versatility. Not only were the zeppelins vulnerable to bad weather and high winds over the North Sea or the English Channel and even over landing fields at home, but they offered easy targets to high-flying combat planes. Dissenting voices, easily overlooked in the chorus of enthusiasm for the giant airships, had already expressed doubts about the safety and sturdiness of the zeppelins before the outbreak of war in 1914. Two fatal naval airship disasters in the fall of 19 I 3 should have alerted authorities.

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The Zenith Carburetor Company used the audacious zeppelin raids to sell its products.

Giant Airships and World Politics

But at the time most responses were uncritical and resigned: "Progress does not seem possible without the sacrifice of valuable lives," commented newspaper editors in Duisburg. 119 The inability to admit mistakes, accidents, and tragedies into the worldview of Wilhelmine Germany's confident burghers is what drew the ire of Maximilian Harden, Berlin's lonesome muckraker: 120 Emperor and princes, chancellor and ministers, even newspaper publishers-ali were supposed to be grievously wrong and have actually sharpened the scythe which cut down youth in its prime? In nooks and crannies, doubt lurks ... But there is no will to admit the truth. After all: Berlin is the most beautiful city in the world, Unter den Linden has the best opera house in the world, the Kurfurstendamm the most magnificent movie theater, Behren Street the most elegant bar and the tastiest girls. In this sort of glitter only the most beautiful, the strongest, the most secure, the fastest airship is suitable.

Harden brilliantly exposed the unwillingness of Germans to examine the pretensions of their newly kindled patriotism and demote the "people's favorite," the zeppelin. National esteem and nationalist dreams sustained the airship, after it burned at Echterdingen in 1908, tumbled into the Teutoburger Forest near Bad Iburg in 1910, exploded above Johannisthal in 1913, and ferried hundreds of airshipmen across the North Sea to their deaths in raids against England after 1915. The zeppelin's journeys in the airstream turned increasingly complicated and hazardous during the hardships of war. Even on the ground, the wartime airships, ready at an hour's notice to scout positions or, on exceptional days, to raid the English countryside, required careful care. Large ground crews maintained greedy supplies of water, fuel, and hydrogen gas, serviced the 24o-horsepower Maybach motors, and ceaselessly repaired the aluminum ribbing, gas cells, and fabric exteriors. To refill the gas cells required as much as sixty thousand cubic meters of hydrogen, which had to be manufactured, usually at the airship base itself, and at such a slow rate that bottlenecks often delayed flights. Treacherous winds made landings difficult, although revolving sheds reduced the airships' vulnerability to gusts when crews pulled them in and out. Even so, a number of ships were destroyed by landing crews, and the LZ 60 simply blew away from its moorings in Wilhelmshaven. Once pulled into the giant sheds, the zeppelins were still not completely safe. British air raids destroyed several berthed ships; accidental explosions

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A fragile titan, the Deutschland crashed in Dusseldorf in 1911.

wrecked many more, including five at once in a fiery explosion at the Ahlhorn base in January 1918. Most of the time, the zeppelins sat in their sheds. Short nights made summer raids risky, and fog and inclement weather severely limited the number of winter flights. Northern Europe's mostly overcast skies helped to protect zeppelins from air attacks, but made it difficult to observe stars and take bearings. Radio navigation was still in its infancy, and distortions such as "night effect" were unknown, with the result that the airships were as much as one hundred kilometers off course. One scholar, Jonathan Provan, has carefully charted the night flights of the zeppelins; the plotted courses twist and loop across England. Airship captains usually had no idea where they were. In one instance, Captain Kuno Manger dropped bombs near Birmingham when he thought he was attacking Manchester, 120 kilometers away. Given three different locations (all wrong) one night in September 1916, an exasperated Captain Martin Dietrich learned that "the only certain thing about airship travel is uncer-

Giant Airships and World Politics

tainty." "Back then we dealt with geography in a pretty arbitrary fashion," he admitted. 121 Lost over the English countryside, zeppelins dropped bombs haphazardly, in farmers' fields, on suburban streets. Airshipmen frequently saw fires below, leading them to believe they had scored direct hits on industrial targets, but just as often they had only set fire to the heath. The problem of navigation in heavy clouds was so serious that Freiherr von Gemmingen, Graf Zeppelin's nephew, designed the famous Spiihkorb, a reverse periscope to see below the cloud cover. This compact unit, which hung almost a kilometer below the veiled airship, was manned by an observer who called up sightings by telephone. Although rejected by Strasser on account of its weight, the Spiihkorb indicated how technically baroque the airships turned out to be. Their elegant cigar shape broken up by weird additions, zeppelins hardly resembled the "last word" in aviation technology. Without accurate weather forecasts, which only came with the development of regular airline routes later in the 1920S, zeppelins set out blindly on flights that lasted twenty or more hours. Unexpected storms lashed at the airships, forcing many to turn back. If a zeppelin encountered strong winds on its return trip from England, the lives of the crew were endangered, since fuel reserves were kept as low as possible to reduce weight. Even moderate winds from an unfavorable direction menaced the success of flights. Ice or heavy rain also added weight, occasionally forcing airships to perilously low altitudes where they were vulnerable to attack. Given this record, the zeppelins were seldom masters of the air. Bitterly cold winter weather at three or four thousand meters turned gruesome as the zeppelins ascended higher and higher to escape counterattacks by English biplanes. In 1917, the L 55 reached an altitude of 7,300 meters, a world record. But at these altitudes, the Maybach motors functioned only at two-thirds capacity, crippling the mobility of the zeppelins. High-altitude northerly gales wrecked or forced down five slowmoving zeppelins one night in October 1917. Winter temperatures at 6,000 meters fell below - 33 degrees centigrade. It was so cold it was impossible to provision the crew of twenty properly. Chocolate and bread, which froze rock-solid at high altitudes, had to be broken into small bits before each flight and each piece later melted slowly in the mouth. Brandy was occasionally made available once a certain height had been reached. Even so, airshipmen constantly struggled to stay warm and rigged their own "height suits." First they

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rubbed their bodies with frostbite ointment and then pulled on woolen underclothes, a windbreaking garment of tissue paper, the navy's blue uniform, a leather overcoat, perhaps a life jacket, and finally a fur coat. For all this effort, cold, stiff joints continued to slow reactions and impair performance. The altitude itself also took its toll on the crews. At 5,000 meters, compressed oxygen was made available to airshipmen, but it was often so impure that men became violently ill, gasping for breath at perilous heights. Compressed oxygen was eventually replaced with liquid air. The flasks were placed at one or two stations, to which fatigued crew members had to grope in the dark. Moreover, the mouthpiece often tasted like fuel and caused bouts of vomiting. Men lost consciousness in the rarified air, and they bled from their noses and ears. Misery did not end when the ship descended. Terrified crew members did not even remember thinking of their bodily functions in flight. But once the ships landed, the crew ran to the toilets; the warmer air had begun to melt the clump of excrement and blood that the cold had hardened during the long flight. I22 The suffering crews not only endured twenty-hour flights but had to constantly maintain the hard-pressed machinery. Cold weather mauled the motors. First Lieutenant Hans Eisenbeck remembered one winter flight to the eastern front just after Christmas 1916. Subzero temperatures thickened the machine oil so that it no longer flowed into the engines. The L 38's flight machinist decided to haul the heavy oil containers to the gondolas where they could be warmed and to supply the Maybach engines with oil by hand, a strenuous job in the dark bitter cold. However, the intake of oil was so irregular that the spark plugs had to be replaced. To do this, the crew shut the six engines off, which caused the coolant to freeze in two of them. The captain had no choice but to bring the zeppelin to a lower, warmer altitude. But in the cloud cover a heavy sheet of ice, 15 to 25 centimeters thick, formed against the hull, weighing down the airship even more and impairing the altitude rudder. Slowly the L 38 made its way back to Ahlhorn, tilting at 15 degrees. The forward propellers whipped pieces of ice against the ship, puncturing gas cells in the stern. Ice also fragmented one propeller, so that a third motor fell out of service. With only three motors left, the ship no longer had the power to move forward and only slid upward at a steeper and steeper angle. To avoid a catastrophe, the remaining motors were shut off, causing the ship to descend rapidly; the crew threw all possible ballast overboard to regain the ability to steer. The descent was still too fast, and the ship hit the

Giant Airships and World Politics

water hard before becoming airborne again. The L 38 finally crashed into an East Elbian pine forest and was abandoned. These sorry circumstances were relieved, however, when the crew was transferred to Friedrichshafen to pick up the L 42, on which they made "a series of nice journeys to England." 123 Enemy fire was as dangerous as winter storms. One airshipman recalled hovering over an English city. Hundreds of artillery shells exploded, mostly below the ship. Caught by a half-dozen searchlights, Pitt Klein's ship was lit up so brightly that the crew could easily have read books. Suddenly the ship lost power in two engines and fell 1,000 meters into the sea of shrapnel and only barely escaped. 124 Night skies were also illuminated by the eerie explosions of friendly airships. Crew members on the L 42 witnessed the fiery destruction of the L 48:125 The airplane appears to slither over the zeppelin. It is as certain of its task as a spider waiting in ambush. Then we hear what sounds like the long rat-a-tat-tat of the machine gun. It is impossible; no more miracles. Those guys have to start making out their wills. Now! Now! The airship suddenly begins to glow bright yellow-red. A darting flame shoots out of the hull. Then a fine smoke creeps over the ship, the stern drops, and the ship plunges down into the depths. It is a column of fire, like a meteor hissing out of the heavens. They are finished over there.

In fact, the L 48 fell slowly, kept buoyant by gas cells that remained intact. In a harrowing story that sounds more like an unbelievable turn-of-thecentury carnival attraction, three men survived the free fall of 55,400 cubic meters of burning hydrogen from 4,000 meters. 126 The zeppelin flew at the very edge of technological possibility. There was a certain romance in exploring this borderland. More than a dozen books recollected the zeppelins' wartime adventures and echoed the same refrain: "the audacious maneuver is successful!" or "it worked!" But success was only partially a question of skill and fortitude. Again and again, airshipmen agreed that they had simply been lucky. Survivors telling their harrowing stories invariably concluded: "It is a wonder that ..." Even for a fully functioning airship, conceded one veteran, "London is a race against death." 127 Rolf Marben called raids across the channel a "lottery with our lives." "Everyone knew that in the next hours a single, tiny incendiary bullet could turn the ship into a flaming torch." To Mar-

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ben, the destruction of the L 48 was somehow foreseen; he described the airship as doomed and floating in the air like a corpse. Rather than exercising dominion over nature, zeppelins fought a losing battle against not only enemy fire but the North Atlantic's inclement weather. The story of their wartime service is one of unequaled vulnerability and failure: nights were "pitiless"; battles were "horrible"; "heaven and earth are alive to destroy us." 128 The failure of technology bred its own heroism. Participation in the flights was entirely voluntary, and, veterans report, the crews clamored for action, sustained by nervous excitement and "intimate comradeship." Not even the heavy losses at the end of 1916 demoralized the crews. Pitt Klein remembered their fervor: "Success is still possible if we commit ourselves completely to duty and demand of ourselves even more discipline, composure, and cold-bloodedness." Precisely because they were technologically imperfect, airships demanded will and perseverance and thus made possible the display of German virtues. Werner von Langsdorffbelieved the missions were "difficult, but wonderful," wonderful because difficult. 129 One scholar even argues that Strasser, the admiral in command of the navy's airship service, was aware of the zeppelins' severe limitations but believed they still offered Germany a small advantage in 1916 and 1917. Strasser believed it was his duty to wrestle this advantage, despite all difficulties. This is a heroic picture of Strasser, battling the failure of technology for the sake of duty and fatherland. In this view, Germany's wonder weapon is not the airship, but the sharp minds and courageous spirits who serve the obsolete, breakable machines. The evidence is entirely circumstantial and relies on the memoirs of Strasser's correspondents. Official memoranda, by contrast, all show a Strasser fanatic in his confidence in the airships. Nonetheless, the overall argument makes sense. By the end of the war, the value of the zeppelins rested not in the mastery of men over nature and not in the harm inflicted on the English, but in the virtues of service and courage that the airships called forth. At the end of the war, Germany celebrated airshipmen, not airships; resolve in the face of technology, not the power of technology; the aesthetic of struggle and defeat, not dominion; and so had completely reversed itself on the zeppelins. The giants regarded as the zenith of modernityafter 1908 had become the very measure of Wilhelmine exaggeration by 1918.130

THE IMAGE OF THE WAR ACE

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If Germany's immense zeppelins ended the war as mastodons, doomed to extinction, highlighting the bravery of German airshipmen but also revealing the false confidence and bravado of the Wilhelmine years, airplanes seemed to belong to a more prosperous epoch of technological precision and enterprise. In the postwar years, planes and pilots served as forceful images of national prosperity. It was the First World War which completely recast the way Europeans looked at airplanes. The prewar flying machines that had been regarded as wondrous, so out of the ordinary that the overhead drawl of a wooden propeller sent people rushing into the streets, eventually came to be accepted as everyday. But wartime aviation gave that acceptance a new sensibility. By the end of the war, pilots and passengers took the reliability of 200horsepower motors for granted, merchants and statesmen eagerly awaited the day when regular airline links would stitch together the continents, and neighbors feared the eerie whistle and siren announcing the aerial bombardier. The coming air age posed tough requirements, to be sure, but also offered a regenerate and auspicious future for those nations willing to meet its terms. In the first year of the war, Georg Wegener, war correspondent for the Kiilnische Zeitung, flew as an observer over the western front. In rapturous, dramatic detail he described the biplane's turbulent takeoff. The mechanic threw the propeller into gear; "the machine shuddered all over," shaking Wegener "to his fingertips." Then, "all at once, the motor turned over," but "with angry impatience." Wegener could hear nothing except the "wild roar" of the propeller. For all this noise, the plane strained to take off. "The contraption swayed back and forth a bit," efforts which reminded the bemused passenger of a young stork learning to fly. But, "as if he sensed my disrespect, he raised his voice ... it was thunder! It was tremendous ... the noise and power of a hundred lions." The airplane began to leap in long strides along the grass runway, this time like a 59

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"leopard hunting antelope." The wheels hit the grass two or three more times before the plane finally left the ground. Exhilarated, a little frightened, Wegener took off when flying was still an uncertain adventure, and his overworked language struggled to suit the proud achievement. 1 Two years later, Adolf Victor von Koerber recounted a very different flight. His smooth-running machine bore little resemblance to the wild, impetuous beast described by Wegener. Firmly in the hands of the pilot, its power was regulated and constant: "The motor belts out its song of iron, drowning out everything else, and the propeller ... pulls the machine in a tearing flight onto the plane of battle." 2 Koerber's Albatros was the shape of things to come. In the last two years of the war, squadrons of fighter pilots took off in reliable and highly maneuverable one-seater AIbatros biplanes. A compact and streamlined plane, outfitted with a 160horsepower water-cooled Mercedes engine, the Albatros D was "a perfect fighting machine," according to one historian. 3 Built to the stern requirements of aerial warfare, it could roll, climb, and dive at high speeds and cruise at 170 kilometers per hour at 7,000 meters. And like the Fokker monoplane it replaced, the Albatros featured a forward-firing machine gun that fired through the propeller. Rather than an airborne ship, from which warriors might fire a gun or drop a bomb, the fighter plane had evolved into a specialized and deadly flying missile for which the direction of flight and the trajectory of fire were the same. This economy was a far cry from the frail planes with which belligerents made do in the summer of 1914. For the first year of the war, the worst enemies of German pilots were not Allied planes or artillery fire, but inclement weather and the structural weaknesses of the planes themselves. Pilots did not dare execute certain maneuvers for fear of damaging the rudder, shredding the canvas exterior, or ripping the stay wires between the wings. The 1910 death of Geo Chavez, the Peruvian airman whose wires snapped during a steep glide moments after he became the first person to fly over the Alps, reminded fliers how close to mortal catastrophe technical accomplishment remained. For the first year of the war, German military aviation was little more than cautious and haphazard reconnaissance, carried out in the 250 planes (including scores of antiquated Taube monoplanes) that were fit for active service. At first, airmen did little more than observe, though many packed along rifles and pistols to take potshots. Even after machine guns were mounted in the rear, several problems remained. Communication between pilot and gun-

The Image of the War Ace

ner proved difficult, the structure of the plane obstructed the line of fire, and direct kills of enemy aircraft were therefore infrequent. In the first seasons of the World War, the airplane did not have an offensive capacity. Technologies of bombing also began in a primitive state. The war had opened with German pilots dropping hand grenades and small explosives over the sides of their Tauben, more to irritate than decimate enemy troops below, but it ended with wings of four- and five-engined "Giants" unloading thousands of kilograms of bombs over London. By the last year of the war, multi-engined, steel-hulled bombers were the last word in war technology, and their size awed observers. One visitor to the air base at Doberitz stressed the novelty and precision of the machines. Despite rain and fog, the "Giant" "rolled soundlessly into place with military exactness, to the centimeter." "There it stands, massive, and doesn't move at all in the gusts of rain that lash against it." "Giant" was no misnomer. Its wingspan was over forty meters and it could carry a crew of up to nine men. It was almost as large as World War II's "Flying Fortress," the B 17. This sight was as fearsome as it was overwhelming: "My thoughts are racing around," the visitor reported, "and always return to England." Powered by four 24s-horsepower Maybach engines, the monstrous bomber had a range of 500 kilometers and carried up to 1,000 kilograms of bombs, which in the last year of the war did more damage and killed more civilians than Strasser's zeppelins. Standing on the cold, rainsoaked airfield, Walter Ostwald imagined the terror of the victims. "It must be terrible to be powerless, impotent against these monsters, which are like giant bats escaped from the underworld. In the black night, they are invisible, inaudible." "Giants" provided yet another confirmation that "German science and German ability" are "victorious over the entire world," Ostwald concluded. Militarism required technology.4 It was in the years 1917 and 1918 that Germany inaugurated strategic bombingalthough shortages of raw materials and fuel limited the reach of bombardiers and left Ostwald's bold assertion unrealized-missions that burrowed into the black nightmares of the twentieth century. Thanks to the industrialization of the ways and means of killing, the Great War became the first in which most soldiers who died were killed in combat, choked by specially designed poisonous gases, raked by automatic machine-gun fire, torn apart by bombs and shells. In the decades to come, crippled veterans along streets in Paris, Berlin, and London lingered as brutalized reminders of the technology of war. English "Pal"

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battalions aptly dubbed the war the "Great Sausage Machine." Although the happy marriage between technology and progress was not completely wrecked at the war's end, since the promise of technocracy was widely accepted in the 1920S and 1930S, images of technology no longer conveyed unalloyed beneficence. Largely as a result of the war, feelings of dread and helplessness now mingled with optimism, and temptations of social engineering and domination impinged on more conventional visions of progress. In August 1914, the war mobilized not just men but also machines. Pointing to the thousands of motorized tanks, precision machine guns, and fighter planes that had been deployed during four years of war, Ernst Junger described the conflagration as a "storm of steel." These machines had changed the nature of war and would recast the nature of postwar society. In what amounted to a shelf of books written during the 1920S, Junger explored how the war had hammered and retooled the continent and had given new shape and harsh rationality to metropolitan space, industrial organization, and political power. He returned again and again to aviation and aviators in his reporting of this new and vigorous barbaric face of the twentieth century. Europe's warriors were modern-day conquistadors, discovering and making a New World. Behind German lines, the noise of this conquest was clearly audible to Junger: "It is a wonderful June night. The sky is black and pricked out with a thousand stars ... The rifles and helmets clink together in the lorries. The engines sing the wild song of energy and tune our nerves more sharply than any march." The assembled power was overwhelming. A plane buzzed overhead. In a moment, "the searchlights' trembling arms explore the dark vault ... light rockets are discharged one after another, and even machine guns send out swarms of deadly glow-worms." As it was, the airplane, "dancing like a pretty butterfly among flame-throwers," eluded the artillery fire. Nevertheless, that June night Junger recognized that armies had never been "more dangerously, more terribly armed." 5 What struck him was the immense realm of possibility that the war had opened up. As Junger's botanical metaphors suggested, technology had evolved into a natural order or "second nature." It was literally alive and invested with insurgent, living power that would shape and reshape postwar Europe; the therapy of machines had left the material, political, and spiritual constructions of the continent labile and unstable. ''A new ardour, a new energy inspires life," Junger asserted; "the men who today are behind the machine guns will tomorrow

The Image of the War Ace

be in industry, carrying their tempo into the markets and the large towns, creating the political situation and giving the world a new face." 6 Jiinger conceded that most soldiers were passive victims in this "demoniac strife," unable to help themselves or master the machines that destroyed them. He subscribed to the conventional notion that industrial war reduced men to unheroic victims. For this reason, he had little sympathy with Frontschweine in the trenches. They were powerless and therefore not completely realized beings. But to focus only on mass armies and anonymous death, the dominant images of the Great War, was to obscure the most consequential products of the conflict, the minority of machine builders whom war had invigorated and empowered: "the men who lead the storm troop, and manipulate the tank, the aeroplane, and the submarine." 7 For Jiinger these men constituted "a new and commanding breed ... fearless and fabulous ... a race that builds machines and trusts machines." 8 Machines required workers, mechanics, and engineers to engage them and demanded from these masters a new measure of skill and courage. It is clear that Jiinger did not see a contradiction between machines and the masculine ideal. Air forces or oceangoing navies themselves were not as important as "the fire, the might, the pitiless will that machines have created" in twentieth-century men. 9 This comprehension of modem technology is distinctly Jungerian. It not only reconciled Nietzsche with industry but made Nietzschean virtue dependent on the mobilization of the industrial arsenal. The new face that war had given to Europe was represented perhaps most faithfully by the pilot and aviator. Airmen were the new men whom Jiinger celebrated in the 1920S: "this ideal type in overalls, with a face hewn in stone under a leather cap. Duty and service, intelligence and talent, character and heart gave this young face its features early on." 10 ButJunger was ambivalent about exactly what sort of men pilots were. On the one hand, he lauded the aristocratic virtues that war in the air preserved. Only in the air, he pointed out, was a chivalrous duel still possible, and only in the air did virtues of honor and respect among warriors still prevail. The life of airmen was also privileged. Short battles interrupted a pleasant routine on the ground. Junger imagined victorious pilots "leaving their machines to the mechanics and throwing themselves into easy chairs, having breakfast and reading the paper." On the airfield and in the casinos there was little of the "daily wearisome labor" that brutalized infantrymen in the trenches. 11 On the other hand, Junger recognized the sons of workers among air-

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men. Many pilots had been "reared in the centers of modem industry ... [their] faces have the imprint of hard fact. The ardour of speed, the tempo of the manufactory, the poetry of steel and reinforced concrete have been the natural surroundings of their childhood ... They are thoroughly accustomed to the enhancement of life by the machine." 12 Combining "hearts of fire" with "brains of steel," a "burning fever" with the "agile and iron clarity required to master complicated hundredhorsepower motors," these worker-warriors did not at all resemble less Spartan, less barbarous, less interesting aristocrats. 13 Both images, however, attracted Junger's attention. Indeed, nostalgia for imagined preindustrial virtue may even have prompted Junger to undertake his careful exploration of the industrial landscape. And both images, the familiar knight in the air and the steeled machine-man, figured in popular ideas about the fighter pilot. Building the Ace

The Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen; Billy Bishop; Eddie Rickenbacker; Georges Guynemer: the names of World War I flying aces are more familiar today than those of World War I generals. The ace in combat is an immediately recognizable image. In control of his fate, handling his airplane with great courage and skill but also with an envied recklessness, the aviator appeared to be a genuine war hero, comparable to cavalrymen in Napoleon's era or chivalrous knights in the Middle Ages. Beginning in 19 I 5, aces found themselves lionized as hugely popular celebrities, particularly in France and Germany. And after the war, a steady stream of hagiography enhanced their heroic status. To this day, myths opposing the individual, distinctive combat of the aces to the industrial mass war on the ground remain deeply embedded in Western folklore. But young pilots did not simply climb into a biplane, fly above the anonymous death of trench warfare, and land glamorously in the history books. Many aviators were not pilots but mechanics and observers, and most pilots did not fly one-seater fighter planes. The demands of military reconnaissance required hundreds of heavier biplanes, which carried an observer as well as a pilot. Air forces also included artillery spotters, infantry strafers, heavy bombers, and training machines. Indeed, it was not until 1915 that individual aces really began to make their mark. And by

The Image of the War Ace

1918, solo sorties were much too dangerous and had given way almost completely to carefully executed group missions. Despite their enduring fame, aces were the creation of a specific stage of air war. Boelcke, Immelmann, and the others were not prototypes of a new twentieth-century aerial chevalier. Strategists devalued their importance in the doctrinal debates in the 1920S, and solo aces did not return to play the same role or enjoy the same adulation in the Second World War as they had in the First. Already by the end of the Great War it was clear that airmen were as much the products of industrial warfare as the masses of infantrymen in the trenches. Like the other great-power belligerents, Germany entered the war deprecating the value of the airplane. Ignoring the recommendations of the General Staff, the War Ministry did little to explore the military applications of aviation. Berlin's "almost mystical" confidence in the Prussian infantry overlooked the usefulness of air forces, and when strategists thought about air war they usually thought about airships. As a result, in August 1914, planes were regarded as little more than secondary helpmates of the cavalry in tactical reconnaissance. Here and there, prewar military theorists recognized the airplane's potential for carrying out long-distance scouting and strategic bombing missions, but these ideas were not widely accepted. 14 Given these conditions, it is not surprising that mobilization orders in August 1914 did not define the precise role that military aviators were to play. The result was ill-conceived placement of airfields in August 19 1 4, which led to costly accidents and unnecessary casualties, and to illdefined or wasteful scouting missions. Army corps often simply filed away the reconnaissance information that intrepid pilots managed to discover. As the fall offensive progressed, however, corps commanders came to rely more and more on aerial reconnaissance. Airplanes also usefully served the artillery, spotting targets and directing fire, especially once the introduction of the wireless in December 1914 facilitated ground-to-air communication. At the same time, the Germans organized a strategic bombing wing in Ostende, although its promise was never realized. 15 At the end of 1914, by the time the immobile war of attrition ended the usefulness of the cavalry, military aviation had established itself as a vital and necessary technology. The General Staff accordingly reorganized the command structure of aviation units and rationalized purchasing from the aviation industry.16 The Allies mobilized as well. French aerial scouts

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provided critical reconnaissance during the Battle of the Marne, and British bombardiers targeted industrial centers and even bombed the zeppelin works in Friedrichshafen. Given the rapid deployment of planes as scouts, artillery spotters, and bombers, both sides became increasingly concerned with shooting enemy aircraft out of friendly skies. By the beginning of 1915, machine guns were standard equipment on a new series of more stable and powerful biplanes, the first step toward a specialized fighter capacity. The sturdy German C-planes featured a ring-mounted machine gun for the observer in the rear. Although the gun was both stable and highly maneuverable, its line of fire was obstructed by the structure of the plane. To get an enemy plane in his sights, the gunner constantly had to shout abbreviated directions to the pilot, who was usually a lower-ranked noncommissioned officer and merely served as "chauffeur," an arrangement which quickly proved cumbersome. As a result, the Germans were outclassed by the Allies, who in early 1915 depended largely on slower "pusher" planes, whose advantage was a free-firing machine gun mounted in front of the propeller. Both the Allies, whose Vickers Gun Bus and Farman pushers sacrificed speed to achieve forward firing, and the Germans, whose faster machines made awkward fighters, continued to cast about for a single-seater that would combine a forward-firing gun with aircraft speed and maneuverability. The morale of German airmen dipped in the winter of 1915 when the Allies plucked more and more observation planes out of the sky. In the first spring of the World War, in early April 1915, a single Frenchman, Roland Garros, brought down three German planes in two days. His unprecedented fifth victory a few days later electrified Paris, and publicitymakers in the French capital awarded him the accolade "as." From then on any pilot with five victories earned the unofficial designation of "ace." Garros achieved his rapid-fire kills not in a pusher plane but in a speedy one-seater Morane-Saulnier monoplane specially fitted with a forwardmounted machine gun that shot through the revolving propeller. In a flash of insight, the manufacturer Raymond Saulnier had calculated that only about one in thirteen bullets would strike the propeller blades and ricochet away from the target. To keep the blades from splintering, Saulnier wrapped the edges with steel, which deflected the bullets. The result was a prototype of a specialized fighter plane in the hands of a single pilot who aimed the machine gun by aiming the aircraft.

The Image of the War Ace

Combat planes no longer had to be slow pushers or shuddering platforms for wild, badly aimed bursts of machine-gun fire, but evolved into missiles of unprecedented and deadly accuracy. Lighter, more maneuverable one-seaters replaced two-seaters, a change that greatly enhanced the role of the pilot, who was now more likely to be an officer responsible for both the plane and the gun. A lone airman entered combat, fought with skill and luck, and if victorious won the accolades of a patriotic public. A combination of technology and tactics created the legendary war ace. Garros's celebrity status was short-lived, however. He was shot down as he passed over enemy lines on 19 April 1915, and his Morane was retrieved by German troops before he had a chance to set it on fire. The only industrialist in Germany who built lightweight one-seater monoplanes like the Morane was the Dutch engineer Anthony Fokker, and it was therefore Fokker whom the General Staff asked to copy Saulnier's gun device. Convinced that the exposure of the propeller to even a small percentage of bullets was too dangerous, especially if the number of revolutions or machine-gun rounds per minute increased, Fokker set to work on an interrupting device which would keep even a single bullet from hitting the fast-moving blades. Aviation buffs debate whether it was Fokker, his mechanic, or an earlier inventor who conceived of the synchronizing gear, but it was Fokker who constructed it, and little more than a month after Garros was shot down he demonstrated the new weapon to military officials. Fokker's device was remarkably simple. When the pilot fired, a cam on the revolving propeller shaft tripped the machine gun, keeping the bullets clear of the blades; the gun and engine had become a single machine. By August 1915, two young pilots, Oswald Boelcke and Max Immelmann, had tested Fokker one-seaters fitted with a sychronized forward-firing machine gun in combat, had brought down a number of Allied planes, and had earned for themselves the "wildest enthusiasm" of the German High Command. 17 Even though the Fokker E.I, with its 8o-horsepower Oberursel engine, achieved a top speed of only 130 kilometers per hour and cannot be considered a high-performance plane, the forward-firing gun gave it a margin of maneuverability and invincibility which the Allies could not match. Assigned only to the best pilots, one-seater Fokkers were distributed along the front to protect slower two-seater observation planes. But a number of pilots also used Fokkers more offensively, breaking away

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This 1916 Fokker advertisement shows the pilot, the gun, and the airplane as parts of a single machine.

The Image of the War Ace

from escort missions in ones and twos, stalking Allied bombers and observation planes, and drilling them with machine-gun fire from behind. It was these victories that made Boelcke and Immelmann popular heroes before the year was out. Deadly only because the Allies had not yet discovered the secret of the synchronizing gear, the Fokkers gained a menacing reputation out of proportion with their numbers or technical virtuosity. This unhappy state of affairs led one Member of Parliament to describe British airmen as "Fokker Fodder." For the rest of I 9 I 5 and the first months of 1916, as long as they monopolized the forward-firing gun, the Germans enjoyed superiority in the air. 18 Despite the best of precautions to keep the Fokkers behind German lines lest they crash and fall into Allied hands, early in 1916 a Fokker stumbled westward across the front in heavy fog and landed undamaged on a French airfield. Twenty-four hours later the plane was in Paris. In a matter of months, a new series of Allied biplanes, the highly maneuverable Sopwith I Yz Strutter and the Nieuport, both vastly superior to the Fokker monoplane, featured synchronized machine guns. Their appearance in the spring and Immelmann's death in a Fokker that broke up in the air on 18 June 1916 ended the almost year-long ascendancy of the slow, unstable monoplane. Although the Germans quickly constructed maneuverable biplanes, the Halberstadt D-2 and later the sleek Albatros D- I, which was perhaps the best one-seater of the war, industrial output lagged, and by the summer of 19 I 6 the more numerous British and French machines easily regained air superiority. The dramatic reversal of German fortunes was confirmed during the Battle of the Somme. In July and August 1916, hundreds of Allied planes strafed German trenches and bombed munition dumps and transportation networks in the rear. German morale frayed badly. "One hardly dares to be seen in the trench, owing to the English aeroplanes," wrote one German infantryman at the Somme. "They fly so low that it is a wonder they do not pull men right out of the trenches." The infantry felt under constant observation and grew panicky and nervous. Wild rumors spread through the trenches. Artillery gunners regarded Allied planes as invincible and gave up shooting at them altogether. All the while, the soldier continued in a voice heavy with sarcasm, "nothing is to be seen of our German hero airmen." 19 Every plane that passed overhead was identified as hostile. Men ran for cover even when the plane had German markings, which were taken to be an Allied ruse. What most worried German military observers was not the material destruction Allied aircraft caused be-

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hind the lines, but. the demoralization their flyovers generated in the ranks of the infantry. 20 In the words of Hans Ritter, a historian of air power in the 1920S, the Battle of the Somme was a crucial turning point. It "hammered the importance of air superiority" into the considerations of the German General Staff. Without a capable air force, friendly artillery could not be properly directed, hostile artillery positions were left undetected, and the infantry was exposed to grueling rounds of enemy strafing. Under these conditions, Ritter argued, the "crisis of nerves" among the troops had been "unavoidable." 21 Accordingly, the General Staff moved quickly to bolster Germany's air forces. On 8 October 1916 it appointed Ernst Wilhelm von Hoeppner, formerly the army's ChiefofField Aviation, as General in Command of the Air Forces, responsible only to the General Staff. Hoeppner's promotion was the culmination of the development of an independent air arm, to the consternation of both the army and the navy. At the same time, Chief of Staff Hindenburg committed Germany to a massive buildup of the air forces. The General Staff, convinced that superiority in the air was vital to victory on the ground, approved production plans to increase the air force by half, to some 2,322 planes, with emphasis on the manufacture of new one-seater fighters and heavier bombers. Factory capacity expanded dramatically, reaching 900 deliveries in December 1916, but slipped to 400 in January 1917 as a result of persistent shortages of coal, raw materials, and skilled workers. Although the Hindenburg Program fell short of its goals, it delivered the Albatros biplane 0-5, Germany's new standard fighter, in sufficient numbers to maul the British air force in "Bloody April" 1917. Poor planning and material shortages kept Germany from fighting a total war in the air, but these inadequacies should not obscure the fact that Germany had largely achieved strategic parity with the numerically superior Allied forces in 19 17. 22 The restoration of parity was not simply a matter of building more machines, but also of deploying them properly. Already during the Battle of the Somme, Oswald Boelcke, the Reich's most famous ace, argued that the only way to throw back the hundreds of Allied planes making their way in ones and twos across German lines was to bunch five or six fighter planes into hunting squadrons or Jagdstaffeln (Jastas). Not chained to a particular area or reconnaissance mission, a highly mobile fighter squadron could achieve local air supremacy, moving from one airfield to another as circumstances demanded. Such mobile groups of one-seater

The Image of the War Ace

fighters, Boelcke believed, could counter the superior Allied numbers. His arguments persuaded Hoeppner, and by the end of 19 16 33 Jastas along the western front had contained the Allied air barrage. The responsibility of Jasta fighters was exclusively offensive. Their purpose was to seek out and destroy enemy aircraft. Whereas Boelcke and Immelmann had hung about in the skies in 1915 and early 1916, waiting for British or French planes to pass, Jastas patrolled particular areas or remained on the ground until observers on the front lines identified hostile aircraft and telephoned in their bearings. Air superiority was no longer a matter of coincidence and luck, but the result of careful calculation. 23 The creation ofJ astas in the late summer of 1916 marked the beginning of classic aerial warfare. The business of fighting, now distinguished from that of bombing or reconnaissance, quickly developed characteristic weaponry, the one-seater biplane outfitted with two synchronized forward-firing maching guns, and a specialized combatant, the fighter ace. The Jastas bred a new kind of airman. Rudolf Stark remembered being transferred into a Jasta. Stark had previously flown heavy two-seaters: "The battles we fought were defensive ones, thrust on us by necessity." For a fighter scout, however, "battle is the main objective. He rejoices in battle." 24 Boelcke hammered the tactics of aggressive aerial warfare into his squadron again and again. The primary responsibility of the J astas was to destroy observation planes and bombers as well as the scouts that accompanied them. Attacks were best carried out from above and behind enemy aircraft. To shoot down an artillery spotter or observation plane was not difficult. The Albatros biplanes which made up most Jastas by the second half of 1916 were faster than any two-seater, especially in diving and climbing. Encounters with enemy one-seater scouts demanded more skill, however. Since the fixed machine guns on fighter planes faced forward, airmen always attempted to attack the rear and, at the same time, took care not to expose their own defenseless tails. To adjust the line of fire or evade a pursuer, scouts would dive and turn and climb in an attempt to get behind their attacker. Aerial combat frequently turned into a classic duel between two pilots who circled, looped, and climbed around each other. Richthofen described a dramatic confrontation with the British ace Lanoe Hawker: It did not take long before one dove for me, trying to catch me from behind. After a burst of five shots the sky fellow had to stop, for I was already in a sharp left curve. The Englishman attempted to get behind

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me while I attempted to get behind him. So it went, both of us flying like madmen in a circle, with engines running fullout at threethousand-meter altitude. First left, then right, each intent on getting above and behind the other ... He had a very maneuverable crate, but mine climbed better, and I finally succeeded in coming in above and behind him.

In the end, Richthofen forced Hawker down to his death, about fifty meters behind German lines. 25 For Jasta pilots, the sky took on new meaning as a realm of ambition and destruction. Above the western front stretched an immense hunting ground, "a real EI Dorado" for fighter pilots, marveled Boelcke. 26 The autumn of 1916 was an exuberant time, recalled Richthofen, who joined Boelcke's Jasta 2 that August: "the first Englishmen came very early in the morning, and the last disappeared long after the sun had gone down." 27 Even clouds were viewed from a fighter's perspective. Reconnaissance pilots, who flew direction to a particular destination, hated clouds. For Georg Haupt-Heydemarck, "flying through thick clouds is the most fearsome business I can imagine. After a little while one loses all sense of equilibrium." 28 More mobile scouts, on the other hand, sought refuge along the edges of cloud formations, using them as cover for surprise attacks. Once assigned to a Jasta, Heydemarck described clouds as a fighter pilot would see them-as friendly "pads" or "formations" and "veils" to hide behind: "When we had climbed above the belt of haze I had a good view of the cloud ceiling that was forming. The wisps were thickening into soft veils, but the wind tore them apart again and pounded their fragments into loose balls. These ... could not retain their forms, but coalesced into huge pads." 29 To stay alive, pilots required not only considerable skill and a fightingman's eye but also a reliable machine that could maintain speed and stability in tight maneuvers. Pilots had to know the capacities of their machines: how fast the plane could be pushed in a variety of dives before a wing or tail broke off; how fast it climbed; or how well it handled in controlled spins and sideslips. Airmen also had to know how to quickly repair jammed machine guns, even in the heat of battle with heavy clothing and gloves. Squadron leaders such as Boelcke tried to reproduce the conditions of battle on the ground and trained their men repeatedly. It was not surprising that scouts quickly developed an almost personal relation to their machines. To Erwin Bohme one-seaters seemed "alive, sentient

The Image of the War Ace

beings, who understand what the pilot wants." "One no longer has the feeling that one is sitting at the controls of a plane," he added; "rather it is as if there is spiritual contact." 30 Again and again, fighter pilots were defined by their intimacy with the one-seater that had given them such a distinctive role. Richthofen acquired his nom de guerre, the Red Baron, after he painted his Albatros D-3 bright red. Boelcke regarded his Albatros as like a "brother," wrote panegyrist Rudolf Gottschalk. Man and machine merged into one, each lending qualities to the other. One journalist described Boelcke as half terrifYing machine, halfwarm-hearted German. The eyes of the ace drew his attention first: "Two clear blue eyes fastened themselves on me ... examining me ... like searchlights." Then Boelcke's face unlocked and he became a recognizable German: "The handsome, brave, and proud face suddenly breaks into a smile ... he shakes off all the honors and the praise I want to bestow with a little movement of his head, with a slight shrug of his shoulders, with a wonderful, graceful motion of his hands." 31 As for Richthofen, he was described by one poet as "half knight and half scythe." 32 Air war in 1916 had created a single weapon out of pilot and machine, the modernfuror teutonicus. 33 The bold, simple lines of a Fokker advertisement illustrated the complete realization of the World War I ace, in which the machine enhanced the man. 34 Jasta tactics made the pilot a self-reliant fighter and turned the skies into a hunter's paradise. Almost every mission ended in an air fight; for a time, in September 1916, Boelcke was shooting down one or two English planes every day. In the five weeks between the formation ofJ asta 2 and his death on 28 October 1916, Boelcke brought the number of his victories from twenty to an astonishing forty. Bohme, Richthofen, and other Staffel members swelled their totals as well, though not nearly as rapidly as their squadron leader. Once again, the morale of the Allied air forces buckled. In September, for example, the British and French lost 123 aircraft over the battlefields of the Somme, while the Germans lost only 27. The next month, the figures remained lopsided: 88 Allied planes to 12 German. Given the greater than two-to-one numerical superiority of the Allies, the Germans did indeed seem to fight quantity with quality, as Richthofen boasted. 35 Writing just three years after the war, Ernst von Hoeppner concluded of the Battle of the Somme: "If the Entente was not able to drive us from the air ... it was due to the devoted and heroic spirit of our aviators." Air war demanded self-reliance and skill, but also

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"nerves of steel and youth's scorn of danger, together with a deep sense of responsibility." 36 It was this notion of quality, not simply better J asta machines and Jasta tactics, but superior character somehow inhering in the new airmen themselves, that lent itself to war propaganda and provided the building blocks to construct the mythical figure of the ace. The Folklore of the Ace The ace was the product of the changing terms of air war, in which a single airman flew a one-seater scout as an airborne gun. There was no such thing as an "ace" until 1915, the year when the forward-mounted machine gun permitted one-seaters to play an offensive role and a single individual to assume the roles of both pilot and gunner-observer. And it was not until the fall of 1916, after Boelcke laid out the specialized tactics of aerial warfare, that the classic duels between recognizable, highscoring aces took place. Once the ace emerged, however, he became one of the most popular figures in wartime Germany. With three, four, then five victories in April 1915, Roland Garros was the first airman the public claimed as a hero. And although the term "ace" was not used in Germany until after the war, Max Immelmann, the "Eagle of Lille," was already an acknowledged "flying hero" with five victories in October 1915. "It is incredible how much I am honored," he reflected, "I simply cannot describe it. My mail has swollen vastly since I have become a famous man." Georg Queri, a war correspondent from Munich, quipped that the army would 'soon have to assign orderlies to open Immelmann's mail, decipher the hand-written poems composed in his honor, and reproduce his signature in reply. On leave in Leipzig in late November, Immelmann was shouldered by enthusiastic crowds upon arrival at the local airfield and mobbed on the streets in town. 37 Immelmann had become a celebrity, that distinctive twentieth-century type. The army quickly exploited Immelmann's popularity to sell war bonds and to advertise the success of the war. Reenacted in short films, which were distributed to field theaters along the front and metropolitan cinemas at home, his aerial victories served as instantly recognizable demonstrations of German prowess and German superiority. Aces previewed victory and thereby sold the war. 38 Before long, the Deutscher Luftflottenverein or German Air Fleet League assisted the government by rallying supporters to promote Germany's new air arm and to raise money to aid

The Image of the War Ace

wounded flyers and their families. The Luftfiottenverein's park concerts, plays, and patriotic evenings were held throughout the Reich. An afternoon charity event in Hamburg in July 1918, for example, featured a "flyin" and lecture by a military pilot, the delivery of "air mail," and a grand ballet in which 139 dancers depicted an epic air battle between the French ace Pegoud, who was portrayed as the better fighter, and Richthofen, who eventually emerged victorious after receiving help from the elements: lightning, thunder, and storm. 39 The message was clear: Germany would overcome the massive material advantage the Allies enjoyed after the entry of the United States into the war because God stood at its side. Oswald Boelcke quickly matched Immelmann's skills. By Christmas 1915 the two aces were locked in a friendly competition that captured the public eye. Throughout December 1915, Boelcke and Immelmann bested each other, running up their Fokker monoplanes and shooting down their fifth, sixth, and seventh Allied planes. Berlin's newspapers made the most of the contest and published clever poems lauding one or the other ace. Finally on 13 January 1916, the kaiser awarded both pilots, each with eight kills, the Pour Ie Merite, Germany's highest award for individual gallantry, which a total of 83 airmen, the great majority of them fighter pilots, eventually received. A day later, Boelcke won his ninth victory, "his answer" to the medal; the show of German invincibility continued, to the delight of the nation's poets: 40 Record

The record in that daring sport Our airman play in heaven Was held by Immelmann, who fought And vanquished victims seven. But Boelcke was a valiant wight, Who did not sit down sighing; He quickly put the balance right, As so one should in flying. But who'd be first with number eight? That left us all surmising. The answer "Both," I'm bound to state, Was really most surprising. They dished up two on one same board'Twas quite an innovation-

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And each received as his reward A noble decoration. Then one day later-you'll avow It's rather hard to swallowFriend Boelcke shouted "Nine! How now! I've nine, I've licked you hollow!" And thus these busy airmen climb, Each day new laurels storing, The ladder of fame to heights sublimeAnd business still is roaring!

"With looks to kill, young and handsome. You wouldn't believe how good the Pour Ie Merite looks on him ... And dancing, he dances like an angel." 41 Boelcke was perhaps the most beloved German airman during the war, though today he is almost forgotten, overshadowed by his pupil Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, whose legacy was glorified by the Nazis, reappropriated by the West German Air Force, and fixed for Americans by the cartoonist Charles Schulz. But in 1916 it was hard not to hear about Boelcke, as the young ace won victory after victory, mostly against French opponents. Small-town newspapers and metropolitan weeklies such as Die Woche, Die Gartenlaube, and the Berliner Illustrirte gave him prominent coverage. Dozens of books appeared, recounting the exploits of Boelcke, Immelmann, and other aces in a popular style. 42 Wilhelm Kranzler, for example, promised a volkstiimlich depiction of Germany's aerial triumphs. 43 Like Immelmann, Boelcke was accorded all the honors of celebrity status. Deluged with mail, "attacked" by autograph hunters, the air heroes more resembled the movie stars of the 1920S than the medieval knights or Napoleonic generals with whom they were often compared. 44 In Frankfurt to attend a meeting between officials of the Inspectorate of Flying Troops and Oberursel engineers, Boelcke felt as if a warrant had been issued for his arrest: people "stared at me all the time in the streets." Attending a performance of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Undine at the Frankfurt Opera, Boelcke was besieged by spectators during intermissions-"it was terrible." At the end of the second act, an opera singer stepped forward and sang a hastily written song for Boelcke. "I could hardly believe my ears," Boelcke remarked. "But then you should have seen the audience going raving mad; they clapped, shouted, and tramped their feet ... I saved myself from further ovations by speedy flight." 45 Similar incidents

The Image of the War Ace

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Germany's favorite ace, Oswald Boelcke, on the cover of Die Gartenlaube, one of the biggest weekly magazines.

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occurred in Boelcke's hometown, Ziebigk, a suburb of Dessau, which he visited in late May 1916, after his seventeenth and eighteenth victories. Well ahead of Immelmann in the number of kills and unexpectedly promoted to captain, an astonishing success for a twenty-five-year-old pilot, Boelcke found himself feted by an honor roll of Dessau's social clubs. One Dessau burgher, Professor Gerhard Heine, conveyed the excitement and civic pride prompted by Boelcke's visit in verse: 46 Hail, Captain Boelcke! Today was a special day in Ziebigk. Lieutenant Boelcke was there. And was promoted to captain. He stepped out of the skies and sat in the house on the corner like any ordinary mortal. Then sounds of marching feet could be heard from Dessau. The youth brigade had arrived. And in the breast of every young man the silent dream to be a hero his country's pride the enemy's fright in this, Germany's war of destiny. The line stands rigid Captain Boelcke welcomes and inspects. And in the breast of every young man a vision of the future, to be a hero like Boelcke. And the prayer, that God protects our Siegfried, that no harm may come to him. Little boys stand nearby, Not young men, just lads who can't quite pronounce the word: Propeller. But thei reyes betray the wish: to be as brave as Boelcke!

Boelcke was more than Dessau's favorite son; since the ace was instantly recognizable and his victories uncontested, he served to embody the German will to victory. To war correspondents and feature writers,

The Image of the War Ace

each kill reaffirmed Boelcke's invincibility and by extension Germany's. By the same token, of course, the foreseeable death of an Immelmann or a Boelcke indicated the assailability and breakableness of German arms. After fifteen victories, Immelmann crashed to his death on 18 June 1916. It was quickly pointed out that Immelmann had not been bested in aerial combat-apparently his propeller had broken apart-but his death was telling nonetheless. Fearful of losing Germany's most famous ace and unwilling to risk a serious blow to civilian morale, the General Staff responded by placing Boelcke on the inactive list. Boelcke, who had flown to Douai to attend a frontline memorial service for Immelmann and, once in the Arras sector, used the occasion to fly against the British, something he rarely had an opportunity to do at Verdun, was difficult to track down; it took a telegram from the crown prince to ground him at last. For the next two months, Boelcke followed a leisurely schedule. He attended various patriotic festivities at home and inspected flying troops on the eastern front. But he chafed at "being tied to a leash," sitting in a "glass house," and wanted to return to the front, particularly once the Battle of the Somme was under way.47 In 1917, it is worth noting, Richthofen anticipated a similar order. He wondered why the General Staff intended to ground him, at least temporarily, after his forty-first victory.48 The answer seems obvious. As soon as he outdid Boelcke, who boasted forty kills, Richthofen assumed the mantle of Germany's Air Hero and had to be put out of danger for propaganda purposes. But only for a time: both Boelcke and Richthofen contrived to return to combat. In Boelcke's case, Hoeppner returned him to active duty to command Jasta 2 after the catastrophic effects of Allied air superiority over the Somme became clear in August 19 16 . Boelcke's biographer Johannes Werner called the next nine weeks on the Somme Boelcke's "heroic epoch." 49 They were weeks when Boelcke, flying a new Albatros D-3 biplane instead of a Fokker monoplane, doubled the number of his victories from twenty to forty. The prestige of the air force was at a new zenith. On 28 October, however, Boelcke's Albatros grazed another plane with its wing and disintegrated. Boelcke's death stunned the nation. "Is it true? Has he been robbed by blind chance, after achieving victory after victory?" Flugsport asked plaintively. 50 All out of proportion with the death of a young captain, the grandiose funeral underscored the public identity of the air hero. The spectacle, cast with Jasta pilots in dress uniform, high-ranking

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generals, and one-seater scouts flying overhead, pushed the airman's parents into the background and extinguished his private existence. Ceremony appropriated Boelcke for the state. Thousands of patriots crowded the streets of Dessau to watch the funeral procession, which was composed ofJasta aviators, regimental associations, patriotic groups, and civic clubs. As the church bells of the entire city tolled and six planes circled in the sky, soldiers carried the casket to the new war cemetery. There Lieutenant-Colonel Thomsen spoke in the name of the air force. Boelcke had done the nation a great service, Thomsen explained. His deeds inspired a generation: "Today there is no vigorous young German whose heart does not burn with the secret desire: 'I want to be a Boelcke.'" As long as these words and this spirit "remain alive in our air service," Thomsen concluded, "our dear fatherland will remain untroubled." An immense literary production honored Boelcke after his death. Scores of Boelcke poems appeared in newspapers and magazines. Die Lufifiotte even published the text and music to a Boelcke song-"I want to be a Boelcke," went the predictable refrain. Immelmann and Boelcke portraits adorned souvenir plates, commemorative coins, and patriotic pins. 51 As the war ground on through its third winter, Boelcke was a ready-made hero. The newly established propaganda arm of the General Staff printed thousands of postcards linking German deeds (Tat) with German victory (Sieg), and airmen like Boelcke and Immelmann were perfect subjects, manufacturing deeds again and again as they won their successive victories. The official German War News service, established in 1917, provided full accounts of air victories and promoted new air heroes, notably Manfred von Richthofen. It was Richthofen who carried the cushion bearing Boelcke's medals during a memorial service in Cambrai. And it was not long before Richthofen became Germany's highest-scoring living ace. With sixteen victories to his name, he received the Pour Ie Merite on 16 January 1917. Thereafter newspaper reporters, magazine photographers, and Ludendorff's propagandists descended on the airbase at Lagnicourt to present the new air hero to the German public. "When Boelcke fell," Georg Wegener remembered to his readers, "an immense sadness came over the German people, and the feeling: 'We will never see his kind again.'" Happily, however, "new pilots, crowned with success," emerged. And one of them, Wegener reported, had climbed to the very "peak of success ...

The Image of the War Ace

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The flight path of Gunter Groenhoff shows how he used thermals over the Wasserkuppe.

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Thermals exist in fair weather as well. In April 1928, Georgii confirmed that rising currents of warmer air gathered under cumulus clouds, allowing gliders to maintain and even increase their altitude. That summer Kronfeld and other Rhon pilots began to fly from cloud to cloud rather than from slope to slope. Finally applying what other scientists had long known, Georgii heralded the thermals for inaugurating a "new epoch." 32 The close map work could be left undone and passable "air roads" ignored. Drafty "upwind chimneys" allowed pilots to glide dozens of kilometers over flat countryside. Glider pilots also learned to use thermals over green fields and stretches of heath and sand, areas which the sun warms up faster than damp, low-lying stretches. Even cities and industrial tracts produced thermals. "What all doesn't simmer together in a city," imagined the author of a popular book on Kronfeld: "the huge boiler plant of a factory, the little oven fires of workers, the hot asphalt streets, the sweltering slate roofs-all this congeals into rising balls of hot air ... that carry fliers to new heights." 33 Later in the 1930S, Wolf Hirth flew dramatic circles over Berlin and New York City. At far remove. from their pastoral launching in the Rhon, gliders developed unexpected affinities with industrial terrain. By the early 1930S, performance pilots such as Kronfeld, Wolf Hirth, and Gunter Groenhoff soared effortlessly in the skies for hours, using upwinds around mountains occasionally, but relying for the most part on thermals and storms. Across Germany, gliders took off and eventually landed hundreds of kilometers away, sometimes in Czechoslovakia or France. Flying thermals, pilots were exhilarated by a profound sense of mastery and freedom. Gliding seemed so natural, so light, that Kronfeld wondered whether gravity would ever pull him back to the ground. Perhaps "only one last push, and everything below sinks" out of sight forever. As Kronfeld climbed over the storm, he remembered himself as a child in Vienna, looking at the moon through a telescope: "a man set it up one evening on the crowded big-city street. For twenty pfennigs one could travel into infinity. The cold, pale marble sphere swam in the dark circle of the lens." The glider pilot began to look at the world below in the same unconnected, indeterminate way he had once peered at the heavens. Kronfeld felt apart, almost stellar in his contemplation: "I want to climb higher, ever higher, until I reach the stars and can look back at the planet and its rivers, mountains, and oceans through the dark light of the universe." No longer tied to rocks and maps, now sailing with the sun and the clouds, pilots described gliding as nothing less than an Icarian expe-

Gliding and the Revival of Nationalism

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/ By the late 1930s, glider pilots were taking off at the Wasserkuppe and landing hours later hundreds of kilometers away.

rience in which technology made possible a sense of infinite movement toward the unknown. 34 Small Nationalist Republics

The triumphs recorded at the Rhon in the late 1920S stimulated a national grass-roots gliding movement. Gliding schools at Rossitten and

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Grunau in Silesia had been in existence since 1923. The number of students enrolled at Rossitten surged from about 100 in 1927 to 200 a year later and to 435 in 193 I. Grunau accepted 446 students in 193 I, up from 33 6 in 1930.35 The end of the decade saw a veritable gliding craze. It was not until 1927 that young fliers in Osnabriick built their first glider; they completed four more a year later. The year 1928 was also a period of astonishing growth in Stuttgart, where the Academic Flying Group increased its membership fourfold. To meet this upsurge in interest, authorities in Duisburg inaugurated a gliding camp with twelve planes at the Bissingheimer Hang in September 1929. Founded in 1928, the gliding school in Berlin-Gatow experienced extraordinary growth as well. Whereas 25 students enrolled in 1928,148 did so in 1929,234 in 193 1, and an astonishing 409 in 193 2.36 These local examples indicated a national trend. By 193 I, three dozen gliding schools dotted the German countryside. The number of new gliders built each year by the Young Flier Groups of the German Aviators' League increased dramatically from 50 in 1928 to 410 in 1929, the year Kronfeld began to explore thermals. Although fewer gliders (295) were built in the Depression year 1931, the movement continued to attract new members. Between 1927 and 193 I, membership in the Young Flier Groups more than tripled to nearly 10,000, mostly but not exclusively young male aviators between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six. In just one year, 1928, the number of Young Flier Groups nearly doubled from 37 to 7 2 . 37 The total number of glider enthusiasts in Germany was certainly higher than these figures indicate, since not all gliding clubs belonged to the Young Fliers. For example, the Academic Flying Groups, which had pulled the first gliders up the Wasserkuppe, and the Social Democratic Sturmvogel or Storm Birds, which claimed fifty local branches in 1930, remained independent organizations. 38 Although Kronfeld and Groenhoff enthralled young people, their feats were emulated by very few. Students rarely had the time or the money to complete all three stages of instruction to earn a "C" license and soar in the thermals. Most contented themselves with the basic ''N' license, which was awarded once fliers used upwinds to glide for about a minute and could make a clean landing, usually after three or four weeks of practice. Given these requirements, gliding schools did little more than recreate the short flights undertaken during the first season at the Rhon in 1920. But it was precisely the experience of living and working in the rustic conditions of a gliding camp that appealed to young Germans from

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Gliding at its height: fifty-four gliders assembled on the Wasserkuppe for a national meet in the 1930s.

all backgrounds. In addition to the thousands of students who enrolled, thousands more dreamed of going and read all they could about gliding and gliders. Throughout the 1930s, an enormous literary production of songs, stories, and plays recounted the happy weeks spent at gliding schools. 39 Gliding schools constituted small nationalist republics. Young German men and women thrilled at the opportunity to practice the sport that supposedly irritated the Allies. The lyrics of campfire songs referred repeatedly to "German deeds" undertaken in "Germany's hour" of need for "Germany's honor" and "Germany's freedom." "What tempts us into the distance?" asked one song, "Rossitten-Grunau-Rhon," sung to the tune of"Ich hab' mich ergeben":40 The eagle had been hit, and from the mountain tops the song of German hope could be heard Rossitten-Grunau-Rhon.

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It blazed like fire, it rumbled like metal. The cry of victory shuddered the fl ier's heart. Year they Year they

after year, the enemies, romped along the Rhine. after year, glider pilots, trained, and remained true!

The Rh6n saw the douds, and stretched up its body: Victory belongs to the people who believe in the highest ... Let it break, let it bend, in the vise of need! The gliding spirit flies into the German dawn! Let it ring and echo: Up to the slopes! The spirit lives in us all Rossitten, Grunau, Rh6n!

Even at its most primitive, gliding was widely regarded a patriotic declaration of faith. Indeed, the simple living conditions and modest technical standards in the camps recalled the Rhon spirit. Gliding instructors, often war veterans themselves, surely remembered Immelmann, Boelcke, and Richthofen around campfires in the evening. Beginning in 1929, one such former flier, Carl Fink, supervised a gliding club in Dresden. In addition to overseeing the construction of gliders in rooms loaned by the Reichswehr and their launching on the Lerchenberg, Fink took time to lecture his charges on air combat in the last war and the importance of rebuilding German aviation in the future. For Fink's group, gliding was always more than simply sport, serving a deeper patriotic purpose. The young airmen reverently honored Dresden's own Max Immelmann and earnestly discussed Dresden's vulnerability to Czech air raids. To show the public that they considered themselves unofficially in Germany's service, members wore distinctive blue uniforms and caps. As Fink's unpublished account shows for Dresden, glider pilots played visible parts in the exuberant nationalist movement that emerged in the late 1920S and many, still brimming with enthusiasm ten years later, went on to join the Luftwaffe and to fight and die for the Third Reich. 41

Gliding and the Revival of Nationalism

Glider pilots were as unreconciled to the Weimar Republic as they were to the Versailles settlement. At first glance, glider camps seemed to provide a refuge from the materialism and aimlessness of modern life. Gliding fortified nostalgia for a purer, simpler time without machines. High on the mountaintops of the Rhon or far away in the East Prussian dunes, glider students trained their bodies and enjoyed the wind and sun. They held the big city and its asphalt decadence and grimy factories at bay. Rolf Italiaander, who learned to fly at Rossitten at the age of fifteen, recalled that gliding was a reaction to life in the "swamp in Berlin," which lacked ideals and spirituality, and he bitterly criticized signs of boozing and dancing on the campgrounds. 42 Glider pilots shared with many other Weimar-era youth groups a disdain for the big city, but parted company with those who continued to regard machinery as an alien and destructive force. Aviators smuggled technological enthusiasm into a nationalist movement that still envisioned the German soul as pastoral. More important, however, the communal spirit of the gliding camps seemed to reconcile the social antagonisms of industrialism without looking back nostalgically to the preindustrial past. Most pilots referred to their gliders simply as "machines" and, by the mid-1920S, built technically sophisticated, standardized models according to twenty-page blueprints. The glider's light and elegant appearance hid an exact mathematical reckoning ofweight and stability. Indeed, gliders were the very model of technical efficiency and expediency and earned the approbation of strict modernists such as Le Corbusier. 43 Throughout the 1920S, the best gliders were designed by engineering students at technical universities. With exceptions like Ferdinand Schulz's ultralight "Broomstick," the prototype for a widely used training craft, very few servicable gliders were actually hand-built in barns or tenement courtyards. At the Rhon and elsewhere, gliding officials simply disqualified wild home constructions and other unsafe planes. Far from serving as a refuge, gliding prepared young students for the reckonings of the machine age. Observers honored gliding for promoting technical thinking and providing affinities to the "technological age." Gliding competitions, Rhonvater Oskar Ursinus argued, had the virtue of making accomplished pilots out of mechanics in dirty overalls. German aviation needed more of these dedicated aviators with "dirty fingernails" and fewer occasional enthusiasts who flew in coats and ties. 44 This was certainly the case in gliding camps, where students learned to work with

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wood, metal, and other materials and gained a thorough theoretical knowledge of meteorology and aerodynamics, experiences which served them well in their future careers. 45 Many Rhon veterans, including Wolfgang Klemperer, Peter Riedel, and Gottlob Espenlaub, ended up working for Luft Hansa or an American airline or joined Germany's aeronautical industries. Ursinus himself regarded gliding as an integral part of German aeronautics and as a requisite first step toward the manufacture of an efficient low-horsepower sports plane. Aeronautical designers in the 1930S also profited from their earlier Rhon experiences. The efficient and aerodynamically trim design of thermal gliders anticipated the streamlined single-wing fighters of the Second World War, reported the pioneer aerospace engineer Theodor von Karman. 46 To expert pilots and young schoolboys across the Reich, gliding resembled a vast summer camp in which Germans gained a practical appreciation for the machinery and technology that modern states required for national defense. Even socialists regarded the predominantly middle-class gliding group at Braunschweig's technical university in a surprisingly positive light. They were "not students in the old sense" -reactionary and weltfremdbut a new breed which the Left recognized. "Standing at the workman's bench, building, repairing, drawing, calculating, discovering," they were "scientists and workers." 47 According to one socialist aviator, gliding promoted a "technical sensibility" and thus helped to prepare for the scientific and rational future to which socialists looked forward. 48 Apparently, considerable numbers of small-town workers and handicraftsmen-typical Social Democrats-wandered to the Rhon. Although socialists eventually established their own flying clubs, Young Flier Groups recruited many sons of workers-one-third of the membership-as well as employees and civil servants. Only one-quarter of the membership had fathers who were businessmen or professionals. As a result, the social base of Young Flier Groups was much more representative of Weimar society at large than other nationalist associations such as the Stahlhelm or the Young German Order, which were much more middle-class. 49 Any neat opposition between gliding and motorized aviation or between gliding and technological values is overly simplistic. What is true, however, is that glider enthusiasts considered themselves to be apart from the realities of the Weimar Republic. Gliding camps proved so appealing to the German public because they honored the virtues of fraternity and self-reliance that promised to mend civic divisiveness at home and revive

Gliding and the Revival of Nationalism

German greatness abroad. Again and again, pilots counterposed the idealistic endeavors on the mountaintops, the Rhongeist which refused to recognize social differences, to the partisan politics pursued in the valleys below. 50 Like many other opponents of the bourgeois republic, on the Left but more typically on the Right, aviators saw themselves as working in the service of a post-Weimar Germany. They did not care for Weimar itself, but were passionately concerned with the kind of society that would come after Weimar. Promoting supposedly neglected values of fellowship and self-reliance, gliding camps constituted the first tiny and far-flung territories of this new society. Gliding was a story of Germans helping themselves which offered general lessons for Germany's recovery in difficult years. To fly in the sky without motors was an allegory for the assertion of self-reliance, though a misleading one since individual pilots required sophisticated machines and mountaintops or cumulus clouds. Nonetheless, students learned to glide by themselves, without a copilot or an instructor, and came to trust their own judgment. As a result, glider pilots were celebrated for their sense of purpose and confidence. 51 Supporters believed gliding built character in other ways as well. Glider clubs were proud of having scrimped and saved to buy the tools and materials necessary to build their own machines. Without wealthy industrial sponsors or government support, they depended largely on themselves and made a virtue of hardship. Effort and endurance not only valorized their achievements but also suggested that Germans could shape their own destiny however difficult the circumstances. In August 1931, Carl Fink hung the following verse in his gliding club's workshop in Dresden: If you never get started and always hanker for better tools, or rely on help from others, and don't build from what you have, you will never be able to create something from nothing!

Entitled "Strength out of Nothing," Fink's cheery sayings captured a sense of defiant self-reliance that had unmistakable national implications as well. 52 In early 1932, a group of young men in Braunfels undertook to build a glider. They did not have any money: "Well, everyone has a little," enough

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certainly to order blueprints for the basic model "Hols der Teufel" (The Devil Take It) from Schleicher in Poppenhausen in the Rhon. Other materials had to be requisitioned somehow. "We got together and starting borrowing, borrowing cold glue from Julius, borrowing plywood from Rosenthal, borrowing here and there. When we are not borrowing, we collect money. A list goes around, and everyone goes door to door." Groups of young people begging money for their gliders were familiar sights in German towns during the Great Depression. Homebuilt gliders required hundreds of hours of work. "Every night the whole gang is in the workshop." Step by step, Braunfels's builders rehearsed the frustrations of following a plan: "again and again we poked our noses in the blueprints, but it's never quite clear." InJuly 1932, however, the "box" was finally completed. The club exhibited "Hols der Teufel" on the street as a way to collect further funds. Curious passersby contributed a total of 101.80 marks, though not everyone was convinced: Despite all our work and effort, some people still think we're playing and laugh knowingly. They can't understand how grown men, even teachers ... can devote themselves to such an adolescent and dangerous activity: "That thing there can't even fly, it has no power source, it won't go on its own, not today, not tomorrow. I don't have a penny to spare for such foolishness."

"Pull out ... run ... let go": the group's first trials ended successfully. It was a sign of aviation's patriotic appeal that Braunfels's mayor organized a public consecration of the new glider. After going around to collect ten-pfennig coins from bystanders, the group showed off its talents, pulling the machine up the slopes of the Odenwald and gliding into the valley below. 53 Gliding storybooks in the 193as richly embellished these grass-roots efforts. They told the story of the emergence of the new German, technically capable, politically self-reliant, and socially unpretentious. As the Rhon inscription promised, Germans were victors by their own efforts. "Dear Germany, do as the glider pilots have," wrote Walter Georgii in 1932, on the eve of Hitler's assumption of power. 54 The notion that will and effort could lead to achievement and excellence found expression in popular stories that cast the glider pilot as a Narr or fool. Like Graf Zeppelin or club members in Braunfels, Germany's young aviators had to endure all sorts ofhumiliations and disbelief before successfully flying their machines. The lonesome fanatic bore a

Gliding and the Revival of Nationalism

resemblance to the imagined figure of postwar Germany, whose resources had been plundered and ambitions supposedly stunted, but which would finally prevail in a friendless world. Ferdinand Schulz, the village schoolteacher from East Prussia who built his simple machines by himself and only with difficulty convinced incredulous technical juries of the competence of his gliders, but who went on to hold numerous endurance records, was the quintessential gliding "fool" whom aviation folklore revered. After Schulz's death in 1929, Walther Kleffel, aviation writer for the big Berlin daily BZ am Mittag, memorialized the flier's contributions to a wider sense of German accomplishment. "Broomsticks, bedsheets, and a little wire"-his glider seemed to be constructed out of little more, and at first it did not receive permission to fly. And yet, "I don't fly with rules, but with that thing there," Kleffel imagined a stubborn Schulz replying. This sort of response in the face of adversity was intended to build faith in Germany's revival. 55 Schulz, the provincial schoolteacher, became a familiar type. Especially after 1933, children's stories introduced unlikely heroes, such as "Fatty" in Eberhard Giese's adventure, who overcame the derision of friends and neighbors to build and fly gliders and eventually found his way to National Socialism. 56 Gliding was first and foremost an active verb, an impression on the world, one of those deeds which catalogued German greatness. "Wer da liebt die Taten," Fink's gliding group sang, "for the love of doing": Not a lot of words, just let me say: learn to fly! Comrade, give a hand! Pull out-that's right. Let's do it! Run!-Let Go!-Good flight!

It was not really important, Ernst Junger argued in the late 1920S, whether gliding was useful or profitable, or whether it offered scientists insights into aerodynamics or lightweight metals. Living in primitive conditions, pulling their machines up the steep slopes, glider pilots expressed a vital and imperious nature. Faithful and durable aviators like those at the Wasserkuppe contradicted predictions of moral and physical degeneration in a disheveled modern world. 57 According to Paul Karlson, writing in 1933, the glider pilot was a combatant and as such regenerate: 58

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The glider pilot hovers alone in the air, in his sleek, fragile machine, with only his courage and his resolution to rely on. They take off against the oncoming thunderstorm, they fly right into the middle, into the house of lightning and the thunder. They dive into the clouds, into the grey, damp, formless fog, and they steer their machines through hard, boisterous gusts ... They grit their teeth and fight their way against the elements and then they ready their machines for another takeoff. The command comes clear and hard: Pull out-runlet gol-and again someone climbs into the sky. Glider pilots do all this with a calm sense of self-confidence. They don't waste a lot of big words on their heroic deeds; they take off into the sunny heavens.

Glider pilots were front-line soldiers in the battle to create a new kind of person. To triumph over nature's storms and national tribulations created the sober hero whom Junger honored. Eager to identify the mysterious life forces of the modem age, Junger believed that Weimar Germany's selfless airmen heralded a fabulous new elite. 59

The group was central to gliding. Here six young men pull a glider into the air.

Gliding and the Revival of Nationalism

In a typical photo, gliding enthusiasts work and relax in a communal spirit.

Gliding did more than train individuals to act and to triumph, however. National renewal represented far more than merely the sum of private accomplishments; it required a social ethos of service and sacrifice as well. One of the reasons gliding received so much attention was that it combined the heroic and the communitarian. German nationalists honored the qualities that gliding supposedly nurtured in the individualphysical and spiritual vigor, resolution, self-confidence, and steel nerves-but they also celebrated the group effort and comradeship on which gliding depended. Gliding was organized along emphatically cooperative lines. True, soaring in the air, the pilot enjoyed quintessentially solitary flight. But actual flight was only one aspect of gliding. Cooperative hauling and pulling on the ground took up far more time. Eight to ten people were needed to set the glider in motion. Perched on the edge of a bluff, the glider would be pulled into the air by a ground crew-"Pull out! Run! Let Go!" After landing, the glider had to be hauled back up the hill and possibly

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repaired. Only occasional minutes of flying broke up a strenuous day of physical labor on the ground. "One minute up-one hour down," wrote Paul Karlson. And yet no one asked: "Is it worth it?" Whoever wanted to fly had to work in the spirit of cooperation. 60 The group was central to gliding, and it was flying clubs rather than individuals which typically constructed and flew machines. Gliding camps, where cooperation could be organized and where the sons and daughters of workers supposedly joined the sons and daughters of farmers and merchants, provided Germans with cherished images of work, accomplishment, and fraternity. Government officials, Socialists, Democrats, and National Socialists all celebrated the community spirit and sense of national purpose that animated gliding camps. Gliding was popular because it fused nationalism and community. Gliding pointed ahead to a technologically capable and at the same time solidary German Reich. With its emphasis on self-reliance, patriotic defiance, and the mystical people's community, the gliding movement anticipated much of the appeal of National Socialism. After 1933, Fritz Stamer, for example, referred to Rhon enthusiasts as a "flying Freikorps," fighting to reclaim Germany from materialism and cosmopolitanism. 61 The pilots themselves were not generally Nazis, though many were surely sympathetic as the National Socialist movement grew in Depression-era Germany. In the Rhon, where Sturmvogel Social Democrats and Jews such as Robert Kronfeld glided, the atmosphere was probably not overtly party-political but was certainly unmistakably nationalistic. We know that on 31 July 1932, the midsummer Sunday on which Germany's critical Reichstag elections were held, thousands of visitors were in the Rhon. For the convenience of vacationers and glider enthusiasts, a temporary voting station was installed on top of the Wasserkuppe. Well over 50 percent of the 962 ballots went to the Nazis, a figure considerably above the national average of 37 percent. 62 This result was not surprising. After all, gliding had provided powerful images of a more fraternal post-Weimar future since the early 1920S. At the Wasserkuppe, nationalists learned that new patriotic communities could be imagined and constructed. And as Weimar Germany's political crisis worsened, fascist voices undoubtedly became louder and louder in aviation clubs. 63 The point is not that gliding camps in the 1920S nurtured Nazis but that the unpretentious and cooperative spirit and self-reliant nationalism that gliding cherished eventually fostered an unmistakable empathy for the National Socialist message.

Gliding and the Revival of Nationalism

In the spring of 1933, after Hitler's assumption of power, the nazification of the gliding community occurred relatively seamlessly. Whatever resistance there was took the form of organizational loyalty to older associational traditions rather than ideological opposition to the Nazis. Except for Kronfeld, who left Germany to promote gliding in England, few of the old faces disappeared. Oskar Ursinus, who joined the Nazi party on 1 March 1933; Fritz Stamer, the longtime director of the gliding school at the Wasserkuppe; Walter Kleffel, Germany's preeminent "air journalist"; and many others happily accepted ranking offices in the newly established Nazi sport organization, wrote chauvinistic homages to the Third Reich, and acclaimed new tough-minded sponsors in BerlinHitler, Goering, Loerzer-who poured thousands of marks into gliding in an effort to train a new generation of twentieth-century Germans. 64

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The second half of the twentieth century strained to understand the passions of the first, in which the peoples' rash catastrophism and supercharged utopian projects and gullible machine romances had played such contradictory leading roles. As early as 1959, Kenneth S. Davis, in his biography of "the hero," warned readers that it was "almost impossible," a generation later, to recapture the "magic" and credulity of Lindbergh's heroism. The Magic Mountain place of the 1920S and 1930S had since been leveled. 1 After the Second World War, almost any look backward to that time was warped and confused by the perspective of distance. To the "lost generation" between the wars, history appeared delinquent, reckless, no longer applicable. The First World War and the revolutions that followed violently declared that European history was not moving toward any particular, predictable destination. When Jacques Bainville asserted in 1919 that the nineteenth century was stupid he also pronounced it dead; in his view, the future had foreclosed on the liberal trajectory of 1789. This liberation from the remembered past was awkward. Harsh economies and brutal politics in the 1930S softened the features of the prewar Belle Epoque. In his memoirs, Stefan Zweig, a Jewish refugee from Austria living in Brazil, recalled a turn-of-the-century childhood world of security and measured progress and wanted to believe it would return, as if the intervening decades were simply a stormy patch after which the world would be all right again. 2 For others, however, the postwar era was full of possibility and vitality. The two most powerful and novel political movements of the interwar years, communism and fascism, shared a presumption that the future could be redesigned and remade, almost at will. Modernist intellectuals from Lewis Mumford to Le Corbusier repeatedly urged their respective publics to rethink the future. Eyeing the precision and power of machines on the factory floor, on the street, and in the home, more and more Europeans found an optimistic future tense per133

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suasive in the postwar years. This was the age of the forecaster, the seer, the technocrat. The "ballyhoo" and con artistry so characteristic of the 1920S were but exaggerated commercial and deceitful manifestations of the decade's prevalent "can-do" spirit. Utopia harbors dystopia, as Eugene Zamiatin, Karl Capek, and Aldous Huxley warned in their science fiction, but each place-the good society that reason builds or its dark counterpart to which hubris and egoism lead-also affirms the malleability of the material and social world. In imaginary fictions as well as in public politics and private dreams, Europeans became increasingly convinced of the plasticity of their universe. Machines and particularly airplanes were the visible artifacts of this dizzying power to transform the given world. Lifting off from the face of the earth and surveying from the air, connecting continents in a day and bombing country heartlands in an hour, attaining faster and faster speeds and finally piercing the stratosphere, the airplane became one of the most powerful symbols for the very consequence of the age. It seemed to make plausible a whole new order of active verbs that described the assault and seizure of the planet by the men and women of the air age. In the United States, "airmindedness" was a nearly religious declaration of faith in moral improvement and civic prosperity, a happy, hyperbolic restatement of the American dream. According to Joseph Corn, the "winged gospel" was mainly pacific and embrasive. 3 It did not foresee brave, new political communities based on exclusion and hierarchy or impose novel geopolitical imperatives. In Germany, however, the elective affinities between innovations in technology and sterner modes ofpolitics were more closely defined, more dangerously partisan. The enduring popularity of fliers; the rapid growth of gliding and commercial aviation; the 1925 establishment of Germany's semipublic airline, Luft Hansa; and the country's aeronautical achievements in the same period, most notably the transocean voyages of a new generation of zeppelins, first the ZR III in October 1924, then the state-of-the-art Gra! Zeppelin after 1928, and also the April 1928 flight of the Junkers Bremen, the first nonstop east-to-west airplane crossing of the Atlantic-all these events redescribed German nationalism in compelling ways. Aviation forecast a new, more powerful, and disciplined German Reich that would be able to meet the hard industrial demands and join the revived imperial contests of the twentieth century.

Modernist Visions, National Dreams

The Spectacle Weimar Germans gathered around airplanes and pilots as much as they crowded socialist picnics and nationalist parades. Once the Allies gradually eased restrictions on the manufacture of new and more powerful airplanes in the mid-1920S, airshows became the rage. From April to October they entertained huge crowds in towns across the country. Brass bands and colorful flags and the bright sun-lit metal and deep mahogany of the Udet Flamingos or Klemm monoplanes on the grassy apron of the local Schutzenwiese made the rallies irresistibly exciting. If "big cannons" such as Gerhard Fieseler, Gerd Achgelis, or Ernst Udet, whose aerial acrobatics, low-altitude loops, and irrepressible clowning dazzled spectators, agreed to come, tens of thousands of curious sightseers pressed onto the meadows. Udet could pick up a handkerchief on the ground with his wingtip, and police reports indicate that as many as 60,000 people were on hand to watch him perform in Bamberg on 25 April 1926.4 Sunday rallies sponsored by the cigarette company Bergmann in the summer of 1931 attracted up to 100,000 spectators (in Gleiwitz, Dresden, Konigsberg, and Mannheim). Air days in Berlin always clogged the subway and filled the streets in Neukolln, near Tempelhof Field. In Wurttemberg, where Graf Zeppelin had found fame and fortune a quartercentury earlier, almost any fair-weather weekend promised an air rally: on 29 June 1928, for example, 20,000 people assembled on the Cannstatter Wasen outside Stuttgart; 4,000 were present for Schwenningen's "air day," 15 July; 12,000 at Oehringen on 9 September; 8,000 "on the Buhler Hohe," near Rottweil, on 16 September; 30,000 returned to the Cannstatter Wasen on 23 September; 7,000 traveled to Riedlingen's rally on 24 September; and 3,000 showed up on a cold October afternoon in Ludwigsburg. Even when only a handful of pilots performed, airshows were held in the smallest towns: Bavaria's Bad Aibling, Furstenfeldbruck, Wasserburg, Tittmoning, Pfaffenhofen, and Krumbach, among others, all celebrated an "air day" during the turbulent, economically depressed summer of 1932.5 Local branches of Germany's largest aeronautical group, the German Aviators' League, usually organized the rallies. However, other social clubs, political parties, and commercial entrepreneurs sponsored them as well. Udet, for example, appeared wherever promoters were willing to pay

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his fee; he performed at the Sturmvogel's Constitution Day air show in Berlin as well as at nationalist rallies. The programs varied only slightly and typically included various acrobatic flyovers, skywriting displays, parachute jumping, demonstrations by balloonists and gliders, and a model airplane competition. Female fliers were an added attraction; "Fraulein Adalice" made her living jumping from planes. Flying in close formation, "like schools of fish in water," bubbled the Giirlitzer Volkszeitung, the Young Flier Wing also enjoyed huge popularity on the air show circuit. Crowds loved the wing's relay races, in which competing teams passed a baton from runners to bicyclists to race-car drivers before pilots took off in airplanes to complete the course. In addition, affluent sightseers could take short trips aloft in eight-seater Luft Hansa planes. With entry fees as low as 50 pfennigs (a daily newspaper cost 10 or IS pfennigs), and 2 to 3 marks for reserved seats, air rallies attracted a broad section of the public. 6 Thanks to the airshows, Udet shook off the resentments that consumed many other former aces after the war and became one of Germany's most familiar stars. Less well-known fliers achieved local notoriety as well. Marga von Etzdorf described the aura which surrounded Weimar's barnstormers: 7 A few days before, the meadow on which the show would take place would be described to me in general terms. I was given compass directions and the approximate distance from the largest town. Early on Sunday I flew over and looked until I finally spotted the white landing cross that the organizers had laid out. Only one or two other machines had arrived. Until noontime we lolled about on the grass and watched as the grounds slowly filled. It was mostly country folk, farmers from small villages, who came with kids and skittles on foot or by car, sometimes from far away, to finally see an airplane up close. Then the local band arrived, and soon we could hear the first trumpet notes, not very melodious, but therefore all the louder. Everyone watched us fliers with a respectful shyness and moved aside when we made our way through the crowd ... Once in a while, an awe-struck, simple country boy would come up to ask how I was able to do loops or other feats, and soon enough other members of his family were dragged out to greet and interview me.

In the afternoon, at last, the airshow got under way. The overhead buzz of the motors, the purposeful bustle of mechanics, the smell of gasoline: it is not difficult to imagine the dreams about planes and pilots that

Modernist Visions, National Dreams

youngsters surely cherished long after the airshows left town. For adults, too, the rallies certainly entertained. Police files are full of complaints that performers risked their lives to "tickle" the nerves of the crowd, whose satisfaction supposedly required at least one death each weekend. 8 But there was more to airshows than death-defying acrobatics. Like the gliding meets, the rallies told a story of German defiance and German revival. Airfields, which as a consequence of the Treaty of Versailles had resembled a "desolate junkyard," full ofwrecked motors and tumbledown sheds, were in the mid- 1 920S again the sites of restless activity; airline service and freight deliveries resumed, and air rallies were organized. Against the odds, German fliers had returned to the skies, stealing world records at international competitions and rehearsing their skills at local airshows. The verse and oratory of officials of the German Aviators' League did nothing to hide this nationalist aspect. Speakers honored pilots who had fallen during the World War and invoked the patriotic inscription at the Rhon: "Volk, fly again." What Germany needed was an air force, speeches exhorted time and again. Before the aerial show at the Third Bavarian Fliers' Memorial Day in Wiirzburg in August 1925, for instance, the university professor Karl Sauger read a poem urging airminded young people to "break the power of the enemy," "loosen the shackles that hold back our cause," and seek "bitter revenge" for the shameful Versailles peace. 9 Provincial air rallies tickled modern nerves, to be sure, but they also stiffened national morale. Even more exciting and consequential were the national airshows in which all Germans had the opportunity to be spectators. The transoceanic flights of Germany's postwar zeppelins and airplanes, whose progress was closely followed by newspapers and radio and tracked almost "live" in extra editions and special broadcasts, electrified the nation. Just as the misfortunes of German aviation immediately after the warmotors wrecked, airships seized, sheds razed, airfields neglectedevoked the humiliation of the Reich, so did the enviable accomplishments later in the 1920S encourage growing confidence in Germany's revival. Machine dreams mingled with national dreams. In an increasingly technological century, Germany appeared able to hold its own, despite political and economic hardships. Between the two World Wars, it was aviators who took the measure of progress. This was certainly so in the United States, where Lindbergh's 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic reaffirmed both the private virtues and the civic enterprise of exultant

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Americans. For the French, the bold advances in aviation across the Rhine heralded the reemergence of Germany as a dangerous superpower. IO Throughout the 1920S and 1930S, Europeans grabbed at the images of aviation to validate claims of national prowess and technical mastery. When a German-built zeppelin prepared to cross the Atlantic in October 1924, the flight turned into an event of obsessive national interest. The ZR III continued the defiant story of trotz and dennoch (spite and defiance) whose first chapter had been written at Echterdingen. Although the Treaty of Versailles prohibited the construction of airships, which the Allies regarded as massive, typically Teutonic creatures ofwar, Hugo Eckener, who had become chief of the zeppelin project after Graf Zeppelin's death in 1917, worked tirelessly to save the Friedrichshafen works. He was convinced of the serviceability of airships; thanks to wartime advances in technology, they promised inexpensive and reliable transportation across long distances. And he defended their peaceful purpose; in an age of high-performance fighter planes, zeppelins no longer posed a military threat. Eckener eventually persuaded the American government to accept a new ship, the LZ 126, registered by the Americans as the ZR III and later christened Los Angeles, as partial compensation for the scuttling of Germany's Imperial Navy at Scapa Flow in 19 I 9. As a result, activity at the zeppelin plant in Friedrichshafen revived and so did the German romance with airships. The October 1924 flight, which was first nonstop transatlantic crossing undertaken by a dirigible, generated enormous excitement. At Friedrichshafen, reporters from Germany and the United States blustered in vain to secure a seat on the crossing, hatched unrealized plans to stow away, and scrambled to wire the news of the ZR Ill's takeoff so that minutes later their newspapers would be first on the streets of Berlin, Frankfurt, or Munich with extra editions. 11 Once the zeppelin was airborne, two or three daily editions and special editions when necessary followed its progress. "ZR 3 over the ocean," screamed the headline of the Berliner Tageblatt's second Extra-Blatt on 12 October. Along city streets, Berliners learned: "ZR 3 near Bermuda" on 14 October; "ZR 3 has reached the American coast" on 15 October; and finally, later the same day, "ZR 3 lands in Lakehurst." 12 Once Eckener safely landed the ZR III in Lakehurst, New Jersey, the U.S. Navy's airship port outside New York City, the Hearst correspon-

Modernist Visions, National Dreams

dent Karl von Wiegand happily announced that "Germany has rehabilitated herself in the eyes of the world." The German press agreed: the transatlantic flight had made an important contribution to science and technology and helped inaugurate a new era in global understanding. After years of drawing the world's scorn, Germany's name had a "new ring" to it, exulted the influential Berliner Tageblatt. A quarter-century later, Eckener, who was anything but an all-German patriot, remembered the homage Americans paid after the historic flight. His understated speech of thanks in Washington was followed by "stormy applause": "the orchestra rose to a man and played the German national anthem. Part of the audience, probably German, sang along. My eyes clouded over, and to this day I cannot think of the occasion without tears coming to my eyes. As a German, I sensed how the national anthem once again paid tribute to me and my people. I left the theater as if I were in a dream." 13 Eckener's testimony deserves to be taken seriously. The ZR III restored a measure of national pride for thousands of Germans. But there was more to German pride than rehabilitation. Making inevitable comparisons to the disaster at Echterdingen, commentators honored the sense of national unity achieved at home and, in 1924 as in 1908, also anticipated the German deeds that would astonish the world in the years to come. Newspapers from the democratic Left to the extreme Right welcomed the sense of national self-confidence that accompanied the flight of the ZR III. Reporters described the scenes in breathless prose: church bells tolled across the Reich, flags flew merrily, and Germans, gathered in public places, spontaneously sang the national anthem. 14 The evening after the landing, we know that Konstanz's market square filled with thousands of joyous patriots. From the direction of the post office, students from the three university fraternities Alania, Bayuvaria, and Allemania and the secondary schools arrived with their colorful flags. Accompanied by torch-bearers, the firemen's band marched from Kanzleistrasse and assembled around the war memorial, where city officials were on hand. It was an "awesome" sight, concluded a local editor, surely one of the city's "finest celebrations." 15 National accomplishment tugged together a heady sense of civic unity. Given the happy scenes in Konstanz and elsewhere, zeppelin enthusiasm seemed to mend the politically torn nation. For years to come, a photograph, probably a montage, by Bauhaus photographer Lazlo Moholy-Nagy evoked the defiance of Germans in an unfriendly world. It shows a stormy sky with a patch of light against which

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