Aufstieg und Niedergang der Luftschifffahrt: Eine wirtschaftshistorische Analyse (review)

In his lightly revised dissertation, Helmut Braun sets out to apply economic theory to explain the rise and demise of the rigid airship. In so doing, he argues that most previous histories have failed to account for the multitude of factors that led to the triumph of heavier-than-air aviation, and that a true multidisciplinary approach is needed. To prove his case, however, Braun ends up treading familiar territory and thus reaches conclusions very similar to other recent histories of the airship.

Reinvestigating known events by casting them in a Schumpeterian perspective certainly is a welcome way of testing previous explanations for the twisted road the airship followed. To ensure that the reader understands his undertaking, Braun also offers detailed backgrounds to each phase of airship history he wishes to investigate. This widens the scope of his work considerably and assumes some prior knowledge of the subject.

Braun’s work deserves praise for seeking to understand how and why the rigid airship was never a moneymaking operation (much to its supporters’ dismay). The actual numbers, however, are not as easy to determine as they might appear. Henry Cord Meyer, who studied the political aspects of the airship, admitted privately that this was his greatest frustration. Braun valiantly tries to fill the void by looking more closely at materials made available over the past decade or so in the Zeppelin Archives.

Furthermore, Braun places the dirigible’s use in the wider context of aviation activities. It is gratifying to see not only a serious endeavor to link airship and airplane, but to see it done transnationally. In so doing, he echoes Schumpeter’s call for an examination of international change, but Braun’s model also prompts him to overlook some valuable material that would strengthen his case.

The broadness of Braun’s investigation ultimately weakens his thesis. In dismissing sociocultural factors early on, he ends up resurrecting them as political ones while missing the grounds for politicians’ reactions to the airship. For example, he calls Atlantic flight a “minor niche.” Although this may be true in the context of interwar business, it ignores combined factors of cultural fascination, economic potential, and geopolitical shifts happening at the time. All of these prompted governments and companies to sponsor—or at least acquiesce in the risks involved in—hopping the pond.

Braun’s use of the existing literature also shows some gaps. The list of German works on the subject appears fairly complete, but published sources in other languages, though cited, often do not make it into the notes. For example, the nationalist dimensions of aviation so aptly explored for more than two decades by several historians pop up occasionally, but it is not always clear how they influenced subsidy priorities.

A similar problem appears in the use of archival sources. Using the Zeppelin Archives’ materials, Braun certainly proves the role of subsidies in the prewar years and in the 1920s, yet he abandons this line of investigation for the 1930s, focusing instead on a kind of political economy of airships that retraces known events. Very few of the Bundesarchiv’s Finance Ministry materials were examined, and the Transportation Ministry material appears nowhere in Braun’s sources. Instead, he offers a highly detailed discussion of the failed helium negotiations of 1937–39 and of the actual metal costs of airship manufacture. Yet he refrains from examining the overall business of the Zeppelin Corporation, by then sole purveyor of rigids. To sum up, such over-contextualization offers up a lot of material, but it also creates an imbalance in the analysis Braun seeks to communicate.

Braun concludes that the airship was a flop from the start because of technological, political, and economic factors. This position is not entirely new, but what is new is the attempted incorporation of business outcomes. On the other hand, Braun does not include sociocultural factors, though he does weigh personal character when discussing helium. Perhaps a better incorporation of SCOT, which...