Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900-1939 (review)

The visit of the LZ-127 Graf Zeppelin to the city of Leningrad in July 1931 left a lasting impression on the Soviet Union's political leadership. Convinced that the world's largest country should have the world's largest airships, the Soviet state embarked on a hastily organized campaign to construct a squadron of giant dirigibles that would surpass in size and technical mastery the most advanced airships the Germans had to offer. Although the effort to match the LZ-127 with an even more impressive "Red Zeppelin" produced no meaningful results, the reaction of Soviet officials was a striking testament to the airship's ability to inspire respect and admiration for German engineering among audiences around the globe.

The public's widespread and durable fascination with the airship is the subject of Guillaume de Syon's perceptive monograph. Marshaling an impressive array of diverse sources, including archival documents, periodicals, memoirs, and cultural artifacts, de Syon depicts the sociopolitical and cultural factors that gave rise to the "Zeppelin spirit" in Wilhelmine Germany and that sustained popular interest in the aerial behemoth until the outbreak of World War II. Specifically, he seeks to explain how and why Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin and his flying machines managed to transcend political, social, and economic differences to become national symbols of progress and modernity for successive generations of German citizens. In doing so, he contributes original and important insights into the histories of modern Germany and twentieth-century technology.

De Syon adopts David Nye's concept of the technological sublime as an avenue for exploring the intersection of airship technology and German culture. A means of explaining the contradictory combination of popular fascination and fear that oftentimes accompanies large-scale projects such as bridges, dams, aircraft, and rockets, the technological sublime refers to the process by which products of technological gigantism are sublimated into a nation's consciousness through constant interaction with their changing social and cultural contexts. As de Syon notes, one of the chief characteristics of the technological sublime is that intended symbolic meanings oftentimes differ from the actual representation of a technological artifact at the political and social level.

Zeppelin! comprises six chapters, each of which involves discussions of the airship's evolving technological composition and symbolic representation. Chapters 1 and 2 trace its history from its faltering origins (in which it was perceived as little more than a technologically unproven, large dirigible) to its widespread acceptance, by 1914, as a powerful symbol of the German national consciousness. Here, de Syon adeptly describes how the tireless efforts of Count Zeppelin and his associates to generate state subsidies for his projects through appeals to patriotism played an essential role in creating the Zeppelin mystique.

In Chapter 3, de Syon analyzes the role of the Zeppelin in the conduct of World War I. Particularly interesting is his description of how domestic and foreign observers consciously exaggerated the airship's military contributions to advance widely divergent political and economic agendas.

The economic difficulties faced by the Zeppelin company during the interwar period are addressed in chapters 4 and 5. Desperate to keep the enterprise afloat during the turbulent Weimar years, Zeppelin representatives such as Hugo Eckener endeavored to reinvent the mission and meaning of the airship by appealing to the nostalgic longing of the exhausted German public while, on the international stage, advancing the craft as a peaceful instrument of scientific and economic progress. The book's final chapter concerns the problematic efforts of Nazi officials to harness the "Zeppelin sublime" to the regime's ideological vision of modernity before disbanding the Zeppelin program (in favor of airplanes) in the spring of 1940.

De Syon's study succeeds admirably in tracing the technological, institutional, and political history of the airship as a military weapon, economic instrument, and enduring symbol of the German nation. My only criticism concerns the "Essay on...