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Weimar Culture and Futuristic Technology: The Rocketry and Spaceflight Fad in Germany, 1923—1933

1990; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tech.1990.a901648

1097-3729

Michael J. Neufeld,

Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life

Weimar Culture and Futuristic Technology: The Rocketry and Spaceflight Fad in Germany, 1923 — 1933 MICHAEL J. NEUFELD In 1923 the Transylvanian German Hermann Oberth published in Munich a slim theoretical volume on rocketry and spaceflight, Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen (The rocket into interplanetary space).1 (See fig. 1.) Over the next few years Oberth’s book was followed in the German-speaking lands by a number of other works, both popular and technical, which attempted to demonstrate the feasibility and desirability of spaceflight—at the time a rather utopian and bizarre concept. One of the world’s first spaceflight societies and the world’s first journal devoted exclusively to rocketry and space exploration were also founded, and a significant popular fad was unleashed, peaking in 1928 —29 with a number of spectacular rocket stunts and a major science-fiction movie, directed by Fritz Lang, about a moon­ flight. Rocket experiments extended the life of this fad into the early 1930s, but the political and economic troubles of the Great Depression gradually overwhelmed it, and public experimentation with and dis­ cussion of rocketry were largely eliminated by the Nazis in 1933—34. Dr. Neufeld is a curator in the Department of Aeronautics of the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution. He is the author of The Skilled Metalworkers of Nuremberg and is currently working on an institutional history of the German army rocket center at Peenemunde during the Third Reich. This article was originally presented at the 1988 Society for the History of Technology annual meeting in Wilmington, Delaware. The research was made possible by the generous support of the Verville Fellowship of the National Air and Space Museum and a Smithsonian Postdoctoral Fellowship. The author wishes to express his appreciation for the many helpful comments made by colleagues currently or formerly at the Smithsonian, especially Frank Winter and Paul Forman, but also Gary Kulik, Robert Smith, John Mauer, Michael Dennis, David DeVorkin, Paul Ceruzzi, Allan Needell, and Cathy Lewis. Adam Gruen of the NASA Space Station History Project also deserves thanks. 'Hermann Oberth, Die Rakete zu den Planetenraumen (1923; reprint, Nuremberg, 1960). Oberth outlived virtually all of his contemporaries, dying in late December 1989 at the age of ninety-five.© 1990 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/90/3104-0004$01.00 HERMANN OBERTH rrKxunt!t VERLAG R OLDENBOURG Fig. 1.—Hermann Oberth’s 1923 book, along with Robert Goddard’s “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes” (1919/20), can be said to have launched the modern spaceflight movement. (All illustrations except fig. 6 courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum.) The Rocketry and Spaceflight Fad in Germany, 1923 — 1933 727 Oberth was not, of course, the first to discuss the feasibility of spaceflight through rocket propulsion. The priority of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Russia and Robert Goddard in the United States has long been recognized.2 Germany was also not the only location where rocketry and spaceflight were energetically discussed in the 1920s and 1930s—German-speakers were involved in a larger international movement that included Russians, Frenchmen, Americans, and Brit­ ons. What was unique about Germany in this era was the spectacular nature of the rocket stunts, the extent of the theoretical discussion, and the level of response in the news media and popular culture to the spaceflight idea. While this fact has often been noted, no one has offered an adequate explanation that takes into account the character of Weimar culture and society. In large part this is due to the scholarly neglect of the history of technology in German popular culture as well as the inadequacy of the literature in space history—a field that has only recently become respectable among academic historians. Not only do we lack comparable treatments of, say, the zeppelins or aviation in Weimar culture; there is little scholarly literature on the Weimar spaceflight fad itself. Popular histories aside, only Frank Winter’s very useful books and articles on the early rocket societies have covered this ground, and they do not focus on the cultural factors that might explain Weimar Germany’s openness to radical technological ideas.3 Such explanations as have been...