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

Abstract

In 1923 the Transylvanian German Hermann Oberth published in Munich a slim theoretical volume on rocketry and spaceflight, Die Rakete zu den Planetenriiumen (The rocket into interplanetary space).' (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 moonflight. 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 discussion of rocketry were largely eliminated by the Nazis in 1933-34.

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