German Rocketry, 1920's & 1930's: Cover Designs

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1901

I've selected a few representatives of design for the covers of pamphlets and books published in the field of rocket development and space flight published in Germany in the 1920's and 1930's (with one from the 1951).  They have a certain expectant sameness them, and, as leading publications in their field, have a remarkable similarity in their (black and white) design.  The combined efforts of these works wound up in the engineering labs of Peenemuende and then int he V-1 and V-2 rockets that pulverized the United Kingdom during WWII.  Later this same expertise, and some of the same engineers, "wound up" in the United States developing the American space program.  The most famous of these Paperclipped scientists was Wernher von Braun, whose name is so intimately connected with the Vengeance Weapons as well as the Apollo space program.  It is interesting to note that for many years if twas impossible to find von Braun's name on any exhibition description in the Air and Space Museum in D.C.--it just wasn't there, so far as I could tell, on no displays, even though I went looking for it pretty closely.  On the 30th anniversary of the Moon landing, I went to von Braun's grave to see if it had been remembered in any way--there wasn't anything there, just his simple small slab, next-door to and within eyesight of a Jewish cemetery. 

Rudolf Nebel (1894-1978), very early member of the Raketenflugplatz, assistant to Hermann Oberth and very nearly the first to successfully conduct an experiment with a liquid-fueled rocket, beaten to the finish line by a man whose work he was not familiar with, Robert Goddard.  He defined right-wing in the Weimar era, and was part of a paramilitary organization called Stralheim; Wernher von Braun seems to have succeeded in the avenue that Nebel tried to travel along.  Nebel published this work in 1932, a year before the Nazi party came into power, and before his crotchety problems with teh SA began.

Willy Ley (1906-1969, and whose work is shown first, at top) published this rather long (344 pages) work, a fundamental book in the history of rocket design and space flight.  It was 1928. Ley leaves the Nazi infestation in Germany in 1933; his work on rocket development stays at Peenemuende.

Hermann Oberth's (1894-1989) 1923 is recognized as one of the great, classical works in the history of space flight and rocket development.  It was a scientific treatise with mathematical basis, and it quite literally fueled the first generation of German experimenters in the field. No one who went anywhere in this rocket design during this period was not influenced by Oberth. He of course was very influential in the design of the Vengeance Weapons (V1 and V2) and worked on delivering those weapons to the U.K.for the duration of the war.  He was allowed to leave Germany following the war, and eventually--in the mid 1950's--was to work again with his pupil Wernher von Braun in Hunstville, Alabama, for the U.S. government. HE would return to Germany in 1958 but would return again to the U.S. working for the Corvair Corporation in the development of the Saturn rocket booster.  He later became involved in right-wing politics on his return to Germany.

Die Rakete was a short-lived journal (1927-1929) dedicated to rocketry, and is recognized as the first of its kind in any language, and was published by the German Society for Space Travel ("Vereins fuer Raumschiffahrt"):

Wernher von Braun (1912-1977).  The first thing that comes to mind for me was sitting at dinner a block away from the Diamond District in NYC and seeing an amber beer advertised in the menu as a "Wernher von Brown".  I imagine that the bright lights behind the restaurant had no idea of von Braun's connection to the war and to the thousands employed in slave labor in his works and the restaurant's proximity to all of those people working a block away from their Nazi amber.  Or the many Vengeance Weapons that slammed into the U.K. killing so many thousands. What everyone remembers of him, if they remember him at all, is his very robust connection to the Apollo Program and sending the U.S. to the Moon and back.  The connections to those awful and murky activities in WWII get very foggy when one talks about Apollo and the V-2, and I guess necessarily so. 

Here's his good thinking on The Mars Project, published in 1952, although it was written mostly in 1947 and 1948--it was the first serious engineering effort to think about a manned expedition to Mars

Otto Willi Gail (1896-1956)  was more a science journalist, popularizer, science fiction and fantasy writer than anything else, though his descriptions of preparations for launching a spacecraft to the Moon as well as the experiences of the crew were fairly lifelike: 

Alexander Scherschevsky was Oberth's second assistant, after Nebel, coming to him as a refugee and set to work almost immediately on liquid-fueled rockets. This 1929 publication contains Scherschevsky's history of rocketry and his ideas about space travel, as well as noticing a mostly unknown contributor to the field, that being Pedro A. Paulet, a Peruvian chemical engineer who reportedly worked in Paris in the late 1890's on a  200-lb thrust liquid-fueled rocket but who did not report on his research until 1927. 

Comments

[Ray Girvan]

These are the kind of stylistic models for a very nice reimagining of a German version of "2001: A Space Odyssey" as "2001: Odyssey im Weltraum" by Fritz Lang.

See the third image down in "What if"... Movies reimagined for another time & place... http://www.behance.net/gallery/Movies-From-An-Alternate-Universe/2783319