Fear of Floating
Diagnosis: Collective Panic Attack. Cause: Count von Zeppelin.
Dan Vergano
July 2009
The sightings caused the British terrible anxiety. At the time, Germany and the United Kingdom were locked in an arms race. In 1906 the British had commissioned the Dreadnought, the fastest battleship in the world, and the most sophisticated in firepower. Germany would launch a fleet of formidable Kaiser-class battleships, but it hoped to shore up its naval power with airships. In 1908, German privy councillor Rudolph Martin bragged to Daily Mail readers that in the event of a war, a zeppelin fleet would “transport 350,000 men in half an hour during the night from Calais to Dover…. [W]e would conclude no peace until a German army had occupied London.”
Popular culture reflected Germany’s threat. The year before the airship reports, the British magazine Pall Mall had serialized H.G. Wells’ The War in the Air, a novel in which a fleet of German dirigibles bombs New York. The following year, Martin elaborated on his boasts, publishing World War in the Air, a book that imagines zeppelins bombing block after block of Paris (“Even at high altitudes,” says one character, “I heard the sounds of hundreds of people crying for help”) and defeating England.
The British “woke up to the idea that the Germans had created this dreadful weapon capable of breaking the [protective] barrier of the British navy,” says folklorist David Clarke of the University of Sheffield. “[F]or the first time in its history the island was vulnerable to invasion from the air.”
