Guided Pathway

Children of Mars, Newspaper Clippings relating to the Zeppelin in 1929

The last sequence must be seen in opposition to the 15^th-century miniature of Saturn and his Children. By creating this opposition Warburg illustrates, on the one hand, the individual’s being subject to presumably uncontrollable outside forces, and, on the other, its capability to develop technical means to calculate and master them. His case in point or rather the symbol of this development is the airship Graf Zeppelin, built from 1926 to 1928. In 1929 the captain Hugo Eckener (1868−1954), who had crossed the Atlantic with a Zeppelin in 1924, embarked at Lakehurst Naval Station (New Jersey) on a so-called round-the-world-voyage (# 5.1). The twenty-two-day trip (which was mainly funded by the newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst) gained massive attention; it was the first attempt to circumnavigate the globe by air. On his return from Tokyo to the USA, Eckener and his crew encountered a potentially devastating thunderstorm (# 5.2). The newspaper clippings from early September 1929 document the success of the trip, but Warburg had paid particular attention to the commander’s skills, first and foremost the fact that already when he crossed the Atlantic Eckener had used both a thermometer and a barometer to navigate around a thunderstorm as, again, he managed to escape a similar dangerous situation in August 1929. This was proof for Warburg of the human being’s final dominance over the cosmos. He compared Hugo Eckener – whom he considered a hero – with 16^th-century inventors such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452−1519) and the Milanese mathematician and technician Camillo Agrippa (died 1595?) who had constructed a compass to assist navigation. The clipping Warburg chose from the Münchner Illustrierte Presse (# 5.1) says explicitly that the success of the Zeppelin’s trip did no longer depend on the airship’s technology but on the skillfulness of the captain. (An element of German patriotism certainly played a role in his admiration for Eckener, too.) Even so, advanced technology is also celebrated, not only the technology that renders long-distance air travel possible, but also the even faster transmission of images via telegraphy (# 5.3). It seems unlikely, then, that these images relate to Warburg’s well-known pessimistic last passage of his Snake Ritual Lecture in which he quotes the Wright brothers as alleged inventors of the ‘dirigible airplane’ – an invention which he condemns as an ‘ominous destroyer of the sense of distance’ and whose inventors ‘threaten to lead the planet back into chaos’. Quite the opposite: although we don’t know how much notice Warburg took of contemporary discussions about the possibility of traveling to Mars, to which Clausberg has pointed, he noticed that technology got continuously advanced and refined: reports through radio transmission, for example, enabled pilots to prepare for dangerous weather conditions. In August 1929, three radio operators were part of Eckener’s crew. A month after the successful round-world-flight Warburg had even pondered the idea to invite the meteorologist Heinrich Seilkopf (1895−1968), an official of the German Weather Bureau in Berlin whom Eckener had praised for his assistance, to Hamburg, to give a lecture about contemporary weather prognosis at the K.B.W.

At an earlier stage of the project Warburg had been planning to include in this sequence a drawing after the title woodcut of Leonhard Reymann’s Practica of 1523 (which he had analysed in his 1920 essay, ‘Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Time of Luther’). The drawing depicts the expected convergence of several planets in the sign of Pisces in February 1524. A majestic fish whose body circumscribes the sun, the moon, four planets, and a skeleton thus functioned as counterpart to the airship. While the emperor, the pope, and several clerics, on one side, and a group of militant farmers led by Saturn, on the other, are on looking, a flood of water falls from the fish’s body onto a city. The similarities between the shape of the fish and the Zeppelin seemed for Warburg symbolic. In both cases prognostication was the theme, on one hand, provoking fear of a devastating flood, on the other, calculating atmospheric forces through meteorology.