FROM THE BOOK

At the start of World War I, German propaganda relied heavily on representations of military triumphs — both real and imagined — as well as correlating images of its enemies’ defeat. As the German army began its campaign through Belgium into France, artists frequently personified the national military force as prodigious in size and power, and its adversaries as comparatively diminutive. Even as plans for a quick victory and invasion of Paris faltered in the fall and winter of 1914, German propaganda cards lampooned the French with a series of images that suggested that the Eiffel Tower, and by extension, the national capital, were easy prey. Artists portrayed this potent symbol of modern French identity and technological innovation as toylike — being carried away as a tourist souvenir or being scaled by a giant German soldier wearing the imperial-era spiked helmet known as a Pickelhaube. In some cards, German warplanes are shown dropping bombs on the tower, although ultimately the air campaigns directed at Paris were largely unsuccessful, and ground troops advancing toward the capital were stalemated. The Germans never captured Paris during World War I.

Despite the German flyers’ failure to triumph over Paris, aerial combat did become a reality during World War I. Rapid advances in aeronautic technology led to a shift in the deployment of newly invented aircraft from reconnaissance efforts and the distribution of propaganda to machine-gunning and dogfights, as well as increasingly effective aerial bombardments. Aviators became the military elite, and the exploits of pilots such as Manfred von Richthofen (better known as the Red Baron) inspired patriotic hero worship. Although airplanes came to dominate aerial warfare, the most feared German flying machine during the early years of the war was the Zeppelin (a class of dirigible named for its developer, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin). In the first year of the war, attacks on Warsaw, Liège, Antwerp, and Paris intro- duced the strategy of using Zeppelins to bomb cities, making the airships a frequent propaganda topic.

German citizens celebrated the Zeppelin for its potential to overcome the legendary strength of the British navy and defeat the naval blockade of German ports, to destroy British arsenals, and, by bringing war to the home front, to undermine the morale of the British people — all themes taken up in propaganda. Postcards reinforced the Zeppelin’s ability to instill fear in the British, whose population had already been primed for the airship’s fearsome potential by pre- war sightings and by popular science fiction such as H.G. Wells’s The War in the Air, published in 1908. During the war, the German military launched more than fifty Zeppelin attacks on England, including twelve on London alone. Postcards depicted the panic induced by these bombardments in caricatures of British soldiers, afloat on tiny boats, cowering under umbrellas.

— Lynda Klich and Juliana Kreinik