Santa's Zeppelin

Images of Santa's Zeppelin are perhaps one of the more unusual combinations of traditional holiday iconography with the early 20th century's latest marvels. At the very least such images show us that postcard audiences had an interest in combining old and new...in taking a long-standing icon of Christmas, like Santa Claus, and mixing him in with the latest topics that were attracting people's interest and fascination. Although holidays on postcards were most often depicted as very nostalgic affairs that embraced the mythologies of a rural past, a stream of images like this one--along with bunny-flying hot air balloons or witch-controlled airplanes--showed an ability to embrace modernity too, and reappropriate the modern world into the holiday landscape.

But Santa's zeppelin speaks to something else as well. We know that postcards (and holiday postcards especially) had multiple links to Germany. Postcards were exported primarily from Germany until a 1909 tariff increased the duties on them. Early in the fad, postcards were entirely German creations, and later became hybrids of drawings by American artists and printing/production by German lithographers working in Germany, especially regions like Saxony. We know the postcard fad carried over from Europe in the opening years of the 20th century, especially Germany, before taking root here. And American manufacturers of postcards were often German immigrants themselves. Joseph Koehler marketed his line of holiday postcards with the promise, “All the Christmas and New Year’s post cards handled by the house may be had in either English or German text…”1

And in the research conducted into postcard audiences, a similar German correlation was found. Among the immigrants in this country in 1910, only 19% were born in Germany. But the results of the research showed postcard audiences that were 30-40% German-born. German heritage was also disproportionately high. The 1910 census found that among all the people born in this country who had at least one immigrant parent, about 26% of those were German. Among postcard audiences with this German heritage (what the census called "German Stock,") the number jumped to 50%!

Putting Santa's Zeppelin in context

Although there was a general fascination with aviation, flight, and modern technologies, the visual linkage to the zeppelin suggests something more. While the marvels of aviation had several different outlets, for Germans, it was predominately the zeppelin. Peter Fritzsche writes that the zeppelin in Germany “congenially represented the insistent claims of a popular, people’s nationalism.” These claims came in spontaneous celebrations whenever a zeppelin appeared, stirring up a “colorful carnival bustle” and changing a workday into a holiday, while also inspiring an outpouring of postcards, cookies, beers, firecrackers and more throughout German marketplaces and fairs.2 “Germany’s airship craze is eloquently exemplified in this year’s Christmas toys,” noted one cable from Berlin. “Hawkers lining the sidewalks of Berlin in these pinching days and nights, as well as the plaything departments of all the great shops, are featuring miniature ‘Zeppelins’ and ‘Wrights’ as the toys of the hour."3

The fact that this new form of technology was tied to patriotism and nationalism, almost from the beginning, gives some indication of what kinds of meanings images of aviation communicated. By bringing aviation into expressions of the holidays, recipients celebrated both the technology and the nations behind it. For German-Americans, core postcard users, this was a bit like having their cake and eating it too. In Germany, Zeppelin beer and toys and other products created imagined communities of celebrants across the German Empire, all heralding a great national achievement through shared products. In the United States, holiday postcards with images of aviation operated in the same way—using the German-originated postcard, holiday celebrants could be linked in imagined communities of folk who understood aviation, and the zeppelin most of all, as a source of national pride. Fritzsche perhaps put it best, writing: “A host of new ‘scientific’ nouns and classifications, which mixed Darwinian imperatives with technological positivism, described this brave new world. National survival in the twentieth century seemed to be a matter of accepting the novel terms of the ‘air age’…”4

Assuaging Fears and Doubts

In 1909, Los Angeles City Hall, the Financial District, and multiple residential areas were bombed from the air

Such images helped accomplish something else as well.  Santa fit naturally into visions of flight—after all, it was his flying sleigh that took him to the homes of all good children. However, linking Santa specifically to these new technologies was also a way of assuaging doubts or concerns about them. Even as aviation was celebrated, people around the world were already having to think about how zeppelins might be used for war. H. G. Wells’ The War in the Air was published in twelve installments in the British Pall Mall Gazette, starting in January 1908. Writes Robert Wohl, “…scientific fact was overtaking scientific fiction. As hyperactive and far-reaching as Well’s imagination was, it could not keep step with the breathless pace of technological innovation.”5

Roy Knabenshue made this abundantly clear in December 1909 when he flew over Los Angeles in a dirigible for an hour and half, and proceeded to bomb city hall, the financial district, and multiple residential areas from the air. The fact that his projectiles were confetti bombs didn’t detract from the point Knabenshue was trying to make: “I think I have demonstrated perfectly how easy it would be in time of war to work incalculable damage to the enemy’s country,” he said after his flight.6 Americans had only to read about Knabenshue’s flight, or to see the cover of the following February’s Popular Mechanics, to visualize such a scenario taking place right over their heads.

Images of Santa flying around in zeppelins (or airplanes or balloons) went right to the heart of this problem. How could a viewer be anxious about such an important nation-building technology when benign, kind, and child-centric Santa Claus (or for that matter, Easter Bunnies, or innocent little Cupids) employed such devices? It is important to realize that images such as these wouldn’t have survived in the marketplace if purchasers and viewers didn’t find enjoyment, pride, and satisfaction in the images. But part of that satisfaction lay in resolving the desire to inject nationalistic feelings into a technology that had darker, more sinister applications.

Santa's zeppelin helped to bridge that divide--one reason (among many to be sure) that it became popular during the height of the postcard phenomenon.

Last Whisper

Back to Gallery

Next Whisper

© 2010 Postcardwhisperer.net