the German Star Trek, 1925

The history of early German space flight and rocket development is complex, puzzling and riddled with unexpected esoteric influences. Then there is the strong yearning to return to a mythical fatherland, that between the two world wars not always translated itself in earthly geographical coordinates. One fitting example of this is found in a German film that was thought lost forever. Only recently a copy of this film, entitled Wunder Der Schöpfung (The Miracles Of Creation), has been found. In the film a German scientific team travels through the universe in a spacecraft that serves as the symbol of progress and an age of new technologies, explaining all that is to be seen. Wunder Der Schöpfung was not meant as lighthearted science fiction. Instead, the film that was begun in 1923 and released two years later, the same year that Hitler's Mein kampf saw print, was meant as an educational device. Hence the end of the world is discussed in optimistic terms, with detailed descriptions of the end of mankind. Four Professors cooperated with the film team, to ensure that everything was based on the scientific knowledge of the day.

Wunder Der Schöpfung was to be, in the words of one critic, UFA's greatest achievment. UFA put itself more and more in the mindframe necessary for its most ambitious project yet: Fritz Lang's Metropolis, that was relased in 1927, two years after Wunder Der Schöpfung. Contrary to Metropolis that obtained only a lukewarm reception, Wunder Der Schöpfung was a tremendous hit. It still is a remarkable film with for that time highly ingenious elaborate special effects and scenes that might have served as a template for Stanley Kubrick's 2001.

At the dark heart of Lemuria, 1917

In 1917, a book with strange and uncanny tales that bore the remarkable title Lemuria was published in Germany. The horrible blackness and the almost pathological nature of its haunting illustrations closely connected to the spirit of the German nation, as the fatherland was desperately struggling to survive the onslaught of the First World War. Lemuria struck a chord in the German psyche and was reprinted well till after the Great War that should have ended all wars, but didn't. The name Lemuria was introduced in the 19th century by geologists speculating on a lost continent in the Indian ocean. The term was quickly seized upon by occultists and theosophists in the wake of Blavatsky's unvelings. Blavatsky saw the Lemurians as reptilian in nature, being the Third Root Race, having followed the Hyboreans, The Second Root Race. However, the Lemurians used black magic and corrupted themselves by intermingling with other species, necessitating the gods of destroying Lemuria after which they created the Fourth Root Race, that of Atlantis. One notes the origin of much Ariosophical speculation here, and the nucleus of her theories on Lemuria bear a striking similarity with those of Lanz von Liebenfels, founder of the Ordo Novi Templi, an order modelled partially on The Knights Templar. Liebenfels of course also edited the antisemitic periodical Ostara of which it is claimed that an impressionable Adolf Hitler read these during his years in Vienna.

In Lemuria we encounter one short story, entitled Der Bogomilenstein (The Stone of the Bogomil), that may betray some of Strobl's cultural predilections. The Bogomils were spiritual forerunners of the Cathars and, some say, the Knights Templar. German author Hanns Heinz Ewers wo would later write the National-Socialist anthem the Horst Wessel Lied published Lemuria in a series titled Gallerie der Phantasten (Gallery of the Fantasts) with publisher Georg Muller Verlag in Munich. The author of Lemuria was Austrian writer Karl Hanns Strobl (1877 - 1946), who during his life also was the editor of Der Orchideengarten, about which I posted earlier on this blog. Strobl wrote many unusually dark, strange and gruesome fantastic tales, collected in, amongst others, Lemuria.

During the First World War , Strobl was a messenger, a position not unlike that of his fellow Austrian Adolf Hitler. After the war, Strobl developed a strong sympathy for the Nationalsocialist cause. In 1938 Strobl worked in an important position in the Ostgau, leading a department of Goebbel's Reichsschrifttumskammer. This lead to his arrest by the Soviet troops in 1945. Strobl was forced to work at road construction for a while. He was released due to age and very poor health. He died a year later in a home for the elderly near Vienna. At the time of his death, the Allied forces had prohibited his works to be published. And where his books once commanded multiple reprints and huge successes and Strobl formed, with Gustav Meyrink and Hanns Heinz Ewers the three dark princes of the German horror and supernatural, he died totally impoverished.

Aryan Gods from Hyperborea

Otto Sigfrid Reuter has obtained in recent years the dubious sobriquet of, together with Hermann Wirth, the founding father of Nazi Archaelogy. Reuter (1876 - 1945) was a staunch Ariosophist and founder of several Aryan-Christian orders such as the Deutschglaubige Gemeinschaft and the Germanische Glaubensgemeinschaft, founded in 1911 and 1912 respectively. The aim of these orders was the fusion of blood and religion, hence, membership was restricted to "true Aryans". Some have it that these orders still exist today. Reuter's reputation rests predominantly on his book Germanische Himmelskunde (German Sky Lore), published in 1934. The idea behind his orders was to rid Christianity of the Jewish influences to make it more digestible for Germans. Reuter's book Sigfrid oder Christus? Ein Kampfruf (Sigfrid or Christ? A Battle Cry), published in 1908, reflects his philosophy. Highly succesful, it was reprinted in 1910. His next book, Das Ratsel der Edda und der Arische Urglaube (The Riddle of the Edda and the Ancient Religion of the Aryans), published in 1921 and 1923, was a continuation of his ideas. Reuter believed in the reality of the Edda "like a maniac" as one authority has it. This was one of the reasons why Reuter left various nationalist and racist German orders which stood at the cradle of National Socialism. It appears that Reuter could not tolerate ideas that were not of his own. Reuter's philosophy based on the study of the Edda was that the oldest human culture had come from a Germanic North. The idea of a world axis - the Axis Mundi or Irminsul, the column that supports heaven -was invented by the Germans and the names of all the constellations were based on ancient German science that had its origin aeons before our time. He also believed that the divine was to be found within the German race. Reuter died in 1945. With him perished his dreams of a prehistoric Aryan supercivilisation that had encoded its secret wisdom in the stars, amidst the smoke and the ruins of the Gotterdammerung of the Third Reich.

Crossing the Abyss, 1931

While the Third Reich made sure to eradicate the bewildering maze of occult orders, esoteric societies and Volkische movements the minute it came into power, it strangely left that other field with its many connections to the occult underground, that of science fiction, largely untouched. Thus, when the might of the German war machine unleashed its Blitzkrieg (thunder war) terror on an ill prepared Europe - its new strategic formula and technological terror tactics in itself a feat of sheer science fiction reminiscent of that early subgenre in science fiction entitled the Future War Tale - and the sirens of the Stuka dive bombers, howling like the legendary Walkuren or Banshees, transformed whole cities into hellish cauldrons of the alchemical Prima Materia, other minds in Germany kept on dreaming of soaring space ships and the conquest of space. Jetzt gehort und Deutschland, morgen das ganse Sonnensystem (now Germany belongs to us, tomorrow the whole solar system), as The Illuminatus Trilogy coyly states, might be the apt slogan. One could perhaps remark that, since Germany had lost most of its colonies, space formed the final formidable frontier. One author who envisioned the path to solar conquest in the dreamtanks of the Third Reich was Walter Heichen (1876 - 1970). His Jenseits der Stratosphäre. Erlebnisse zwischen Mond und Erde. Eine Erzählung für die Jugend (On the Other Side of the Stratosphere. Experiences between the Moon and the Earth. A Story for the Youths) was published in 1931 and was reprinted in 1939 as Luftschiff im Weltenraum (Airship in Space), the year that The Third Reich annihilated Poland. Heichen, who lived in Berlin, already had published propaganda lecture to kindle pattriotic interest during the outbreak of the First World War. During the Third Reich his pattriotism adhered to the National Socialist cause. In Heichen's book, the protagonists travel to the planet of Sigma, where they encounter highly developed humanoids. Heichen died in Berlin in 1970, having witnessed the landing of the first man on the Moon the year before, made possible by his fellow countryman Wernher von Braun, who had led the rocket development program of the Third Reich before and during World War II.

The German Mission to Mars, 1910

Mars has held the fascination of mankind since times immemorial. Starting in the early 19th century many books were written about travels to Mars, or Martians travelling to earth, the most famous ones probably being H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds (1897) and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars series. In Germany however, the pen was taken up by Kurt Lasswitz. His Auf Zwei Planeten (On Two Planets) was published in the same year as Wells' War of the Worlds. Lasswitz book became immensely popular. Wernher von Braun confessed to have read it and became so inspired by it to pursue a career that landed a man on the Moon. Then there was Albert Daiber who published his Die Weltensegler, drei jahre auf dem Mars (The World Sailers, three years on Mars) in 1910 and its sequel Vom Mars zur Erde (From Mars to the Earth) in 1914. Albert Ludwig Daiber (1857 - 1928) was born in Germany but died in Chile. Apparently the reactions to his succesful book Elf Jahre Freimaurer (Eleven Years Freemason) that was published in 1905 were such that he decided to emigrate to Chile. In Daibers' books we encounter Martians called 'Marsites' who live in a scientific utopia. And where certain rumours have it that in 1944 or 1945, towards the end of World War 2 a secret German SS mission to Mars was actually undertaken in a 74 meter diameter Haunebu 3 flight disc, in Daiber's book the journey to Mars is started in 1942. The names of the seven world sailors, German scholars and professors, all begin with the same Letters. Thus we have a Paracelcus Piller, A Bombastus Brumhuber and so forth. The main protagonist, the leader of the expedition and its spiritual father is named Siegried Stiller, or, SS.

Noordung's solar space station, 1928

In 1925, a chronically ill and impoverished engineer in Vienna devoted himself entirely to space travel. His name was Herman Potočnik (1892 - 1929), and in 1928 his only book, Das Problem der Befahrung des Weltraums - der Raketen-motor (The Problem of Space Travel, the Rocket Motor) was published. In it, he gave detailed plans for the construction of a geostationary space station, solar powered and manned, called Wohnrad (Habitat Wheel). The design consisted of a ring with an outer diameter of 164 feet (50 metres) for living quarters, two large, concave mirrors for solar energy assembled to one end of the central axis, and an astronomical observation deck. His was among the first to propose a wheel-shaped space station in order to to create artificial gravity. The book did not bring Potočnik fame nor fortune, however. Engineers in Vienna dismissed his ideas as sheer fantasy, although it was of influence on the German Verein für Raumschiffahrt (The Space Flight Society) that was located in Berlin. Founded in 1927, it counted amongst its members Hermann Oberth and Wernher von Braun.

Potočnik too was a member. He died in Vienna on August 27, 1929 of pneumonia, in great poverty. Parts of his magnum opus were translated and in English, in the July, August and September issues of Gernsback's Science Wonder Stories in 1929. Oberth coined the phrase 'space station'to describe Potočnik's concept. Let us here, make place for Hermann Noordung as he wished himself to be known, and give the last words to him: "Conquering space! It would be the most grandiose of all achievements ever dreamed of, a fulfillment of the highest purpose: to save the intellectual accomplishments of mankind for eternity before the final plunge into oblivion. Only when we succeed in transplanting our civilization to other celestial bodies, thus spreading it over the entire universe, only when mankind with all its efforts and work and hopes and with what it has achieved in many thousands of years of striving, only when all of this is no longer just a whim of cosmic events, a result of random incidents in eternal nature's game that arise and die down with our little Earth so large for us and yet so tiny in the universe will we be justified to feel as if we were sent by God as an agent for a higher purpose, although the means to fulfill this purpose were created by man himself through his own actions."

The Garden of Orchids

It is often claimed that the first magazines devoted to science fiction and the fantastic orginated in the United states and exerted their influence on the emerging fields of ufology, the paranormal and the fortean. While the venerable Weird Tales was launched in March 1923, Austrian magazine Der Orchideengarten (The Garden of Orchids) preceded the American venture with four years. First published in 1919 under the editorship of Karl Hans Strobl (1877 - 1946), an Austrian writer of dark and unusual horror tales who also was the publisher together with Alfons von Czibulka, it ran until 1921. Der Orchideengarten was more than a magazine devoted to the fantastic; appropriately founded in the year that across the ocean, Charles Fort would publish his Book of the Damned, the magazine too, devoted space to anomalous phenomena: "...we no longer dismiss as nonsense all things that are not explicable in terms of the known laws of physics. Mysterious connections between human beings, independent of spatial and temporal separation, spooks, the appearance of ghosts, all are again in the realm of the possible..." as the editorial in the second issue of Der Orchideengarten explained.

Strobl published his gruesome, unusual and haunting tales in a number of books with titles like Lemuria (1917) and Gespenster im Sumpf (1920) (Spooks on the Moor). Swedish science fiction magazine Hugin (1916 - 1920) preceded Gernsback's magazines like Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Stories (first issued 1929) and Amazing Stories (started in 1926). The editor of Hugin, Otto Witt (1875 - 1923) studied at the technical university of the German town of Bingen, at the same time that Hugo Gernsback studied there. Gernsback, born in 1884 as Gernsbacher, at ten years of age was an insatiable reader. At that time he found a translation of Percival Lowell's Mars as the Abode of Life. He devoured the book and went into a delirious phase that lasted two days, during which he rambled almost non-stop about the Martians and their technology, a theme to which he would return in later years. This experience would prove a pivotal point in the life of young Gernsbacher. In 1904, Gernsbacher went to the United States and changed his name into Gernsback. There he would come to know inventors like Tesla, de Forrest, Fessenden and Grindell-Matthews. Gernsback would also publish an impressive list of science fiction magazines and coin the very phrase 'science fiction'. As such, a case is to be made for Germany as the birthplace of 20th century science fiction magazine publishing.

Alien technology in Germany, 1920

Recent years have seen the emergence of a rumour that float around the internet like moths to a flame about a crashed UFO in the Black Forrest in 1936 which was spirited away to the dark heart of Nazi Germany. There it was to be dismantled and dilligently studied by, it is claimed, the members of the Vril Society. While no historically verifiable evidence for this tale has come to light, the idea of alien technology that has fallen into the hands of a select group, was already the subject of a film in Germany in 1920.
Just two years after the defeat of Germany in the First World War, a little known silent film was released. Entitled Algol, it tells the story of a superior extraterrestrial from the Dogstar, who donates incredible technology that enables a wealthy industrialist to enslave the world by this free energy device. Lost for decades, copies of the film have surfaced in recent years. The illustration here is of the alien being, poised far away in the eternal blackness of the universe. One may wonder how the age old ritual of the trafficking with otherworldly beings and intelligences, the angelic beings and the demons of the old magical textbooks, evolved with the aide of a film like Algol that expressed a specific message or thought, and gradually transformed into alien entities from far away planets in the feverish and strange undercurrents of the German occult movements.

the roots of the Andromeda-Gerät

In the relatively modern variant of the Vril Society saga, it is claimed that, amongst others, in 1944 a huge, 139 meter long cylindrical mothership called the Andromeda-Gerat (depicted on the illustration at the bottom) was constructed by the Vril Society or by means of the technology of this highly secret society . Foreshadowing the large Adamski-type motherships, but post-dating the cilindrical spaceship from Nils Meyn's Die Reise zur Venus (the Voyage to Venus), the conception of the Andromeda Device itself was nothing new. In Germany in 1908, readers were introduced to Captain Mors who flew through space with what may be considered the precursor to the Andromeda-Gerat (depicted on the illustration at the top). Captian Mors was a proto-science fictional hero who encountered various aliens, crystal robots with strange devices and discovered new planets with extraterrestrial life between 1908-1911 in 165 adventurous installments published in Germany. As such, both the fabulous Andromeda-Gerat of the Vril Society and Captain Mors' Lenkbares Luftshiff (manoeuverable airship) and his Meteor, a Weltenfahrzeug (World vehicle), may be considered as extreme extrapolations in a fantasmagoric world where the occult, avant-garde science and the sense of wonder meet.

The occult technology of the Ark

In their article Re-engineering the Ark which was published in Fortean Times 207, authors Michael Blackburn and Mark Bennett speculate on the Ark as being a source of electrical energy. This theory appeared much earlier in Nazi Germany. In 1936 a slim book written by Konradin Aller was published, entitled Moses Entlarvt: die Wunder Moses als Luftelektrische Vorgange (Moses Unmasked: The Miracles of Moses as Atmospheric Electrical Events), with a series of evocative drawings by Werner Graul. The booklet appeared as part of the series of the Werner Graul Bildbucher. The premise of the book was that Moses was a hoaxer; all the divine miracles that accompanied him were the effects of laws of nature. Thus the Ark was nothing more than a repository of electricity. This knowledge Moses had acquired in ancient Egypt. Aller also alluded to the work of Estonian engineer and inventor Hermann Plauson. Plauson was director of the Fischer-Tropps Otto Traun Research Laboratories in Hamburg during the Weimar republic in the 1920’s. He built on Nikola Tesla’s ideas of connecting machinery to the wheelworks of nature, and 1920 saw the publication of Plauson’s book Gewinnung und Verwertung der Atmospharischen Elektrizitat (Production and Utilization of the Atmospheric Electricity). Plauson’s ideas were also published in the March, 1922 issue of Hugo Gernsback’s Science and Invention magazine. Gernsback was an intimate friend of Tesla – he arranged for a death mask to be made when Tesla had died.

Friedrich Hermann Werner Graul (1905 - 1984), was a sketcher and engraver by profession. Graul gravitated towards volkische circles and became a member of the NSDAP in 1933. He founded the periodical Sigrune and a publishing house of the same name. He specialised in drawings which represented the conversion of the ancient Germans to Christianity - drawings which clearly demonstrate his affection for the old religion. Graul also had designed the film poster for Fritz Lang's 1926 dystopian classic science fiction film Metropolis. The film was produced by German film production company UFA. From Graul to Grau: A design and set painter named Albin Grau worked at UFA around that time. Grau, a mysterious person to whom we shall return in a later installment, was a freemason and a spiritualist with a deep passion for the occult. He became a member of the Fraternitas Saturni, founded in 1928 after a rather tumultuous visit by Aleister Crowley to Germany. The order specialised in an unusual mixture of avantgarde technology and magical ritual partly based, or so it claimed in the pages of its official organ Saturn Gnosis, on Tesla’s theories. Neither had Aller postulated a new theory; Tesla wrote in his article A Fairytale of Electricity, published on September 9, 1915 in Manufacturers' Record: "...Moses was undoubtedly a practical and skillful electrician far in advance of his time. The Bible describes precisely, and minutely, arrangements constituting a machine in which electricity was generated by friction of air against silk curtains, and stored in a box constructed like a condenser. It is very plausible to assume that the sons of Aaron were killed by a high-tension discharge, and that the vestal fires of the Romans were electrical..."

Grau's paintings and drawings adorned several of the five lavishly produced Saturn Gnosis issues. The last issue was published in 1930, the Berlin order disbanded not long afterwards, due to the prohibition imposed by Nazi Germany on the esoteric societies. Grau would die at Buchenwald concentration camp in October, 1942. To conclude in biblical terms; UFA had its ateliers at Babelsberg.