German 1925 Zeppelin Eckener Spende Fundraising Poem Newspaper Clipping Graf Zeppelin

This is an original German newspaper clipping of 1925 carrying a printed patriotic poem headed Gedenket der Zeppelin-Eckener-Spende! (Remember the Zeppelin-Eckener Donation!), an appeal to the German public to give toward the building of a new airship. The clipping measures 7 by 4.5 inches (17.8 by 11.4 cm). The poem occupies one face within a decorative printed border in two columns of Fraktur type, credited beneath the title to Direktor Milarch (Löwenberg), while the reverse preserves fragments of the newspaper's other content, including radio broadcasting schedules for Hamburg, Berlin, Leipzig, and Münster, concert and theater notices, and an advertising panel for the Hannoverscher Kurier, placing the leaf in a Hanover-region paper of the mid-1920s.

The poem is a fund-raising exhortation, and its verses move from mourning to renewal and then to a direct call for money. Translated in full from the German, it reads:

Echterdingen! Ship in distress! And in bright flames a proud work of human hands suddenly collapses in on itself. From the ashes, phoenix-like, it was born anew: Hero-count of Lake Constance, you were not lost! North and South and East and West, town and country and every station in life reached out their helping hands to you in a spirit of sacrifice. All good spirits appeared on the scene, and a united German people helped the great master. Yet the last masterpiece passed into foreign hands. German people! Come to your senses! Is this now the end? What German strength accomplished here, shall it now fall to pieces, shall there now be the silence of the grave in those vast halls? All the art and all the spirit and the strong faith — shall the counsel of our enemies really rob us of it now? German people! That must not be — stir heart and hands, give from your poverty to the Eckener Donation. Many a burden presses hard on us with its weight; "Z.R.3" as a war tribute brought us nothing but honor! So too shall the new ship proclaim Germany's glory, Eckener will surely find his pole in secure flight. Over land and over sea ships will fly, Germany will conquer a world in the work of peace. There will be work for head and hand! In the great halls the strike of rivet and hammer will ring out merrily again! German people! So shall it be! Stir heart and hands, give from your poverty to the Eckener Donation! Young folk! Do give up the cigarette for a few days — and it will be a success, I wager! German lass, adorn yourself but once a little less, reach deep into your savings pot, all you German children! And whoever likes to drink his glass, let him abstain this once — whoever is a winner at gaming, let him give it to the donation! Housewife, make the Sunday meal just once more modest; what you save belongs to our conqueror of the air. Every one, even the poorest, shall bring his mite here, and if each one helps like this, the work must succeed! "Germany" shall be its name — that is the people's wish! Germany over land and sea, Germany high in honor!

Several of the poem's references reward explanation. The "hero-count of Lake Constance" is Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, whose works stood at Friedrichshafen on the Bodensee (Lake Constance). The opening invocation of Echterdingen recalls the destruction of Count Zeppelin's airship LZ 4 at Echterdingen in 1908 and the wave of public donations that followed it and rescued his enterprise. The "last masterpiece passed into foreign hands" and "Z.R.3" as a war tribute both refer to the airship LZ 126, built at Friedrichshafen and surrendered to the United States as reparations in 1924, where it served as ZR-3, the USS Los Angeles. The "conqueror of the air" is Hugo Eckener. The poet's wish that the new ship bear the name "Deutschland" (Germany) was the campaign's popular hope, and the repeated refrain to "give from your poverty" reflects that this was an appeal made in a Germany still economically battered in the mid-1920s, asking ordinary people to spare small sums they could barely afford.

The appeal belongs to a specific and pivotal moment in the history of the German airship. After the First World War the Treaty of Versailles and its aftermath stripped Germany of its Zeppelins, and the surrender of LZ 126 to the United States in 1924, though a technical triumph that proved the transatlantic capability of the rigid airship, left the Zeppelin Company at Friedrichshafen without a flagship and under threat of extinction. Hugo Eckener, who had taken up the leadership of the enterprise after the death of its founder Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in 1917 and who had personally commanded the delivery flight of LZ 126 across the Atlantic, responded by launching a national public subscription, the Zeppelin-Eckener-Spende des deutschen Volkes (Zeppelin-Eckener Donation of the German People), in 1925. The campaign drew contributions from across German society and, together with other funding, made possible the construction of LZ 127, which was launched in 1928 and named not Deutschland, as this poem had wished, but Graf Zeppelin in honor of the founder. LZ 127 went on to become the most successful airship in history, circling the globe in 1929 and operating a regular transatlantic passenger service to South America. This clipping is a direct artifact of the grass-roots campaign that saved the German airship enterprise and gave rise to the Graf Zeppelin, capturing the mixture of wounded national pride, admiration for Eckener, and popular enthusiasm that funded it.

Condition is consistent with age and with the newsprint on which it is printed. The paper is toned to a warm tan, as expected of newsprint of this period, and shows fold lines from having been kept folded, with light edge wear and minor chipping and small tears at the margins. The printing on both faces remains clear and fully legible, the poem complete within its decorative border and the reverse fragments readable. There is no significant loss to the text of the poem itself.

For the collector, the Zeppelin-Eckener-Spende is a landmark episode in aviation and airship history, and printed appeals from the 1925 campaign are evocative and increasingly sought paper artifacts of the effort that produced the Graf Zeppelin. This item falls outside the shop's core Imperial German focus, being a product of the Weimar Republic rather than the Kaiserreich, but it descends directly from the airship tradition founded under Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin in the Imperial era and belongs to the same field of Zeppelin and Eckener collecting as the flown covers and commemoratives that surround it. It will appeal to the collector of airship and aviation history, of Zeppelin ephemera, and of German patriotic printed material of the interwar years.