The piece, which cost over four million dollars to complete, is impressive. After purchasing an entry pass (a reduced-size reproduction of a ticket for the Hindenburg), the visitor heads for an adjoining glass-walled gallery containing the centerpiece of the museum: a replica of one part of the passenger section of the Hindenburg. In so doing, the designing architects have exploited the Hafenbahnhof’s space in a manner that does justice to its original style. The new Zeppelin Museum has taken up the challenge masterfully, first with a scale diorama of the Hindenburg dirigible over Friedrichshafen placed at the entrance, and then with a full-size replica of a section of the same airship. This is particularly problematic since the gigantism associated with the airship era is possibly the most difficult thing to render in exhibits, and few airship collections have the resources (or the space) to build a convincing replica. The main challenge to a museum purporting to present the history of rigid airships is the fact that none of the original machines still exists in complete form. (Courtesy Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen GmbH.) This 1933 photograph shows the Graf Zeppelin flying over the Bauhaus-style harbor train station that now houses the Zeppelin Museum. The result is a remarkable technical achievement. A budget of seventy million marks was allocated through state and corporate sponsorship (most notably from IBM and Mercedes), and construction began four years later. Although a small section of the Hafenbahnhof is still used for train service, increased road traffic reduced the German Federal Railway administration’s need for office space in the building, and it offered the station for sale in 1988. A prime example of Bauhaus architecture, the station was completed in early 1933 to link ferry service on Lake Constance from Austria and Switzerland to the German railroads. The Zeppelin Museum Association quickly selected the old Hafenbahnhof (harbor train station) to house the new museum (fig. In the late 1980s, with the assistance of the Zeppelin Museum Association, whose members were primarily former Zeppelin employees and airship enthusiasts, the museum administration turned its attention to locating a new site.
Opened in 1982, it added an airship section three years later but soon found itself running out of space for exhibits and the substantial Zeppelin archives. The Zeppelin Museum’s former incarnation, the Bodensee Museum, had sought to highlight the region’s dual heritage of art and industrial achievement (the Zeppelin company and its offspring: Dornier, MTU, and others). The process that led to the inauguration of the new museum lasted almost ten years.
On 2 July 1996, the ninety-sixth anniversary of Count Zeppelin’s first airship flight, the new Zeppelin Museum was opened to enormous fanfare. Having shifted its production focus following the Second World War, the Zeppelin company returned to its former specialty and began developing a new transport airship, the LZ-N 07. An obvious move in this direction was the establishment of a museum a small facility was duly created in the 1980s, and planning begun for a larger institution. Beginning in the 1970s, Friedrichshafen sought to shore up its “Zeppelin” identity as a source of civic pride and potential tourism. From 1900 until World War II, the southern German town of Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance was known as “Zeppelin City.” During that time, Friedrichshafen served as the manufacturing center for the giant airships bearing their inventor’s name.
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