Shuffled Zeppelin Clips: The Flight and Crash of LZ 129 Hindenburg in the Archives

Abstract

This essay discusses practices of reuse, archiving, and digitization of historical film documents from the Nazi era. It lays out the ways in which those filmic images can contribute to questions about remembering and discussing history. In 1958 the historian Fritz Terveen, editor for history at the Institute for Scientific Film (IWF) in Göttingen, published a film on the flight and crash of the notorious zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg. These catastrophic scenes of the airship crash were reproduced and reused many times and now appear on numerous online platforms. The reappearance of analogue 16-mm film in the digital world offers the opportunity to discuss the provenance and reuses of research and educational films. The central question is how those reused and recycled film materials can claim to produce specific knowledge about historical events that are now part of cultural memory. The essay argues that films like the one on LZ 129 were always embedded in a referential system of different media and that making them accessible today requires strong contextualization within curated platforms. It is an attempt to write the recent history of film digitization, including the earliest provenance of a historic research film.