Zeppelin Fictions and the British Home Front

Abstract

I n The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) Paul Fussell famously argued that the dominant effect that the war produced on writers was a mood of irony and disillusionment.2 Yet the impact of the Zeppelin on the imagination of home-front writers belies the general mood of dread that Fussell indicates, and initially shows instead an intoxication or exhilaration by war.3 As Guillaume de Syon writes, artists and intellectuals were particularly taken with the contradictory mix of fascination and repulsion that the airship evoked.4 The effect ofthe Zeppelin was not simply traumatic; it inspired awe as well as fear, excitement as well as dread. The Zeppelin simultaneously displaced attention from soldiers at the front and allowed civilians to identify with soldiers, to feel their own roles in the war as central, and their own lives at risk. As new objects appearing in the sky, the Zeppelins helped trigger the eschatological language which Jay Winter claims assumed renewed prevalence during the war.5 They changed the social fabric of the wartime city, sent city dwellers to the coun? try, and employers to the cellar along with their servants. The Zeppelin changed the meaning of