Weltraumschiff 1 Startet
Entry updated 23 September 2024. Tagged: Film.
["Spaceship Number 1 Starts"] German short film (1940; vt Rocket Flight to the Moon). Bavaria Film. Directed and written by Anton Kutter. Cast includes Fritz Reiff and Carl Wery. 23 minutes. Black and white.
It is the Near Future (probably 1960; see below), with a crowd of people dwarfed by an immense Art Deco building. The press are lectured by the project's Technical Director (Reiff), who – after briefly touching on aeroplanes and the distance between the Earth and the Moon – summarizes the development of Rocket powered transport, particularly flight (there is some interesting archival film showing pioneers of German rocketry). We then cut to six men in pilot's clothing entering the building, as one of its walls sinks into the ground: the press and Director join the expectant crowd outside.
A giant Spaceship, Zeppelin-shaped save for a flattened back end, rolls out of the now open hanger. After a press interview with head astronaut Commodore Hardt (Wery) via video screen, the spaceship's rockets fire, pushing it on rails along a rising, viaduct-like runway until it launches into the sky. It travels to the Moon, rather dramatically lifting up at last moment to avoid crashing into the surface, orbiting it and journeying safely back to Earth. We learn the reactions in Germany and from around the world, including the President of the United States suggesting the Germans intend to annexe the Moon. Colonizing Mars is deemed possible ("kolonien auf dem Mars eine technische moeglichkeit").
Though the story is minimal and the actual Space Flight only lasts a few minutes, the special effects – which include some animation – are impressive, particularly the spaceship leaving the hanger, the take off and the Moon scenes; though when in flight the craft does sometimes look like a model. Weltraumschiff 1 Startet uses footage from two cancelled films: in 1939 the Bavaria Film studio began work on Zwischenfall im Weltall ["Incident in Space"], about a rocket going to the moon; whilst another German film company, UFA, announced they would be making Weltschiff 18 ["Worldship 18"], usually referred to as Spaceship 18, based on a story by Hans Dominik, which also involved space travel. Both films were expensive, so with the onset of World War Two they were dropped and the funds redirected to the war effort. The proportion used by Kutter from each project, and how much if any of his film is new material, appears to be unknown. Fred Ladd later reused some of the scenes, along with those from other sources, when making The Space Explorers (1958), which was then edited into a popular Television serial credited with enthusing US youngsters on the subject of space travel (the irony of its having used communist and Nazi footage has been remarked on).
The elephant in the room is that Weltraumschiff 1 Startet was made when the Nazis were running Germany and they took a strong interest in its film industry. Though there appears to be no overt propaganda in Weltraumschiff 1 Startet, we see the spaceship being tracked by a German observatory in Africa: Germany lost its African colonies after World War One, so inferences might be made. The observatory also seems to have some advanced Technology. Kutter himself was an amateur astronomer (he developed the Kutter-Schiefspiegler reflecting telescope) and an enthusiast of space flight; he was not a Nazi, and it has been said his antipathy towards them meant he was kept from making feature films. Nonetheless, he did work on Kulturfilme, of which this film was one: short documentaries or pseudo-documentaries shown before a main feature – and indeed, an early title for this film was "Spaceship One Launches, a 1960 Cultural Movie". Under the Nazis, Kulturfilme were primarily propaganda tools and Weltraumschiff 1 Startet was one such: the speech on the history of rocketry originally mentioned pioneers from around the world, but Kutter was told to remove all the non-German ones. Another Kulturfilme directed by Kutter was Germanen gegen Pharaonen ["Germanic Tribes against Pharaohs"] (1939; vt Pharaonen Pyramide und Stonehenge), which argued not only that that Aryan culture is older than that of Ancient Egypt, but that the latter was influenced by the former: connections are made between Stonehenge and the Pyramid of Cheops in Giza (see Paranoia; Politics; Pseudoscience), making this in effect Alternate History. Kutter also made Ein Meer Versinkt ["A Sunken Sea"] (1936), about Herman Sörgel's (1885-1952) Atlantropa Project, which proposed damming the Mediterranean, arguing that evaporation would eventually leave two smaller seas (tributaries being insufficient to maintain the current water level), so exposing new land for settlement and cultivation: Kutter's film was apparently a pseudo-documentary about the creation of Atlantropa which climaxed with the Gibraltar dam being destroyed and the Atlantic flooding the new lands and their communities (see Disaster). Sörgel was not pleased. [SP]
about the film
- Joerg Hartmann. "Weltraumschiff I startet. The Dual-Use of a Spaceflight Science-Fiction-Film between Fact and Fiction, V-2 and Sputnik". [talk at conference on "Embattled Heavens: The Militarization of Space in Science, Fiction, and Politics", Berlin, April 2014: na/]
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