photo credit: Matt Sroka
How did the zeppelin become a pop icon
and the symbol of national identity? How did Germany “repackage”
itself after the Nazis to attract tourists? How did the elevator impact the
height of skyscrapers?
Guillaume de Syon is very, very busy thinking about all of these
questions.
Forget history being dry as dust. History, according to de Syon,
associate professor of history, is the fascinating story of the interplay
of personalities, ideas, science, technology, politics, business and culture.
Describing de Syon’s field as the history of technology
doesn’t quite express the scope of his scholarship, which includes such
wide ranging topics as zeppelins, aviation, the space program, the atomic
bomb, early civilization, modern European history, especially Germany and
France, East Asian studies, the Holocaust, and even elevators. 
His approach to both teaching and scholarship is interdisciplinary,
he says, and his own interdisciplinary training “allowed me to think
about history in ways different from the ‘dates and battles’ so
many of us have had to suffer through.”
Amidst the dates and battles, de Syon is looking for connections
and implications, the interplay of forces that creates the panorama of history.
He is interested not only in the impact of the technology itself, but how
society responds to it. Not only its design, but its uses, how an invention
“bridges differences in society, and how consumers… define its value
and application.”
His new book, Zeppelin!: Germany and the Airship 1900-1939
is a case in point. The book is not a treatise on aerodynamics or the technical
aspects of flight, but rather one of the first works to examine the social
and cultural aspects of airships. Zeppelin! is a story of technological adventure,
of how an airborne marvel and its inventor captured the public imagination
to become symbols of German pride and progress.
From the moment when Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin first flew
his rigid airship, or dirigible, in 1900, the cigar-shaped wonder was a sensation.
In an era when the only flying machines had been balloons, the huge airship
filled the sky, and the minds of people who had never experienced flight.
The zeppelin “made one of the strongest impressions on European collective
memory of any machine, especially in pre-World War II Germany, where the zeppelin
and its inventor enjoyed extraordinary levels of popularity.” It was,
he says, a little like the impact of the space shuttle on Americans.
Only
119 rigid airships were built in 40 years, but both von Zeppelin and zeppelin
became pop icons, their images on a steady stream of political cartoons and
kitsch — souvenir spoons, toys, posters, postcards and even nutcracker
dolls in the likeness of Count von Zeppelin himself.
“While relatively few people flew in the ‘flying cigars,’
the masses adopted them as their own,” de Syon writes. “Zeppelins
may have transported thousands, but they enchanted millions. The airship’s
symbolic functions exceeded its practical use; like bicycles, household tools,
or other objects of everyday life, its influence remained immeasurable.”
“Unlike other instruments of modern technology with a direct
application or function, the airship assumed its cultural role not through
its transportation or military potential but rather through its symbolic power.
Technocultural icons cannot be understood in isolation but require a careful
linking to contemporary factors found in sociopolitical, political and technical
history.”
How people accept or reject technology is also an important
part of the historical perspective. “Very often these new ideas are not
accepted readily,” de Syon says. “In fact, the airplane was not
accepted readily. People did not see it as something for everyday life.”
The zeppelin’s impact on German society was profound. Pacifists
hoped it was a herald of peace, while the military saw the potential for the
“ultimate weapon.” Business and industry viewed it as a potential
“piggy bank.” But for Germany itself, the invention was a major
boost to the newly unified nation’s self-perception, and the German people
celebrated the zeppelin with patriotic fervor, as an “engineering marvel
that seemed truly ‘all-German.’”
Born in Paris and growing up in France, de Syon’s original
choice of career was the Swiss foreign service. He applied to American colleges
because, he says, he was thrilled that he could take courses in “everything,”
unlike the single majors imposed by European universities. After a degree
from Tufts in political science and German, he earned a master’s degree
in international affairs from George Washington University.
Working on his Ph.D. in history from Boston University, his
interest was in aviation, but his advisor’s focus on modern Germany encouraged
him to combine the two areas and write his dissertation about zeppelins.
For de Syon, the combination of his interests in aviation and
Germany was a natural. Sadly, however, de Syon himself can’t fly. Although
as a kid he dreamed of being a pilot and hung around airports, he discovered
at age nine that he was colorblind. He is resigned to being a passenger. “In
a way, I’m having more fun digging things up than if I had been a pilot.”
Soft
spoken, with a boyish smile and dressed, despite his American clothes, with
a distinctly European sense of style, de Syon switches easily back and forth
between periods and nations, between German pop culture, Garibaldi, the space
race, and elevators. Elevators? “What a silly topic,” he thought,
when asked to write a piece about them — until he realized that elevator
technology not only made skyscrapers possible, since people simply wouldn’t
work in buildings that required walking up 20 flights, but altered their very
architecture, and history.
In the classroom, in addition to modern European history, modern
France and early civilizations, he also teaches interdisciplinary honors courses
on the space program, the atomic bomb, and a course on the Holocaust.
“What’s the pattern?” he asks his “Modern
Civilizations” class, challenging them to think about multiple perspectives,
implications and interconnections in nation building in the 19th century.
“What did Bismarck have against the French? Why are the French so annoying?”
His teaching was recognized in 1999 with the Henry and M. Paige
Laughlin Distinguished Faculty Award, for innovative teaching approach and
ability to reach students. In the Holocaust course, for example, the point
for his students, he says, is to do their own thinking on the matter after
being exposed to very different kinds of readings. And, he says, they must
read outside of their field of interest. “A Navy veteran was asked to
read poetry of the Hibakusha, the atom blast survivors, while a religious
studies student strong in her pacifist sympathies was called on to summarize
an article about verifiable arms control.”
“Interdisciplinary studies form new prisms which when studied
and understood, offer a whole new outlook on the world, one which is required
in the 21st century.”
“Literature borrows from anthropology, political science
takes tips from sociology, and of course history steals shamelessly from everybody!
When Max Weber founded sociology, he thought of whole societies and tried
to make sense of Marxist definitions of class, but he did not consider the
women within these societies. When political scientist Elizabeth Fehrenbach
analyzed political symbols, she thought of flags first. But machines would
never have crossed her mind.”
He also challenges students to avoid easy answers. In the Holocaust
course, “as we start digging, it becomes clear the issues are far more
intricate and disturbing than one imagines. In times of crisis, we look for
easy explanations. It’s a story where we’d like to point right at
the bad guys, but it is in fact a story in shades of gray. We use readings
supplied by philosophers, ethicists, psychologists, political scientists.
There are so many ways of approaching it. For example, in the wake of September
11, how do we explain why a Palestinian child cheers when the towers go down?
The explanation is far more complicated. We can no longer look for easy answers.”
In the search for more answers, de Syon will be spending the
next year on sabbatical in Germany, doing research for a new book on the history
of German tourism.
“Germany became a democratic success after 1949. There
is a completely new generation of leaders, the country has been a broker of
peace and is the economic locomotive of Europe,” he says. His book will
explore what the Germans did to make the country attractive to travelers again,
“How they said, come back, we’re not so bad anymore,” he says
with a smile.
Bad rep? It’s history.