Novel Offers a Bird’s-Eye View of History From the Hindenburg

THE PHOENIX

A Novel About the Hindenburg

By Henning Boetius

Translated from the German by John Cullen

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday

340 pages, $24.95

“The Phoenix” is a memorable novel of several dimensions. It is the carefully researched and gripping story of the fiery crash of the German airship Hindenburg at Lakehurst, N.J., in May 1937, after a transatlantic flight. It is, incidentally, a college course in the building and flying of zeppelins, rather as “Moby-Dick” is a course in the art of whaling, though this runs shorter.

“The Phoenix” is also a delicately erotic love story. It is a meditation on appearance and reality. And it is a subtle and convincing picture of the Germany from which Hitler sprang and the country he left in ashes. After the crash, a German-American commission decided it was the result of several natural factors that led to the explosion of the ship’s hydrogen, which kept the zeppelin aloft. Hitler’s regime was anxious to declare the accident was not, as widely rumored, the result of anti-Nazi sabotage.

In the novel, one of the surviving passengers, who had never believed the official story, tries, 10 years later, to find out what actually happened. His quest takes him to one of the small, xenophobic Friesian islands off the German coast in the North Sea, where the man who was at the Hindenburg’s elevator control during the crash lives.

This is where the fictional plot arises from reality. Boetius’ father, Eduard, to whom the novel is dedicated, was at the elevator wheel when the ship crashed and is now the only living survivor. The younger Boetius, the author of 20 novels in German, was raised on a North Sea island and grew up hearing his father’s stories about the airship; he says that he “drank my tea from the Hindenburg teacups all my life.”

In the novel the elevator man is named Edmund Boysen. He is raised rather coldly by his father but is enchanted by his slightly mad uncle, who is a successful inventor. As a teenager Boysen ships out to sea and rises in the German merchant marine. He is methodical, dedicated and talented. In 1936, as Hitler is beginning to build his war machine, Boysen, on the basis of his sea record, joins the German Zeppelin Transport Co. and trains for the difficult job of elevator man. It is he who points the airship up or down and keeps it level. The job requires the sensitive feel and instant reaction of a helmsman at sea.

The ultimate chief of the zeppelin program is the Reich Minister for Aviation and commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Goering. With finesse, Boetius describes how a serious technical German like Boysen could matter-of-factly work for his Nazi masters. He writes that the “euphoric expressions” on the faces of the crew members working on the airships revealed how they “merged a sense of duty and responsibility with elements of play, childishness, dream and individual dignity to produce a kind of collective rapture.”

Though we know how it will turn out, Boetius’ account of the flight from Frankfurt to New York and landing at Lakehurst is suspenseful and exciting.

As the author of several suspense novels, Boetius knows how to keep an intricately constructed plot moving forward smoothly.

And with the luxurious Bauhaus-influenced decor of the airship’s interior, the formal correctness of the crew and the casual elegant manners of the international passengers, he skillfully transports the reader back to prewar Germany.

As artfully drawn, too, is the Germany of 1947, the center of Frankfurt heaps of bricks, Berliners moving in their rubble like ants scattered from their shattered hill, the remote islanders in the North Sea unrepentantly long for their dead Fuehrer. The central character in the novel, Swedish journalist Birger Lund, the passenger who is trying to discover what really happened, is the crux of Boetius’ musings on appearance and reality.

To say how Lund plays that role would unfairly give away the plot.

The phoenix of the title, who rises newborn from the ashes of destruction, is in one specific sense Lund himself.

But the reader infers that there are more meanings behind the title.

Perhaps it applies to the truth, as in the truth of what actually happened to the airship, or, just perhaps, to the birth of a new Germany, a nation that finally recognizes, as Boysen does, what had happened to itself during the Third Reich and which can act once again with honor and decency.