Friedrichshafen

Airships are surely the dinosaurs of the transport world. Huge, lumbering bodies carrying a very small payload and difficult to manoeuvre. They both had their day in the sun before being extinguished by a fireball and survive only as a barely recognisable relic of their former selves. Like dinosaurs too, airships exercise a fascination over us, representing as they do a world long gone.

It would have been very remiss of Friedrichshafen not to have created a museum in the town, as this was the centre of the German airship industry. Indeed it still is, as airships are used for research and scientific purposes. You can even ride in one, for the not inconsiderable sum of €300. But all this current activity goes on at the Friedrichshafen airfield. The museum is in the town centre, right on the shores of Lake Constance, and is constructed in the old shipping terminal. It is in fact at the centre of what town planners would call an inter-modal transport hub, viz the rail station, bus station and ferry docks are all in one place. The Zeppelin Museum is appropriately built over and around these termini. (So interconnected are they, that we nearly drove on to a ferry while looking for the museum car park. There isnt one - car park I mean - but at the top end of the bus station there is a supermarket and multi-storey car park).

The museum divides into four sections, and although they are not officially labelled as such, I would call them Experience, Engineering, Memorabilia and Special Exhibitions. They are visited in that order, so moving from the general concept and overall appreciation of the size of airships, to how they work, to the small details.

How do you convey their size, or give an impression of what it was like to be a passenger? This museum succeeds brilliantly. The first hall you enter is big, airy and glass-sided which makes it seem even bigger. It is largely empty at floor level, but above your head has been constructed a full-size section of the passenger accommodation set within a mock-up of a piece of the canopy. On the wall is a diagram showing what proportion of the whole shebang this cross-section is. Unbelievably tiny. Another inspired piece of scaling is a red crane, about 30 feet high, standing in the centre of the room. Next to it in a display case is a model of a hangar needed to house a Zeppelin, with a model of the same red crane, to scale, in the entrance. It is barely distinguishable. In fact at first glance you hardly notice it, then you realise what you are actually looking at. Now that is a rather cumbersome description of what is an arresting visual image, and a far better illustration than any recital of dimensions.

From this hall you walk up a flight of stairs into the reconstructed passenger accommodation, just as if you were boarding a flight. At the top of the stairs is a stewardess waiting to greet you, although she has a practical function to channel visitors in the correct flow, as it's quite narrow. Faithfully (I presume) reproduced is a corridor of sleeping cabins with bunk beds, folding wash hand basin, table and small hanging space. It has the aura of a sleeping-car on the Orient Express of the same period. The corridor opens out into a passenger lounge with tables, chairs and furnishings, 1930s style, and observation windows. We in 2007 are looking down into the hall we have just left, but what's clever are the TV screens just under the observation windows playing newsreel loops taken on real airship flights. So we see people running on the ground as the airship comes into land, world famous landmarks overflown, cloud formations.

The next hall is full of bits of engine and associated kit. Techie heaven, but even I, as a mechanical illiterate, could not fail to be impressed by the sheer size and raw power implicit in these heaps of metal. They are well displayed down a centre aisle so visitors can walk round and see them from all sides. Along one wall is a series of explanations of propulsion, lift and manoeuvring together with touch screens the only ones in the museum for in-depth explanations.

Then on to the Memorabilia section. Glass cases devoted to each of the main airships, Graf Zeppelin, R101, Hindenburg and others, arranged in order of development, display newspaper cuttings, photos, menu cards, crockery, bar price lists, named napkin holders. Poignantly, in view of the fiery demise of the Hindenburg and R101, there are also paper bags into which passengers had to deposit lighters and matches before the flight, although curiously there was a smoking room available. Looking at these things brings a whiff of the Titanic, not because they actually came from one of the wrecked airships but because they embody so much expectation which came to nothing. Particularly striking were the advertising posters, very modern and allusive in design and also slightly chilling as they often depicted the shadow of an airship over a famous landmark like the Statue of Liberty.

Well, dear readers, all this took about two hours and we enjoyed it thoroughly. But the verdict? Could do better. I have a few gripes. Firstly and most unfortunately, it lacks pizzazz. You have to bring your enthusiasm with you because if you think airships are dull I doubt your view will be altered by this museum. What an opportunity missed to convey the excitement that was felt about criss-crossing the globe in this new technology when planes were only in their infancy. If Trivago had existed in the 1920s and 30s we would have been discussing the possibilities endlessly. But the museum restricts itself to descriptions of what is on display with little or no scene-setting or vox pops of the times. It doesn't really engage the visitor.

One way to achieve this would be more use of contemporary film footage and photo archives. There must be acres of this stuff in Germany and the UK but little is on show. The TV screens visible from the mock-up observation windows are a great idea, but are too small and carry only a few minutes of film. Why not have big plasma screens and lots more footage?

Which brings me neatly to another problem. Just as we got to the end of our tour we found a film show. There was no indication anywhere in the museum that it was there, or how long till the next showing so you could plan your visit. It lasted an hour which was too long for us at this stage so I cant tell you what it was about or if it addressed the presentational issues Ive described. In any case, an hour is too long for a museum show; better to split it up into, say 15 minute segments, so visitors can pick and choose which topics they want to watch.

Also it was in German. All the displays are in German, with no translations. In fairness, the German is very lucid while still conveying lots of information, but visitors who dont understand German are snookered. Yet round the walls in the entrance hall are listed all the places visited by the Hindenburg on its round-the-world tour: so much for internationalism which disappears as soon as you enter the museum.

Yet another discovery awaited us before we left. Another flight of stairs led to an art gallery. It seems a bit late in the review to be telling you this, but the museum is actually a "Museum of Technology and Art". The art is from the local area from the middle ages to the present day. We didn't go in. Call me blinkered, but when I go to an airship museum I want to see bits of airships; ditto art galleries and art. Surely the art is good enough to have its own separate gallery, then the airships can have more space. That can only be a good thing.

This is a museum with a fascinating subject, some brilliant ideas and some serious downsides. Bit like an airship, really.