Kurd Lasswitz & Wernher von Braun

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"It's a Rocket-raising: a festival new to this country. Soon it will come to the folk-attention how close Wernher von Braun's birthday is to the Spring Equinox, and the same German impulse that once rolled flower-boats through the towns and staged mock battles between young Spring and deathwhite old Winter will be erecting strange floral towers out in the clearings and meadows, and the young scientist-surrogate will be going round and round with old Gravity or some such buffoon, and the children will be tickled, and laugh...." - Gravity's Rainbow, p. 361

Just learned that the reissue of Kurd Laßwitz's early Sci-Fi novel "Auf zwei Planeten" (1897, eng. Two Planets) - did anybody here read this? - was published with a preface by Wernher von Braun.

+ ... Neuausgabe: Auf zwei Planeten. Geleitwort von Wernher von Braun. Scheffler, Frankfurt 1969 ... +

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurd_La%C3%9Fwitz

+ ... A story from Lasswitz's Traumkristalle served as the basis for "The Library of Babel", a short story by Jorge Luis Borges ... A crater on Mars was named in his honour, as was the asteroid 46514 Lasswitz ... +

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurd_Lasswitz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Planets

+ ... A group of Arctic explorers seeking the North Pole find a Martian base there. The Martians can only operate in a polar region not because of climatic requirements, but because their spacecraft cannot withstand the rotation of the Earth at other latitudes. The aliens resemble Earth people in every respect except that they have much larger eyes, with which they can express more emotions. Their name for the inhabitants of Earth is "the small-eyed ones". Lasswitz's Martians are highly advanced, and initially peaceable; they take some of the explorers back with them to visit Mars dominated by canals. The story concludes the contemporary battleship armaments race between Germany and Britain by having the Martians defeat the Royal Navy ... This novel was popular in the Germany of its day.<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed> Wernher von Braun and Walter Hohmann were inspired by reading it as children just as Robert H. Goddard was by reading The War of the Worlds ... Theodore Sturgeon, reviewing that 1971 translation for The New York Times, found Two Planets curious and fascinating . . . full of quaint dialogue, heroism, decorous lovemaking, and gorgeous gadgetry" ... +

"Eine Schlange jagt über das Eis. In riesiger Länge ausgestreckt schleppt sie ihren dünnen Leib wie rasend dahin ..."

http://www.gasl.org/refbib/Lasswitz__Auf_2_Planeten.pdf
https://archive.org/details/twoplanets00kurd/page/n423