STetc ch 30 - gas comparison / ch 29 all about the Trans-Trianon 2000

[Michael Bailey]

How big of a Zeppelin - er, flying watermelon - are we talkin' here?

According to a very basic search, the Graf Zeppelin carried 2.6 million cubic feet of hydrogen & 1.1 million cubic feet of something called "Blau gas"

"The remaining roughly1,059,435 cubic feet of the ship's capacity was dedicated to carrying something called "Blau gas", a specialized liquid petroleum gas, which was used as engine fuel because it had a weight similar to air, preventing the airship from changing altitude as fuel was consumed."

The Hindenburg carried about 7 million cubic feet of hydrogen & about 88,000 liters of diesel fuel for its four 1,200 horsepower Daimler-Benz diesel engines.

Soooo...in ch 30, passengers in the lounge are..."exchanging merrily evasive quips, not about sex or alcohol so much as the millions of cubic feet of hydrogen gas just above their heads"

The Zeppelin company designed Hindenburg to use helium for lift, but US export restrictions made helium unobtainable in the quantities it would require.

Goebbels [in order to drum up support for occupation of the Rhineland] demanded that the Zeppelin Company make the two airships available for a tour of Germany (the [subject-to-English-monoglots'-juvenile-humor named-] Deutschlandfahrt), flying "in tandem" around Germany over the four-day period prior to the voting....

Like the Blessing of the Watermelons, "not altogether free of political motives"


Chapter 29 is brief, and has only 2 sections.

The Trans-Trianon 2000 is a burly & impressive (imho) imaginative excursion, creating a Zone of sorts, a concentric ring-ish ("a broken ring") lying between the borders of the old Kingdom of Hungary and the newer, lesser Hungary which the Treaty of Trianon had created in 1920.

https://www.americanhungarianfederation.org/news_trianon.htm

Nice graphic illustrating post-Treaty of Trianon Hungary in amongst the "newly reformulated nations of Romania, Czecho-Slovakia, and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, soon to be known as Yugoslavia, which also got the old kingdom's access to the sea, the port of Fiume, nowadays known by its Croatian name Rijeka"  (p 228)

This is just freakin' lovely, lyrically wacky:
"While the '20s roared in Chicago and American expats whooped it up in Paree, while Dzigo Vertov and Boris Kaufman went gliding through the city traffic of Petersburg filming a newly tsarless and not yet Stalinized people, while Berlin still offered unparalleled freedom and refuge to heretics and asylum seekers of all persuasions, this is what was going on in the strange ring of historical debris that had once belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary - bikers in motion, some riding clockwise, some counter-, not a rally, not a race, not a pilgrimage, no timekeepers, no grand prizes, no order of finish, no finish line for that matter, though some, speaking metaphysically, say if there were one it'd be at Fiume, Rijeka, whichever."