Roller coaster and Rocket Ride to the Moon, Stuttgart 1937

Small cars full of riders crest the timber trestles of a roller coaster under the sign Hiiinein! and an onion-roofed kiosk tower, and the view from a car plunges with them, all rails and blurred beams. Under the lettering Raketenfahrt zum Mond a train of rounded cars races round a banked oval track until the riders dissolve into streaks; a girl with plaits smiles beside a man holding a baby, two boys shout with open mouths, and children scramble into the tubs of a spinning ride.

Space travel was the fairground's newest fantasy. Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon of 1929, with the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth as adviser, had made the rocket popular; in 1937 the army moved Wernher von Braun's rocket team to Peenemünde on the Baltic, where its work would serve war, not the moon.