The Giant Slayer

The Giant Slayer, from the series The Toys Chronicles. Hand-carved linocut, hand-printed with baren on Hahnemühle paper, Charbonnel ink (Lefranc & Bourgeois). A slingshot — a classic toy of a now-distant twentieth-century childhood — against the front page reporting the explosion of the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, Friday 7 May 1937. A piece of dark humour: the toy is credited with bringing down the airship, reducing one of the century's defining aeronautical catastrophes to the trajectory of a pebble.

The Hindenburg was not generically "German": it was the flagship of the Reich. Two enormous swastikas painted on its tail fins, red on white, visible from kilometres away. Named after Paul von Hindenburg, the president who in 1933 handed Hitler the chancellery, it flew as the aerial ambassador of Nazi Germany over New York, Rio, the Mediterranean. In 1936 it had crossed the sky above Berlin during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games — the same Olympics the regime had built as a planetary showcase of Aryan supremacy. It was propaganda in flight.