Breakfast on the Hindenburg

Georgia Garvey
Fri, 09 Jan 2026 23:00:00 -0800
Opinion

I stumbled across an old menu the other day on social media, one claiming to be from 1937, for the passengers on a German zeppelin crossing the Atlantic.

"Breakfast," it read, "on board the airship Hindenburg."

The words dotted the page in elegant script like a poem:
Updated: Sat Jan 10, 2026

I stumbled across an old menu the other day on social media, one claiming to be from 1937, for the passengers on a German zeppelin crossing the Atlantic.

"Breakfast," it read, "on board the airship Hindenburg."

The words dotted the page in elegant script like a poem:

"Coffee, tea, milk, cocoa

Bread, butter, honey, preserves

Eggs, boiled or in cup

Frankfort sausage

Ham, salami

Cheese, fruit"

I wondered if it was fake, written as it was in English, when the airship had been designed and its luxuries planned to broadcast the triumph of post-World War II German engineering. Joseph Goebbels himself reportedly invested in the company as part of a broader pro-Nazi propaganda plan.

As happens sometimes, the discovery of the menu sent me tumbling into a bit of a rabbit hole online, and I read about the ship, the disaster and those who died, as well as the many who miraculously survived. One boy, pushed out of the burning ship by his mother, lived until 2019, albeit with extensive scars — emotional as well as physical, I'm sure.

Eventually, I found another, likely more authentic menu for the Hindenburg, this one a lunch and dinner menu that featured erdbeercreme mit sahne and kalbsteak mit truffelsce. The translated dishes — strawberry cream with whipped cream and veal with truffle sauce — sounded rich and European, some of them with names like salat Monte Cristo that were almost certainly invented to heighten the sophistication.

That felt right. They were German yet decadent, the kind of fare aiming to persuade that fascism was compatible with Continental luxury.

I don't know how much it matters now, anyway, with the final Hindenburg survivor joining his fellow passengers and crew in death more than six years ago. But there was something so small, and yet so massive, about the food on those menus.

There once was a day, it occurred to me, when a lady sat in a fancy Bauhaus chair in the state-of-the-art dining room and perused that menu, or a similar one. She considered whether to drink coffee or tea, dined on a meal cooked in a specially designed aluminum kitchen, possibly nibbling a few bites of fruit at the end. She must have looked out the large, angled windows next to her, perhaps thrilled, perhaps tired and passed the time as she traveled to New York with her husband and three children.

The entire time, that woman floated in ignorance under a giant balloon full of hydrogen, an element so volatile that flames can travel in it as much as seven times faster than in natural gas. A spark, static electricity likely, would ignite the ceiling above her.

"Oh, the humanity," a radio reporter from Chicago would wail as he watched the inferno.

"I'm sorry. Honest: I can hardly breathe," Herbert Morrison said a few seconds. "I'm going to step inside, where I cannot see it."

"Coffee, tea, milk, cocoa

Bread, butter, honey, preserves

Eggs, boiled or in cup

Frankfort sausage

Ham, salami

Cheese, fruit"

A poem of a menu, the words of the last meal of the condemned.

I thought then of another poem I'd just read, an award-winner by a woman listed on the prize page as Renee Nicole Macklin, one that talked about the sounds of summer sunsets, "tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches." Macklin would later go by Renee Nicole Good, a name orders of magnitude more famous in her death than her poetry could ever have made her.

On the videos of Good's shooting, which I could not bear to watch, I read the comments. I shuddered. "FAFO," plenty of them said, an obscene initialism for a mother leaving a 6-year-old child behind to grieve her. I had to click away.

Joking, laughing, gloating — there is no depth too low when it comes to celebrating the punishments visited upon those with different political views. Our leader guides us, and like little ducklings behind mama, the followers quack with callousness.

The statements of support, kindness, anything other than cruelty, all felt as watery as weak tea. None nourished any of my hope that this could end in any way other than disaster.

"Breakfast on the Hindenburg"?

Oh, we're all dining on the Hindenburg now.