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German Culture and Aviation in the First World War: 1909-1925

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German Culture and Aviation in the First World War: 1909-1925 University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2017 Privileged Killers, Privileged Deaths: German Culture and Aviation in the First World War: 1909-1925 Robert William Rennie University of Tennessee, Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the European History Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, and the Military History Commons Recommended Citation Rennie, Robert William, "Privileged Killers, Privileged Deaths: German Culture and Aviation in the First World War: 1909-1925. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2017. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/4422 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Robert William Rennie entitled "Privileged Killers, Privileged Deaths: German Culture and Aviation in the First World War: 1909-1925." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Denise Phillips, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Vejas Liulevicius, Monica Black, Maria Stehle Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Privileged Killers, Privileged Deaths: German Culture and Aviation in the First World War: 1909-1925 A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Robert William Rennie May 2017 Copyright © 2017 by Robert W. Rennie All rights reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is the culmination of several years of research, writing, and revising. Beneath the text, however, this document represents the feedback, support, and advice from dozens of friends, family members, and mentors. My time at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville has been the most intellectually rewarding of my career. The work reflected in this document was shaped by the generous feedback and guidance of Dr. Denise Phillips, who I would like to thank for reading numerous drafts of each of the chapters presented here. The questions she posed in our many conversations helped to frame and focus my work and the result is infinitely better for it. I would also like to thank Dr. Monica Black, whose mentorship has made me a better scholar and educator. Monica’s approach to history helped me formulate my own questions about this topic, and her methods, I hope, are reflected in some of my own work. My thanks also to Dr. Vejas Liulevicius, whose work in German history inspired me to apply to The University of Tennessee, and whose feedback, suggestions, and inspired insight shaped several of the chapters within this dissertation. Finally, my sincere thanks to Dr. Maria Stehle, for her guidance, assistance, and enthusiastic support of my work from its earliest stages. Outside of the university, my work has been supported by a great number of friends and colleagues. My thanks to Dr. Richard Byers of the University of North Georgia, who started me on this path many years ago, and whose mentorship first encouraged me to pursue the life of an academic. To Dr. Ryan Thompson, who has remained a steadfast friend through my years of graduate work and who shared the trials of graduate studies as he worked towards his own degree. My thanks too, to Carl, Jordan, and Leah, for keeping me focused on my goals and for tolerating my endless talk about dissertations, research, and the work of writing. My sincere gratitude to the entire Kleinkopf family for their unending love, support, and understanding during this long project. This would not have been possible without you. And finally, I dedicate this dissertation to Katie, for all of the things. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines aviation’s influence on German cultural and social history between 1908 and 1925. Before the First World War, aviation embodied one of many new features of a rapidly modernizing Germany. In response, Germans viewed flight as either a potentially transformative tool or a possible weapon of war. The outbreak of war in 1914 moved aviation away from its promised potential to its lived reality. In doing so, the airplane became a machine which compressed time and space, reordered the spatial arrangement of the battlefield, and transformed the human relationship with killing. Germany’s fliers initially served as observers, noting troop positions in the war’s opening weeks. As the Western Front transformed into static trench warfare, flight, in concert with photography, became a method of gathering intelligence. The camera also shaped the identity and iconography of the aviator both in public and in private photographs. Aviation created a privileged space for combat pilots to engage with, or ignore, the consequences of killing as aerial violence became commonplace. Killing, death, and superstition in the air were repackaged with older cultural tropes to render new violence knowable. The German general staff too, became increasingly obsessed with killing in the air, and this fascination fed a new system for understanding the air war. Germany’s regional divisions were also reflected in aviation and directly influenced both the composition of its air service and the machines issued to its pilots. Aviators were again privileged in their use of cultural markers to signpost individual, local, and national identities. The end of the war, however, shattered previous perceptions of war time, and left living aviators to struggle to make sense of a new present, while the nation’s lost fliers were repurposed for contradictory social and political ends. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: PRE-WAR VISIONS 26 CHAPTER TWO: IMAGING AVIATION 78 CHAPTER THREE: PRIVILEGED KILLERS 117 CHAPTER FOUR: GERMAN FLIERS IN FOREIGN LANDS 180 CHAPTER FIVE: PRIVILEGED DEATHS 237 CONCLUSION 282 REFERENCES 300 VITA 309 v INTRODUCTION This dissertation follows the cultural history of German aviation before, during, and immediately following the First World War. The advent of powered flight entered a complex historical narrative in Germany between 1908 and 1925. My research examines the ways in which powered flight was a disruptive experience for German aviators, and the ways those experiences were repurposed to produce the illusion of reassuring continuities in German popular culture. My work builds on previous histories of German social and cultural history written in the last quarter-century, while incorporating the influence of powered flight to elucidate both continuities and discontinuities within German culture. In doing so, I demonstrate the disruptive role that technology played in Germany, and how German culture responded to it. 2017 marks the latter half of four years of centenary commemorations of the First World War. This period has witnessed an intense production of new historical research regarding the conflict and its broader consequences. Undoubtedly, this prodigious period of historical research will continue well after the anniversaries pass, and it is my hope that this dissertation contributes not only to the history of First World War aviation, but to the much wider historical questions being addressed in the current conversation.1 In addition to intervening in the historical question of the war’s wider consequences, my dissertation builds on the original request for a wider and culturally sophisticated history 1 The ongoing historiography of the First World War features works from a variety of methodological approaches, some of which inform my own research. See Ross Wilson, Landscapes of the Western Front: Materiality during the Great War (London: Routledge, 2012). See also, Birger Stichelbaut and Piet Chielens, The Great War Seen from the Air in Flanders Fields, 1914-1918 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 1 of aviation, first made by James Hansen.2 The response to his call produced a body of literature focused on aviation’s social, cultural, economic, political, and military history. My dissertation contributes to this call by examining the ways in which powered flight shaped the culture of German aviators and how that relationship influenced broader cultural markers in German society. Consequently, my research employs multiple perspectives to go beyond considering flight from a strictly military or industrial standpoint, to examine the ripple effect of aviation across social, cultural, economic, gender, and geographic divides. My approach draws on the cultural traditions of the long nineteenth century.3 In doing so, I frame aviation as a technology that built on the rapidly shifting landscape of the previous century. In doing so, aviation created new discourses while drawing on older cultural markers to make a new paradigm knowable. Hansen’s call for a wider view of aviation sparked a vibrant historical conversation. Histories of powered flight were initially a one-sided monologue which focused exclusively on technical, mechanical, economic, or industrial narratives.
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