by Clare Mulley
Up until 1928 it had been possible to believe that Germany was still on the road to economic recovery. The following year, the impact of the Wall Street Crash was quickly felt in Germany; industry ground to a halt, millions lost their jobs, and chaos once again gripped the country. To many Germans facing further national humiliation, unemployment and shortages of food, fuel and materials, Hitler began to look like a dynamic new type of leader: one able to restore not only their national, but their personal pride. Melitta was clever and naturally questioning. At work, Blenk remembered her as ‘always ready to enter into wide-ranging discussions’ about politics and economics, and he felt that ‘she judged the rising National Socialism very critically and soberly’.57 Rather than engage more deeply, however, Melitta preferred the distraction of flying. Seen from the air, the dramas below reduced pleasingly in both size and apparent significance.
Melitta took part in her first organized flying event in 1930, when she was twenty-seven. The advantage of there being so few female pilots was that they all met at such events, forming a strong and supportive community. A few years younger than Melitta, the talented Elly Beinhorn and Marga von Etzdorf were both wealthy enough to have enjoyed private flying lessons in their early twenties, although Elly had done so against her parents’ wishes. Elly could not work up much enthusiasm for Melitta’s interest in ‘science and research’, so when her money ran out she paid her way like the wartime aces Ernst Udet and Robert Ritter von Greim by giving aerobatic displays at weekends.58 Inspired by Earhart and Johnson, Elly’s great passion was for long-distance flying, and in the early 1930s she embarked on a series of increasingly high-profile expeditions to what were then Portuguese Guinea and Persia,* Indonesia and Australia. In the German press, flights such as these were presented as bringing countries and peoples closer together, and sometimes as reflecting Germany’s potential mastery over territory and technology.
Marga von Etzdorf, the orphaned daughter of a Prussian captain, was the second woman to earn her licence after the war. In 1930 she bought her own plane, an all-metal Junkers Junior, which she had spray-painted bright yellow to compete in the first German Women’s Aerobatic Championships that May. She and Melitta became firm friends. At weekends they and Georg Wollé would drive to swimming resorts in the beautiful lakes south-east of Berlin. Marga, ‘whose hair was bobbed’ like Melitta’s, Georg could not resist noting, ‘behaved in a rather masculine manner’.59 It was as though instead of female pilots domesticating flight, these women were seen as a modern new type of human, defined by their flying ability rather than their gender. Like Elly, Marga was increasingly drawn to long-distance flying and flew to Turkey, Spain, Morocco and Sicily. One weekend, while the friends were staying at her family’s country estate, Marga confided her plans to attempt the first solo flight from Germany to Japan. The following year Georg checked the instruments in her little Junkers Junior before she left Berlin with minimal fanfare. By the time she touched down in Tokyo, twelve days later, she was famous. But Marga’s plane was written off on the way back and, although she survived, she had to return rather shamefacedly on a commercial flight.
Melitta was proud of her friends, and of her own achievements, but she had no desire for the added pressures of public recognition.60 Occasionally a Berlin illustrated weekly would print photographs of her with other female pilots at a dinner or social event but, although she had no qualms about flying, or even riding a motorbike around Berlin, being noticed in the papers did not, as she put it, ‘readily coincide with my own views about female dignity’.61
Melitta’s closest friendships, however, were with men. In April 1931, Paul von Handel had asked her not only to be a bridesmaid at his Berlin wedding to Elisabeth, Countess von Üxküll-Gyllenband, but also to fly in some of the guests. Among the bride’s cousins was a tall young man with high cheekbones, brown eyes, a shock of thick dark hair and a keen interest in poetry and classical history. His name was Alexander von Stauffenberg. According to Paul, Alexander was ‘very gifted’, both ‘artistically and poetically, a thinker and dreamer, not a “man of action”’. Melitta, he added slightly mischievously, ‘could both think and dream’ and ‘was full of energy and enterprise’.62 Photos show Melitta and Alexander standing on either side of the wedding group, Melitta for once in a dress that reached to the floor, and with a circlet of flowers in her hair. ‘Her expression had retained a captivating naïve childishness around the mouth . . .’ her sister Jutta recalled, ‘supported by a proud bearing that one likes to attribute to those of noble spirit.’63 Perhaps seeing Melitta gravitate towards the aristocratic Alexander who, friends noted, ‘gave the impression of immediate significance’, Jutta was deliberately painting them as equals.64 In fact, as a graduate engineer, Melitta was already exceptional within upper-class circles, and as a pilot she was a sensation. Due to his height, Alexander had a sympathetic manner of holding his head bent forward, as though listening with amused but respectful attention. Melitta was impressed. But she, too, was charming, blessed with ‘incredibly winning manners’, and never less than fully focused on whomever she was speaking to while always ‘remarkably modest’ about herself.65 Away from the other guests, over endless cigarettes, Melitta and Alexander slowly came to discover their shared love of endeavour, culture and their country, and to appreciate each other’s views on everything from ancient history to aerodynamics.
Melitta was soon close to all three of the Stauffenberg brothers: the intellectual Alexander; his twin, Berthold; and the younger Claus. Belonging to one of Germany’s most distinguished families, the boys had enjoyed privileged childhoods divided between a vast, turreted mansion in Stuttgart and an impressive country schloss in Lautlingen.* Educated by private tutors and inspired by some of the leading cultural figures of their day, they were deeply committed to the elitist, aristocratic traditions of monarchy, nobility, church and military. As young men they joined the inner circle of the influential and charismatic poet Stefan George. George was their first führer. His idealization of male heroism, loyalty and self-sacrifice deeply impressed all three of the brothers, but it was his concept of a secret elite, whose noble spirituality should set the tone for the nation, that they found most inspirational.
The Stauffenberg boys were all ambitious, and all brilliant, but George’s preference for Berthold and Claus shook up their relationship. Alexander felt Berthold was the greatest among them, and could not but reflect on the intense bond between his own twin and their younger brother. He would always believe his brothers to be both cleverer and more heroic than himself, but he was sufficiently self-assured to admire them wholeheartedly while taking his own path. Soon he had found another mentor in the historian Wilhelm Weber, whose invitations to lecture tours around the ancient sites of Italy kindled new interests. Inspired by Weber, and Homer, Alexander pursued an academic career as a lecturer in ancient history at the University of Berlin. Berthold became a professor of law, eventually working at the Permanent Court of International Justice in The Hague that had been established through the League of Nations. Claus joined the famed Bamberg Cavalry Regiment of the German army, and appeared at Paul’s wedding in full uniform.
Over the next few years Melitta would spend many of her weekends with Alexander, Berthold and Claus. She had quickly nicknamed Alexander her Schnepfchen, or little snipe – after the shy wading birds that fly in zigzags when startled and produce a bleating, drumming sound when courting. It was a highly affectionate, if slightly diminutive, term of endearment. Melitta’s classical name, meaning bee, or honey-sweet, may have appealed to Alexander just as it was. Sometimes the sweethearts stayed at the Stauffenberg and Üxküll country houses, where Melitta soon felt at home, whether hiking up to a hunting lodge to go shooting and rabbit hounding, or dining in evening dress and discussing the issues of the day through a haze of cigar smoke.66
For many in 1932, Germany was a country in ruins. With six million unemployed, there was enormous public anger and regular clashes on the streets between
supporters of Hitler’s now flourishing National Socialist Party and organized communist activists. By the end of the year Paul von Hindenburg, the elected president of Germany, would be negotiating the formation of another new government, this time with Hitler. The older Stauffenberg and Schiller generations were more interested in the ‘cultural tides’ than the sordid details of the fight for political power on the streets. ‘The swelling of the ranks of support for the “Brown” and “Red” masses was registered and discussed as a distasteful product of the times,’ Melitta’s sister Jutta later wrote.67 Like many right-wing intellectuals, they felt that the communists presented the greatest threat. The Nazis’ methods might be unpleasant, but their rhetoric appealed to deep-seated feelings of nationalism – and were not all new regimes beset by teething troubles? Meanwhile, for Melitta, Alexander and their wealthy, well-connected friends, focused on their careers, their weekends and each other, these were, Paul said, ‘wonderful, happy times’.68
Melitta was now in possession of almost every licence for motorized planes, and qualified in aerobatics, instrument flying and radio. Having helped the DVL staff flying club to win first prize in the German reliability flight contests that year, she returned to gliding, in many ways the purest form of flight. Her instructor was Peter Riedel, the head of the gliding research institute at Darmstadt, who would shoot to fame in 1933 when he won both the national gliding championships and the Hindenburg trophy.
Peter was about Melitta’s own age and could not help but assess his new female student romantically, although she did not return his interest. She was an ‘attractive woman’, he wrote, ‘but extremely reserved’.69 They connected better discussing flight, and later, cautiously, the rise of Hitler. ‘It was obvious the so-called democratic government had failed,’ Peter later recalled. ‘The country was going to hell, people starving . . . huge unemployment, lists every day in the papers of people who had killed themselves in despair.’70 The communist talk was of revolution. The Nazis, he felt, stood for strong leadership, patriotism and the performance of one’s duty. ‘That sounded good.’71 Nevertheless, Peter was concerned about the increasingly militaristic nature of the regime and, yearning for wider horizons, he was considering emigrating to Africa. ‘In a way, she agreed with me,’ he later claimed.72 Melitta may have concurred about the threat of communism but, deeply patriotic, she would never have forsaken Germany or her work, which she saw as a form of national service as well as a source of personal pride. Freedom, for her, meant flying for her country, not flight from it. In any case, she was in love with Alexander.
‘In the end’, Peter decided, Melitta ‘was too serious for me’.73 Within a couple of years he would be sailing not to Africa but to South America, in the company of another female pilot. Hanna Reitsch’s sympathies were rather different to Melitta’s, and she and Peter would enjoy a more dramatic friendship. By then Melitta would have an unofficial agreement with Alexander von Stauffenberg, and Hitler, as the appointed chancellor of Germany, would have proclaimed the arrival of the Third Reich.
2
SEARCHING FOR THE FABULOUS
1912–1933
In 1920, while the teenage Melitta was sizing up gliders on the slopes near her boarding school, in a different suburb of the same town a spirited seven-year-old Hanna Reitsch was also turning her face to the sky. Pretty, petite, blonde and blue-eyed, Hanna lived in Hirschberg with her parents, her elder brother Kurt, her younger sister Heidi and a succession of maids, but she was already convinced she was destined for broader horizons. Family legend has it that Hanna first experimented with gravity when she was four years old, aiming to leap, with arms outstretched, from a first-floor balcony. Although frustrated on this occasion she never lost her fascination with flight, nor her desire to take to the skies. ‘The longing grew . . .’ she wrote, ‘with every bird I saw go flying across the azure summer sky, with every cloud that sailed past on the wind, till it turned into a deep, insistent homesickness, a yearning that went with me everywhere and could never be stilled.’1 Despite fracturing her skull after one particularly ambitious jump from the branch of a fir tree and literally being grounded by her parents, Hanna never doubted that, one day, she would fly. ‘What child is there that lives, as I did, midway between Reality and Fairyland,’ she would later ask at the beginning of her memoirs, ‘who does not long sometimes to leave altogether the familiar world and set off in search of new and fabulous realms?’2 Unlike Melitta, Hanna longed for more than freedom. In many ways she would achieve her dreams but she would, perhaps, never manage to live fully in reality, and somewhere during her all-consuming search for the fabulous she would lose the ability to distinguish between the two.
Born on 29 March 1912, Hanna was two years old at the start of the First World War, seven at its close. Just old enough, perhaps, to absorb something of her nation’s mood of hope, before the hardship and humiliation of the defeat. Most of her childhood memories, however, were not of the drama and despair of war, but of growing up during the depression that followed. It was the issues and impact of reparations, inflation and unemployment, civil unrest and anxiety, that coloured the Germany of Hanna’s youth. Hers was a patriotic middle-class family, moderately well off, and all for God and Germany. Her parents felt that the Polish annexation of the eastern part of Upper Silesia, and the Allies’ harsh war reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, were deep injustices. The violent rise of communism at home and abroad confirmed their patriotic, nationalistic world view. Besides ‘respect for human dignity and a sense of honour’, Hanna listed a love of ‘the Fatherland’ as the key moral value and principle instilled in her as a child.3 She was brought up to believe that German national honour, and with it her family’s pride, had been compromised, and that the integrity of her country was still somehow under threat. What seemed to be missing, under the Weimar Republic, was leadership strong enough to discipline, unite and rally the country.
Hanna’s father, the strict and rather taciturn Dr Willy Reitsch, was a Protestant, a Prussian and a Freemason, who exercised ‘uncontested authority’ over his family.4 He was also an eye specialist and the head of a private clinic. Hanna adored, but rarely impressed, him. An accomplished amateur cellist, at his most sociable Willy Reitsch would arrange musical soirées at their home. His standards were high, however, and although they were dutifully learning violin and piano, and singing traditional three-part Austrian yodelling songs, his children were rarely invited to perform. Medicine provided another opportunity for the children to bond with their father, and sometimes Willy would bring home pig or sheep eyes from the butcher, on which to demonstrate operations. On occasion Kurt and Hanna were even allowed to accompany him on his rounds, during which they gained a great respect for his dedication to his patients, but little enthusiasm for his daily routine. Not that this mattered to Hanna. ‘In our family,’ she later wrote, ‘it was accepted as a principle, so obvious as to be unspoken, that a girl could only have one task in life, namely to marry and become a good mother to her children.’5
Hanna’s own mother, Emy, was the eldest daughter of a widowed Austrian aristocrat. She quietly tried to imbue a sense of Catholic piety in her children while officially bringing them up in the faith of their father. Like her husband, Emy was a passionate patriot. Generally welcoming and tolerant, she nevertheless launched into occasional tirades blaming the government, various foreign nations or ‘the Jews’ for anything she felt was wrong with Germany. Deeply loving, but not deeply questioning, Emy was the rather unreliable moral compass upon whom Hanna relied. ‘My mother and I lived in each other,’ Hanna later wrote, ‘each sensing the other’s thoughts without need to confess or conceal.’6 Emy saw her daughter’s deep longing for something more than faith, motherhood and a gentle life contained in a pleasant country town, and it worried her. She cautioned Hanna not to give in to vanity or ambition.
Willy Reitsch was less empathetic than his wife. He found his daughter’s school results disappointing and her high spirits t
rying. Her obsession with flight was to him not only unacceptable, but completely inexplicable. Hanna liked to spend hours watching larks hovering over the fields, buzzards circling in the summer air, and occasionally a glider crossing the skies. Sometimes, as Melitta once had, she insisted on doing her homework up a tree, and she regularly still spread her arms to leap from various windowsills. But Hanna’s main problem seemed to be, as one of her school friends put it, that she was ‘difficult to overlook’.7 Bursting with energy and rather full of herself, Hanna was confident, loud and cheeky. With her wonky twin braids tied with broad ribbons and her wide, impish smile dimpling her cheeks, she laughed a lot and often inappropriately, was easily bored and ‘always talked in superlatives’, much like many young girls.8 Her schooling was limited. History stopped at 1848, and discipline was deemed more important than debate. Although not ashamed to cheat in class, Hanna was highly sensitive to criticism and quick to perceive injustices. A natural extrovert, when she felt her personal honour had been besmirched she would plunge into overt misery, from which she often later appeared to emerge quite refreshed and reinvigorated.
At a time when many families faced crippling hardship, Willy Reitsch was fortunate that his livelihood was secure, and Hanna’s early childhood was generally a happy one. Outside school, life was enlivened by family hikes, picnics in the mountains and tomboy escapades with her brother Kurt, as often as not with both of them dressed in lederhosen. But as Hanna grew up she felt increasingly restricted. Although never tall, with her blonde plaits now pinned up, her huge clear-blue eyes and brilliant smile, she was the very image of pretty, healthy ‘Aryan’ maidenhood. If Hanna yearned for more it was not just in reaction to forever having to make do and mend; she was quite happy in a plain corduroy dress and had never felt the despair of utter poverty. It was not material luxury she craved, but the luxuries of status, endeavour and aspiration. In winter she took pleasure in skiing and skating, in summer walking and cycling, but other sports were discouraged as unfeminine. Concerts and dances provided some entertainment, but trips to the cinema were vetted for the film’s suitability and she was not allowed out at all without a chaperone. Not that Hanna was particularly interested in boys; it was the activities open to them that appealed to her. She now took a tram or cycled over to the gliding clubs outside the town almost every day, to lie in the grass at various vantage points and watch other people’s dreams take flight.
