A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.64 (900 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0674601211 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-10-10 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
(Martin Pawley The Guardian)This book illuminates a significant event-the human acquisition of powers of flight…The first chapter, on the zeppelin craze, is a splendid evocation of the popular enthusiasm that flooded the channels of official patriotism and disturbed the princes jostled by the masses coming to witness the flyby or landing of zeppelin…and this book becomes an informative and useful essay on the German experience of aviation in the first three decades of the twentieth century…Its strengths become obvious as it turns to the phenomenon of human flight in its German incarnation, recognizing the broad-spectrum appeal of flight and the peculiar relations between fliers and the masses it enge
By drawing from numerous private archives, including those of Lufthansa, the Zeppelin Company, the German Aero Club, and the papers of "the father of gliding", Oskar Ursinus, as well as by analyzing popular poems, songs, and patriotic appeals, Fritzshe parades through his story such heroes of aviation as Graf Zeppelin, Manfred von Richthofen, Oswald Boelcke, and Marga von Etzdorf. Even before the Nazis, fliers embodied a new breed of men and women who stood ready to restore German power. From the crowds in the shadow of Graf Zeppelin's hugely popular airships, to the myths surrounding the chivalrous fighter pilots of World War I, and finall
Everything you ever wanted to know about airships & gliders Fritzsche's writing feels considerably less like formal academic history and more like an entertaining narrative of the rise of aviation in fin de sicle Germany. At times his sweep is so large that the historical details get lost, but at the same time the added perspective keeps the often dry subject matter (Airships, Zepplins, gliders, the rise of nationalism from German aviation) moving in a lively manner. Particularly interesting is his narration of the rise of gliding as a German response to the aviation restrictions in early 1920's Germany. I often fee. Nation of Fliers It is not a text of technical details, like how zeppelins were built, or what the actual range of the Bremen trans-Atlantic flyer was. Instead, it gives a general portrait of the importance of aviation in the popular mind of that era, and how certain ideas and issues became dominant. This actually explains a lot, that might be obvious to someone growing up in Germany, but that can be hard to understand from the outside. For example, how the popularity of the zeppelin before WW1, and of Count Zeppelin - both as a technological wonder, and as a celebration of
Peter Fritzsche is Professor of History at the University of Illinois.