Deconstructing Rudolf Berthold: The Brittle, Violent Life of Germany’s “Iron” Aviator

While the First World War in the air has been extensively studied from technical, military, and industrial perspectives, the intersection of aviation technology and the human experiences of aviators themselves remains underexamined. This chapter shows that the experience of First World War aviation was a conversation and negotiation between the need for internal meaning making on the part of fliers and the external pressures, demands, and crafted narratives of both the German military hierarchy and the broader public at home. German ace Rudolf Berthold’s unpublished diary helps to distill the aviator experience. Berthold presents both a promising and a problematic source. His diary is unusual in that it tracks his experiences throughout the war, from his mobilization in August 1914, until his exit from active military service in the fall of 1918, just before the end of the conflict. But Berthold, who was murdered in a riot in Germany after the war, also became an iconic figure for the Nazi party. Berthold’s unvarnished words show how the experiences of aviators—their attempts to make meaning of their service, their need to cope with extreme danger and the threat of death, and their elevated place within German military culture—often differed from the public-facing memoirs penned by pilots both during and after the war. This chapter, then, distills the fundamental experience of aviators through the lens of Rudolf Berthold to discover the transformative power of aviation, not only in war, but in broader conversations which shaped German culture in the aftermath of the conflict.