8 - Regaining Mobility: The Aviator in Weimar Mountain Films

Summary

LOOPING ABOUT FREELY above the beautiful snow-and ice-covered rock faces of Germany's highest mountain—the Zugspitze—the inexperienced pilot-to-be Heinz Muthesius loses control of his glider and begins to tumble uncontrollably out of the sky. As the glider plummets and breaks into smithereens, the young Muthesius descends via parachute and lands inaccessibly atop the icy slopes. Immobilized and hurt, he needs help—a mountain rescue involving ropes, crampons, ice axes, and torches, which one might expect to see in a film that is advertised as an “exhilarating, celebratory Bergfilm.” Instead, the rescue that unfolds at the end of Wunder des Fliegens (Miracle of Flight, 1935) comes in the form of Germany's most famous war pilot, Ernst Udet. Udet, the highest-scoring ace to survive the First World War, approaches from faraway Berlin and lands his plane on a nearby snowfield, thereby saving the future German aviator from certain death. With his arm draped in a fatherly way around the self-doubting Icarus's shoulders, Udet encourages the boy's ascension and ambition: “Wenn's auch mal schief geht … Jugend muss wagen!” (Even when things go wrong from time to time … youth has to dare!) Just before Udet flies Muthesius out to safety, the two admire a squadron of German planes thundering above the mountains. The future of Heinz Muthesius, whose father fell in 1918 on the Western front as a German fighter pilot, is all but certain. He, too, will fly for Germany.

While Wunder continues the well-established genre of mountain film, it is anything but a mountain film in the classical sense. Rather, it is an aviation film that was directly sponsored by the Luftwaffe Ministry and its chief Hermann Göring, and consequently reflects the ubiquitous discussions that were taking place in military and conservative circles regarding a future German air force. True to its propagandistic form, the film ultimately ties rescue and survival not to the stout mountain climber, as is typical of mountain films, but to the flier and his aircraft. Wunder, a popular crowd-pleaser at the time, openly touts the necessity of a German air force and cleverly employs the mountainfilm genre alongside past aviation greatness to generate a narrative of a nation's enduring vocation to fly.