TY - JOUR
AU1 - Rieger, Bernhard
AB - Abstract This article examines the images of modernity that surrounded two famous married couples in Germany and Britain during the nineteen-thirties who owed their status as popular stars to the mastery of innovative technologies. In Britain, pilots Amy Johnson and James Mollison galvanized attention, while the German public eagerly followed the lives of aviatrix Elly Beinhorn and her husband, racing driver Bernd Rosemeyer. The first part of this article examines how in both countries racing drivers and solo pilots personified a modernity characterized by constant dynamic acceleration that confronted the individual with novel challenges. The ensuing two sections demonstrate how contrasting notions of nationalism, gender and companionship account for differences in the couples' public images which, in turn, modified the concepts of modernity associated with them in Britain and Germany. Notwithstanding the contrasts between Britain and Germany during the nineteen-thirties, recent scholarly interpretations have referred to both countries as permeated by a spirit of modernity. British and German popular cultures, for instance, featured a host of phenomena that signalled a widespread embrace of ‘modernity’, irrespective of the forms of government in both nations. In addition to a popular fascination with new technologies, Britain and Germany displayed vibrant celebrity cultures revolving around male and female stars – especially in the worlds of film and sport – who owed their outstanding visibility to dynamic entertainment and media environments.1 While studies of British and German popular culture in the thirties have been conducted in isolation from one another, their findings raise the issue of how these cultural similarities correspond with the vastly different political and gender ideologies prevalent in each country. This article addresses this question by examining the images of modernity that surrounded two famous married couples who owed their status as German and British popular icons to the mastery of innovative technologies. In Britain, pilots Amy Johnson and James Mollison galvanized attention, while the German public eagerly followed the lives of aviatrix Elly Beinhorn and her husband, racing driver Bernd Rosemeyer. As individuals and as couples they embodied modernity by handling advanced technologies – high-powered aeroplanes and racing cars – that served as widely recognized markers of the modern at the time. In addition, the unions between these technological adventurers hardly fit conventional or ‘traditional’ models of marriage. Amy Johnson and Elly Beinhorn attracted exceptional media publicity that coexisted uneasily with prevalent ideas about the private sphere as the appropriate place for married women. Furthermore, both female pilots derived their star status from achievements in the predominantly male world of aviation, thereby further challenging conventional understandings of gender roles. This article asks how notions of gender and technology shaped the similarities and differences evident in the images of British and German modernity displayed by the Rosemeyers and the Mollisons. As in the field of popular culture, recent inquiries into gender, technology and modernity in Britain and Germany in the thirties have pursued separate, nationally specific agendas. Instead of focusing on National Socialism's anti-democratic energies and its penchant for Blut und Boden imagery as indicators of a rejection of the ‘modern age’, scholars of Germany have sought to understand the modernity of National Socialism by analysing the amalgam of anti-rationalism, anti-individualism, anti-feminism and racism that coexisted in this mass movement with a widespread fascination with science and technology. A growing body of new research charts how the Nazis selectively appropriated and promoted innovative technologies and sciences such as aviation, the motor car, eugenics and new management methods in their pursuit of political objectives, including enhanced economic output, racist policies and warfare, all of which party officials considered ‘modern’.2 Women's historians have identified some modern impulses in National Socialism's anti-feminism both in the support for single women who acted as functionaries in party organizations and for those who worked as nurses and teachers. More importantly, given its intellectual pedigree as a brainchild of the new science of eugenics, the regime's pronatalist marriage policies represented anything but the promotion of a clear-cut return to traditional family values, despite stipulating the household as the appropriate domain for married women.3 Thus, recent research has demonstrated that recasting the gender order and embracing innovative technology played crucial roles in Nazi plans to shape a radically new, powerful, ‘modern’ Germany. Meanwhile investigations of Britain during the thirties have cast its modernity in different terms. Historians stress the relative stability of a political culture firmly rooted in liberalism that interacted with a host of social and cultural changes, thereby giving rise to a ‘conservative modernity’ that can be characterized as neither exclusively backward looking nor as rejecting change as such. As Britain's public leaders readily identified the new economic, social and political problems of the thirties as ‘modern’, they aimed to find solutions within established parliamentary and social frameworks. Situating phenomena of change within flexible traditions allowed Britons to embrace a modernity imbued with a sense of historical continuity.4 To note another instance of conservative modernity, gender studies have recently complemented work on the cultural figure of the ‘flapper’ that threw up the spectre of single, independent and fashionable women in stark contrast with Victorian and Edwardian ideals of femininity. Alison Light has shown that a realignment of gender norms in the wake of the First World War led to a reconstitution of the private sphere around an ideal of domesticity based on more egalitarian notions of conjugal partnership, granting women new personal freedom and independence within marriage. Other historians have taken up this theme, detailing how the introduction of new household technologies underpinned this transformation of domesticity in Britain.5 Of course, not all contemporary perceptions of change easily lent themselves to definition in terms of continuity, and historians of technology have uncovered a host of innovations that struck observers as unprecedented.6 In the context of the significant contrasts uncovered by research on modernity, gender and technology in Britain and Germany during the thirties, this article explores how the Mollisons and the Rosemeyers were worshipped as symbols of modernity in their home countries. Approaching the celebrity cults surrounding Johnson and Mollison, as well as Beinhorn and Rosemeyer, from a comparative perspective not only highlights overlapping and varying meanings of modernity in British and German popular cultures during the thirties, but also demonstrates how these visions of modernity interacted with wider cultural concerns. The first part of this article examines how in Britain and Germany racing drivers and solo pilots personified a modernity characterized by constant dynamic acceleration that confronted the individual with novel challenges. It then demonstrates how contrasting notions of nationalism, gender and companionship account for differences in the couples' public images which, in turn, modified the concepts of modernity associated with them in both countries. In the summer of 1930, Amy Johnson appeared as a new star in the firmament of British popular heroes and heroines. A graduate of Sheffield University and a former clerk in a London law office who had gained a pilot's licence a year earlier, Johnson set out on a solo flight to Australia in late May 1930, breaking several records en route. When she returned in early August, prominent politicians including the Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thomson, welcomed her, as did a ‘million Londoners’ who cheered as she was driven in an open car from Croydon airport to the luxurious Grosvenor House hotel.7 Further record flights to Japan and South Africa ensured Johnson's continued celebrity throughout the thirties. In 1932 she married fellow record-setting pilot James Mollison, an aerial star in his own right. The Mollisons crossed the North Atlantic together in a much-publicized flight a year later, an event described as the ultimate aerial ‘romance’.8 Although Johnson divorced her philandering husband in 1938 following a two-year separation, her star status remained intact while Mollison faded into relative obscurity. After her death in a plane crash in January 1941, Johnson's life became the subject of the hit film They Flew Alone, which starred Britain's most famed diva of the silver screen, Anna Neagle, as a model of modest, selfless and committed national service to a country and empire at war.9 ‘Amy and Jim’ were by no means the only well-known ‘fast couple’ of married daredevils risking their lives in dangerous machines in Europe during the nineteen-thirties. In Germany, the union between pilot Elly Beinhorn and racing driver Bernd Rosemeyer also commanded popular attention. Beinhorn, who had traversed Asia, Australia and South America by plane in 1932, received the prestigious Hindenburg Cup in 1933 from a jury of politicians and members of the aviation industry for outstanding aerial achievement. During the early years of the National Socialist regime Beinhorn combined long-distance flying with a career as an author and public speaker on aviation in Germany and abroad. She met the racing driver Bernd Rosemeyer while lecturing in Czechoslovakia in late September 1935, where he had just won his first Grand Prix in Brno. In the wake of a stormy courtship, they tied the knot in 1936 as Rosemeyer won the European racing championship by a wide margin. On 28 January 1938, a few weeks after the birth of their son, Bernd Rosemeyer died while trying to set a world speed record. During the war, Beinhorn stepped out of the limelight and led a withdrawn existence.10 These pilots and racing driver owed much of their celebrity status to carefully crafted media campaigns that continually informed the wider public about their adventures, big and small. From the nineteen-twenties, an alliance between the press and the stars worked to mutual advantage: sensationalist front-page coverage of daring exploits increased circulation, while press exposure enhanced stars' marketability. With the exception of Rosemeyer, all members of the quartet under consideration penned flattering stories for the press, sometimes hiring ghostwriters for this purpose.11 Good relations with the media were particularly important for female pilots, who had no access to regular jobs in the overcrowded British and German aviation sectors that – to name but one discriminatory practice – actively barred women from employment as civilian airline pilots. In a sense, becoming famous was the only career move available for female flyers like Johnson and Beinhorn who, lacking private wealth, sought to derive a comfortable income from aviation. Given these economic stakes, it is hardly surprising that the public image that female and male aviation stars presented to their fans was anything but authentic, as celebrities went to great lengths to put on a good show for reporters. To provide attractive promotional material, stars agreed to advance film and photo shots several days before outstanding feats, which subsequently circulated as faithful records of events. The scenes in a German newsreel about Elly Beinhorn's start to a flight across Africa in 1933, for instance, had been caught on reel a day before the beginning of the journey because the actual take-off was at such an early hour that lack of light prohibited filming.12 Although German press campaigns were conducted in compliance with the strict censorship rules in force, the government found it difficult to control ebullient media interest, as complaints from the state agency issuing guidelines for media coverage demonstrate.13 In Britain, where a fierce circulation war broke out among the popular newspapers at the beginning of the thirties, the press landscape offered ample opportunity to aerial heroes and heroines keen on self-promotion as individual newspapers competed for scoops.14 Amy Johnson owed her fame to a protracted campaign in the Daily Mail, which gained the privilege of exclusive coverage of her journey upon payment of £10,000 as the previously unknown aviatrix was making her way to Australia in 1930.15 In subsequent years, both Johnson and Mollison consistently sold the press rights for their long-distance flights to the highest bidder, usually the Daily Mail or the Daily Express. At the same time, exerting control over their public image proved difficult as cut-throat competition between individual papers encouraged the publication of hair-raising anecdotes about well-known personalities. As a pre-emptive measure, Johnson and Mollison hired William Courtenay, an ‘aviation correspondent’ for several London dailies, as their press secretary to negotiate with editors, arrange industrial sponsorship deals, handle fan mail and design the story lines to be fed to the press. Courtenay also supervised and edited Johnson's and Mollison's autobiographical writings.16 Like sporting heroes and film stars of their day, Johnson, Mollison, Beinhorn and Rosemeyer belonged to a relatively new socio-cultural species that struck a host of observers as quintessentially modern: they were all media celebrities who owed their prominence to exposure in the press, movies and on radio shows designed for an urban, mass clientele.17 Pilots and racing drivers managed to galvanize considerable public attention during the thirties. In Britain, enthusiasm for Amy Johnson and James Mollison regularly approached boiling point. When Johnson reached the climax of her career by completing her second record-breaking return flight between Britain and South Africa in July 1936, ‘London went a little mad’, according to the Daily Mail. After a tumultuous welcome at the airport by an ‘enormous crowd’ shouting ‘we want Amy’, she was driven to central London where ‘hundreds of pedestrians recklessly invaded the stream of traffic to reach the open car’, allegedly resulting in ‘women with shopping baskets jostling women with perambulators’.18 Even though the scenes that surrounded James Mollison's arrival after a transatlantic flight in October 1936 did not reach the same heights, he was still mobbed at the airfield and in the city centre.19 Similarly, success on Europe's race courses in full public view during 1935 and 1936 turned Bernd Rosemeyer into a ‘darling of the masses’ in Germany.20 Of course, celebrity status sometimes proved more of a burden than a blessing. Beinhorn and Rosemeyer decided to change churches at the last moment in order to escape the attention of intrusive fans during their wedding.21 Despite this, Elly Beinhorn never quite attained the same degree of prominence as Johnson, Mollison and Rosemeyer. The German aviatrix received a rather quiet welcome when she returned from her successful flight around the world in 1932. Articles about her achievement remained relatively short, even colourless, and lacked the enthusiasm Amy Johnson generated in Britain.22 Yet her flights did attract regular coverage in the German press both before and after 1933.23 Beinhorn may have been the least prominent among the group of stars examined here, but she still gained considerable media exposure. Contact with the social and political élites of the period further enhanced and highlighted the outstanding status of the four stars. Even Beinhorn rubbed shoulders with Italian Atlantic flyer General Balbo, Mussolini, Göring and Hindenburg. Moreover, she accompanied her husband to glamorous balls and parties, one of which was hosted by Joseph Goebbels.24 In Britain, leading politicians like Secretary of State for Air, Lord Thomson, and Director of Civil Aviation, Sir Sefton Brancker, headed reception committees for Amy Johnson in 1930. Johnson's and Mollison's arrivals habitually culminated in festive dinners at London's most exclusive hotels in the company of hand-picked guests. Several encounters with royals, including the king and queen, bestowed the ultimate stamp of social distinction upon the British pilots.25 Celebrated across the entire social spectrum from rich to poor, these stars were universally accepted media celebrities. What sort of modernity, then, did pilots and racing drivers embody? Press reports and self-descriptions repeatedly employed the term ‘modern’ to characterize flyers, racing drivers and their feats. Beinhorn, for instance, took pride in demonstrating the competitiveness of ‘modern German machines’ during her flights, while reports stressed that Rosemeyer rode to his triumphs in ‘modern German racing cars’.26 In keeping with observations about the railway, the telegraph and ocean liners in earlier decades, aeroplanes and automobiles embodied modernity because of their high and ever-increasing speeds.27 Raising the rate at which distances could be traversed by technological means struck contemporaries as a typically modern pursuit, which appeared to know no limit due to the expanding capacities of engineering.28 In 1939, Amy Johnson summarily declared that acceleration provided the leitmotif for a ‘hurrying modern world’ continually under reconstruction.29 These ‘prophet[s] of speed’ were among the pioneers of a modernity whose dynamism lent itself to empirical and impartial measurement with the stopwatch and the speedometer.30 In this context, aviation and motor racing formed part of a wider culture of high-speed competitions that also included motorcycle races and speedway events, in all of which individuals handled fast machines.31 Public interest rested not simply in the fact that pilots and racing drivers handled machines that attained high velocities. As with speedway and motorcycle competitions, individual exploits involving aeroplanes and racing cars promised stories replete with high drama because of the dangers that characterized motor races and long-distance flights. Aviation and motor racing were the ideal subject matter for newspapers with sensationalist proclivities because, in the twenties and thirties, these activities claimed numerous casualties, with Rosemeyer himself the most prominent of many victims in 1938 alone. A year earlier, his Auto Union team had mourned the death of young talent Ernst von Delius, who had crashed during the Grand Prix on Germany's most difficult race course, the Nürburgring.32 Amy Johnson publicly stated that she did ‘not believe in “safety first”, which never got anyone anywhere’.33 In fact, neither Johnson nor Beinhorn claimed in public that their achievements as women of the air provided evidence for the safety of flight, an argument playing on conventional notions of female weakness prominent among promoters of the aviation industry in the United States at the time.34 Transatlantic flyer James Mollison stressed that attempts to cross the North Atlantic had resulted in twenty-one deaths by 1927, and the Mollisons themselves participated in an air race in 1934 in which one of the competing teams perished in a crash.35 Deadly perils thus represented a central element in accounts of the worlds of both racing and flying, thereby firmly associating popular notions of modernity with ideas of risk. Racing drivers primarily faced the danger of becoming involved in one of the many accidents that resulted from pile-ups or crashes due to excessive speeds. Observers paid them ‘unlimited respect’ for disregarding the obvious perils of high-speed chases during risky moves to overtake opponents.36 Elly Beinhorn went so far as to declare flying a ‘solid’ and unspectacular occupation when compared with the chances her husband took.37 Her statement gained special poignancy because Beinhorn herself was only too aware of the manifold dangers pilots confronted in the air. To begin with, trivial mechanical failure could spell disaster at any moment. Furthermore, pilots risked losing their geographical bearings because they either attempted to cross oceans that rendered orientation impossible or because they flew over badly charted territory for which maps remained unreliable as late as the thirties. Bad weather presented an additional danger as aviators encountered violent storms in their small single-propeller machines which repeatedly spun out of control.38 Last but not least, the sheer monotony of spending hours in a cramped cockpit without diversion led to fatigue and exhaustion. When Johnson and Mollison landed after jointly crossing the Atlantic in 1933, they crashed into a swamp with a double somersault because Mollison, at the controls, was ‘so tired [he] could hardly keep [his] eyes open’ and, therefore, missed the runway. According to the Daily Mail, ‘it was only a miracle that saved the life of the gallant flyers’.39 Thus, pilots and racing drivers invited sensationalist media coverage because they handled high-risk technologies in spectacular fashion. One German journalist remembered Rosemeyer's driving style as ‘either do or die, a struggle for life and death’. In particular, the German's ability to go around bends and corners faster than any of his opponents commanded admiration.40 Racing in front of crowds of up to 350,000 people, Rosemeyer struck contemporaries as a young man who risked his life in full view of the public eye. By contrast, long-distance pilots confronted deadly perils under solitary circumstances. Since solo aviators frequently decided against fitting their machines with heavy radio equipment, they effectively disappeared from the public eye during long-distance efforts. An aura of mystery surrounded them as they were cut off from communications while in transit over oceans and deserts. Long-distance flights launched pilots into spaces from which they – and only they – could report back authoritatively. Upon completing their journeys, flyers exploited effectively this opportunity for self-promotion by highlighting the dangers they claimed to have defied. Elly Beinhorn recalled a trip across a stretch of the Sahara in the following manner: It is strange what it means: for the first time you have to fly completely on your own over the desert for 450 miles. There is nothing, no house, no rivulet, not the tiniest path, absolutely nothing. Only sand and, if you are lucky, some brown grass. After some time you get sound hallucinations [from the engine] … I frequently had to think of the Atlantic flyers, who flew for one whole day and one night over water, nothing but water beneath themselves. I could understand them a little. Every now and then you saw a ‘flying Dutchman’ on the coast – a big deserted ship which had become completely rotten with the time.41 Beinhorn expressed a feeling of existential loneliness in a spatial void. Flying alone over monotonous, uninhabited and barren scenery turned the environment into a landscape rife with symbols of disorientation, peril and disaster. The ‘flying Dutchman’ aside, ‘two airplanes whose crews were never heard of again’ represented the only landmarks for orientation that she encountered in the desert.42 Frequent exposure to life-threatening situations lent pilots and racing drivers a unique star status based on an aura of immortality. Elly Beinhorn expressed this notion most succinctly after her husband's fatal accident when she wrote that she had ‘always believed in his inviolability [Unverletzlichkeit]’ since Rosemeyer had repeatedly returned from Grand Prix crashes with a smile.43 Given the extraordinary dangers that pilots and racing drivers faced, a set of specific traits was widely held to be prerequisite for the pursuit of such daredevil exploits. Reports repeatedly noted that Beinhorn, Johnson, Rosemeyer and Mollison were young stars in their twenties who pursued their careers at the height of their physical powers.44 Furthermore, long-distance flyers and racing drivers displayed exceptional talents. Rosemeyer for his part was credited with a ‘genius’ for racing, while Mollison allegedly relied on a ‘sixth sense’ for orientation to arrive at his destination.45 Admiration for their powers of endurance as well as physical toughness provided additional themes in media coverage about pilots and Grand Prix drivers. Rosemeyer's ability to withstand physical pain attracted attention when it became known that, at the end of competitions, his hands were regularly covered with burst blisters from violent vibrations of the steering wheel.46 In the case of Amy Johnson and other pilots, observers wondered how they maintained their ‘surprisingly fresh’ appearance despite the exertions of long-distance journeys.47 Flyers and racing drivers resembled sporting icons such as cricketers, footballers and athletes who had the ability to prosper in competitive and challenging situations through a combination of youthful energy, skill, fitness and the capacity to overcome exceptional physical strain. At the same time, pilots and racing drivers represented a particularly extreme version of the sporting hero. In contrast to most sporting stars, who restricted themselves to playing games, flyers and Grand Prix competitors engaged in ‘daring gamble[s]’ with their lives.48 The pursuit of their occupations, therefore, required exceptional courage and ‘nerve’ that exceeded the demands placed on the majority of sporting stars by a considerable margin.49 Mollison, for instance, claimed that he sought to adopt a ‘stoic frame of mind in moments of danger’, while Elly Beinhorn surprised observers by seeming to ‘know no fear’.50 It was no coincidence that reports stressed pilots' and drivers' extraordinary psychological attributes. After all, in the inter-war years widespread coverage of ‘shell shock’ during and after the First World War combined with a large body of popular writing about psychology to intensify a long-standing interest in the psychological aspects of human nature.51 In these contexts, Beinhorn, Rosemeyer, Johnson and Mollison symbolized not only the physical but also the mental qualities required to withstand a modernity whose dynamism confronted the individual with potentially lethal challenges. Despite their very visible part in celebrity culture, these stars sought to pre-empt potential charges that they employed their rare talents for mere self-promotion or to indulge in vain personal pleasures. Neither the press nor the stars themselves tired of pointing out that flying and motor racing served concrete ends. Beinhorn stressed that the German participants, including her husband, in the prestigious Vanderbilt Cup race in the United States in 1937 wasted none of their time on idle tourist activities such as sight-seeing or attending glamorous receptions in New York City. Instead, she portrayed the German delegation of Grand Prix aces as a professional group whose single-minded concentration on training sessions and fine-tuning their cars resulted in a clear victory by Rosemeyer.52 Leading conspicuously disciplined lives helped to provide explanations for why aviators and racing drivers managed to overcome dangerous situations, but a sober and purposeful public lifestyle also supported broader claims that long-distance flying and Grand Prix competitions furthered serious and worthy causes. On a general level it was argued that hunting for new records demonstrated wider technological advances for the benefit of the nation and mankind. In the words of the German car magazine Motor und Sport, the German racing sector was engaged in ‘tireless work for progress’.53 In a similar fashion, covering aerial routes at unprecedented speeds also indicated technological improvements. Still, the ‘record craze’ came under increasingly critical scrutiny in the British liberal press during the thirties. When Mollison set out to fly from Africa to Brazil in February 1933, the Manchester Guardian reacted unenthusiastically, reminding readers that ‘the South Atlantic has been flown many times … Mr. Mollison proposes to repeat [a] solo flight [from] last year, except that he is crossing from east to west’.54 Defenders of his endeavour, however, sidestepped the charge that Mollison had performed a ‘useless’ stunt only for the sake of self-publicity by hailing the flight as a test for a specific type of a British-made aeroplane rather than a mere speed race along an established air route.55 Most flights and motor races escaped censure altogether because they lent themselves to promotional coups that treaded safe and uncontentious ideological lines. Both stars and the media co-operated when they emphasized the multiple benefits their nations reaped from technological developments tested under extreme conditions. In addition to enhancing German and British international prestige, technological success promised tangible advantages for the nation. In the British case, maintaining the empire provided the most frequent justification for daring aerial exploits. Although concrete plans for imperial reform differed across the British political spectrum during the thirties, the overwhelming majority of Britons firmly supported the idea of empire in principle.56 Flight, and the aeroplane, furthered the imperial cause by facilitating control over extended areas. Aviation technologies, as ‘airminded’ imperialists pointed out, put British authorities into a position to react to insurgent activities without engaging in direct combat.57 Amid concerns about the strategic and budgetary implications of potential imperial overstretch, flight offered a comparatively cheap means of policing and securing overseas possessions.58 Furthermore, aviation linked metropole and periphery more efficiently, thereby improving imperial communications. In a similar manner to Sir Alan Cobham, who had achieved exceptional fame and a knighthood through three flights across the empire in 1926, Amy Johnson and James Mollison established and maintained their reputations through spectacular flights over imperial territories.59 The fact that press reactions were most intense when Johnson and Mollison broke records for return flights to South Africa also indicates the weighty role that imperialism played in the promotion of aviation in Britain. Imperial themes were particularly important for the establishment of Amy Johnson's public persona because the culture of empire helped her to overcome initial public hostility. While James Mollison shot to fame with ease, Johnson had to battle misogynist attacks that sought to discredit her prominence. When she returned from her much celebrated spectacular first flight to Australia in the summer of 1930, the Manchester Guardian, for instance, refused to join in the wider celebration. Despite praise for the aviatrix's skill and courage, this newspaper found the ‘hero worship’ for Johnson ‘pathetic’, and ‘even slightly distasteful’, because it remained on the level of superficial ‘indecent curiosity’ rather than initiating a fundamental redefinition of ‘national values’.60 For the Manchester Guardian, Johnson's flight seemed pointless. Adopting the public role of a British woman furthering the empire, however, granted Johnson opportunities to argue for the legitimacy of her prominence within the nation. She could draw on familiar imagery depicting women engaged in imperial adventures. In the second half of the twenties, penny magazines began to publish a deluge of adventure stories set in the empire featuring heroines ‘who [could] face hardship like any man and who [could] shoot, hunt and ride’.61 Furthermore, a growing number of British women in India learned to handle firearms in the inter-war years not only to hunt but also as a preparation to defend themselves against potential attacks by militant members of the growing independence movement. Thus, there existed a substantial ‘overlap between femininity and masculinity [that] allowed … women a broad scope for public activity in the Empire’.62 Whether from a Conservative, Liberal or feminist background, Britons agreed on the principle that women could and should play an important part in the empire's ‘civilizing’ mission.63 Johnson took up this argument and urged her contemporaries ‘to take advantage of each and every step of progressive transport for more closely linking our scattered empire’, not least to ‘fulfil the great ambition of Cecil Rhodes’ in Africa.64 Casting Johnson as a British woman in the empire thus provided an acceptable way to celebrate her public visibility because female contributions to the empire were generally perceived as honourable. In addition, the language of empire furnished an opportunity to extol the risk-taking with which her flights were associated. The noble cause of empire justified women exposing themselves to dangers and shouldering their part of the white man's burden. According to Lord Thomson, who greeted Johnson upon her return from Australia in 1930, she ‘was a young woman … fired with that spirit of adventure which has contributed more than any other single factor to the development of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.65 By the time of her death in 1941, Johnson had gained universal acceptance as a public celebrity of imperial adventure.66 The sharp focus on flight's imperial dimensions, which was not restricted to media coverage about Johnson and Mollison, reveals several facets that shaped notions of modernity in nineteen-thirties Britain. First, the empire represented a crucial component of British modernity. Second, men and women legitimately filled public roles in a modern and imperial Britain. Third, through its association with empire, the innovative technology of aviation – recognized as an indicator of modernity at the time – became identified with a long-standing political pursuit that marked Britain out as a modern power. As a result, flight came to be seen as a new tool to preserve and strengthen a British tradition of modernity. Technological innovation held the promise of enhancing links between the past, the present and the future. Notions of historical continuity, therefore, left a stamp on British interpretations of modernity which emphasized the need for an empire and assigned legitimate public roles to both women and men. How do these features compare with definitions of the modern in Germany during the thirties? In keeping with calls to endow sport more generally with a ‘political mission [politische Sendung]’, motor racing and long-distance flying events served distinct ideological purposes in Nazi Germany.67 While open and systematic references to fundamental aspects of National Socialist thought such as racial theory remained rare, reports about pilots' and racing drivers' exploits were imbued with a staunch nationalism that appealed to a wide readership, without running the risk of contributing to an over-saturation of everyday life with overt and ubiquitous Nazi propaganda.68 In this context, Rosemeyer's successes in competitions fulfilled thinly disguised power fantasies. His series of victories during the summer of 1936 amounted to proof that ‘German racing cars completely dominate this era of motor sport’.69 In a similar fashion, the German media described Rosemeyer's first place in the Vanderbilt Cup race on the outskirts of New York City in 1937 as a ‘unique triumph of the German car industry’, one which demonstrated the ‘importance of German technology and Germany's will to rise [deutscher Aufstiegswille]’.70 When he led a victorious trio of German drivers in Monaco in 1936, the press resorted to the overtly martial language of military aggression to interpret Rosemeyer's achievement as a collective rather than an individual feat, the most important aspect of which was that ‘Germany has won a hot battle in superior manner – now we advance to other battles’.71 In keeping with this combative tone, the Nazi media depicted motor races as competitions of ‘life and death’.72 As the Nazi press turned Rosemeyer's individual achievements into national triumphs, Beinhorn also portrayed her aerial adventures as a service to the nation. Prior to her flight across Africa in 1933, she had her machine painted in the colours of the imperial monarchy – black, white and red – that, of course, also featured prominently in Nazi party symbols. In Africa she proudly paraded her small Heinkel aeroplane as ‘the most elegant and most powerful machine of the world’.73 According to a popular book about female pilots in Germany, there could be no doubt about Beinhorn's credentials as a ‘woman of deep German feeling [deutschbewußte Frau]’, who found no ‘worthier cause than to promote Germany's reputation abroad’.74 In particular, she devoted herself to supporting those Germans who continued to reside in the former colonies that Germany had lost after the First World War. She praised the aeroplane as a prime ‘propaganda instrument’ to invigorate ‘Germanity abroad [Auslandsdeutschtum]’ and recalled circling in ‘a German aeroplane [over] an island [off the African coast] under German administration with a German steamer moored in the harbour’ as a climactic moment in her flying career.75 Like Johnson, Beinhorn sought to draw on the figure of the ‘imperial woman’ to legitimize her public role. Beinhorn's emphasis on the promotion of ‘Germanity abroad’ through flying in Africa played on the central theme that fuelled the re-energized activities in German women's colonial associations after the loss of formal colonial possessions at Versailles. As part of its attempts to strengthen communities of ethnic Germans throughout the world, the Women's League of the German Colonial Association set up girls' schools staffed with German teachers, ran a recruitment scheme for nurses seeking work in German hospitals in Africa and sponsored unmarried women's emigration to suitable settlements outside of Europe. Beinhorn, however, fit the prevalent mould of a German woman of empire only imperfectly, since her initiatives did not correspond with the ‘images of maternal solicitude’ underlying all of the activities approved by the Women's League.76 In the context of colonial activities deemed appropriate for German women, the aviatrix Beinhorn appeared as an unconventional imperial woman in Germany during the thirties. At the same time, Beinhorn's flights secured her a place among the numerous critics of the Versailles peace treaty, which aroused hostility across the political spectrum because it formally divested Germany of its colonies and placed severe restrictions on German aviation, including a ban on maintaining a military air force.77 Piloting her machine over Africa, Beinhorn embodied the prospect of a revision of Versailles. Her activities formed part of wider demands for national regeneration in Nazi Germany that stipulated the need for a radical break between the recent past and a new Germany. Contrary to the position in Britain, notions of continuity threatened to mar images of a German nation whose power was supposed to rest on the relentless exploitation of the ‘most modern means of transport and the most recent technological breakthroughs’, thereby establishing an alternative modernity that bore no resemblance to the Weimar Republic nor the Wilhelmine empire.78 Proclamations of temporal rupture characterized calls for a new and modern Germany after 1933. Rosemeyer symbolized this ‘new German [neudeutsch]’ era perfectly. His victories in Europe and America were interpreted as tangible evidence for the ‘rise’ of a fundamentally novel ‘modern’ Germany. While Beinhorn's flights also indicated a new global presence for Germany, her public role remained ambiguous because she did not fully match the prevalent maternal image of a German woman of empire as she promoted ‘Germanity abroad’. Beinhorn's failure to match dominant notions about the appropriate role for German women overseas accounts only in part for the problems she faced in maintaining a prominent media presence in Nazi Germany. Radical calls for fundamental change lent German nationalism an aggressive character whose implementation presupposed ruthless and energetic initiatives. While such appeals had already surfaced during the Weimar Republic, not least in the context of aviation and sporting contests, Nazi propaganda further intensified the rhetoric of national self-assertion.79 The German press celebrated Rosemeyer because ‘nothing ever diminished his initiative, nothing took away his courage, nothing brought him to despair’. Male ‘heroes’ like Rosemeyer, whom observers credited with ‘iron resolve and unshakeable will’ that allowed him to employ his car as a ‘weapon’ in ‘battles’, corresponded with the public image of an aggressive national dynamism much better than did female public figures whose femininity coexisted uneasily with notions of uncompromising and assertive determination in competitive situations.80 Put differently, Beinhorn's search for inclusion in the Valhalla of German national heroes encountered a very pronounced gender barrier erected by the close association of national achievement with virile toughness. Of course, the aviatrix claimed that women were in a position to contribute to Germany's revival because of their ability to thrive under adverse circumstances. For example, she repeatedly ridiculed suggestions that aviatrixes were at a physical disadvantage in comparison with male pilots, since flying required endurance rather than sheer muscular strength. In fact, Beinhorn went one step further in 1932 when, in several photographs, she posed as a big game hunter in Africa and donned a naval captain's uniform at the helm of a liner, thereby indirectly arguing that women could fill male roles.81 Yet, in conjunction with her short hair and her habits of smoking and drinking whisky, such poses brought Beinhorn into perilous proximity to the ‘new woman’ of the Weimar Republic, one of the most polarizing socio-cultural phenomena against which the National Socialists had turned radically.82 Furthermore, before marrying Rosemeyer in 1936, Beinhorn was bound to appear exceptional, if not anomalous, in National Socialist Germany, since piloting did not figure among the social service professions like teaching and nursing which the Nazis identified as appropriate for single women.83 Beinhorn could not be assigned a ready social classification befitting her status as a single woman, and as a result, her position as a national celebrity remained precarious: her achievements rested on physical and mental qualities that coexisted uneasily with predominant notions of femininity in Nazi Germany. While Rosemeyer's stardom thus took precedence over Beinhorn's public presence once they had married, their relationship did not straightforwardly correspond with traditional ideas of marriage. Although Beinhorn scaled back her flying for propaganda causes, she never completely abandoned aviation after marriage, thereby emphasizing her status as a ‘modern’ woman. Furthermore, Rosemeyer's greater prominence vis-à-vis Beinhorn did not imply that the couple conformed with a traditional middle-class (or bürgerlich) model of separate spheres. Rather, the ‘Rosemeyers’, as they came to be known, provided a prime example of a successful ‘achieving couple [Leistungsgemeinschaft]’ in which, in keeping with official propaganda, husband and wife fulfilled complementary roles within a non-egalitarian relationship.84 In the case of the Rosemeyers, the wife supported her husband's career as a competitive racing driver by combining the auxiliary roles of secretary and manager, as well as by being the provider of friendship and comfort. Marriage changed Beinhorn's public role from solo aviatrix to ‘unconditional companion [bedingungsloser Gefährte]’ as part of an ‘organic union’.85 For the Rosemeyers, then, husband and wife did not so much operate in separate as in overlapping spheres. Beinhorn regularly accompanied her spouse to races both in Germany and abroad, fulfilling functions around the race course such as measuring lap times during qualifying practice.86 However, she clearly found it difficult to accept her new role. Even the best-selling hagiography of Rosemeyer which the aviatrix wrote immediately after his fatal accident is littered with episodes describing his entry into her life as a process of intrusion and infringement rendered irresistible by charm and charisma. Rosemeyer's relentlessly competitive spirit permeated the couple's relationship from its outset, no matter whether they engaged in harmless target practice with an airgun or raced their private cars over country lanes.87 He not only prevailed in playful contests but also pressured Beinhorn into giving up solo long-distance flying. After the wedding, Rosemeyer gained a pilot's licence in no time, and Beinhorn witnessed the loss of her ‘aerial superiority’, as she called it, with dismay. The day when her husband first flew Beinhorn's aeroplane on his own marked a watershed: ‘My beautiful, fast machine with its retractable legs had been the last reminder of my previous life over which I had enjoyed exclusive control. Now, that was gone, too’. On the whole, wedlock meant that Beinhorn ‘packed away conviction after conviction from single life [Junggesellenüberzeugung]’ while her spouse continued to enjoy all of his former privileges.88 Thus, the Rosemeyers represented a celebrity couple structured along unequal lines in which the wife was relegated to a prominent public role of supporting companion while the husband pursued his public career as a representative of a new Germany under National Socialist leadership. In comparison, prevalent gender notions in Britain proved more conducive to Johnson's stardom. In inter-war Britain, prominent images of male heroism did not incorporate notions of unshakeable virility to the same extent as in Germany. The First World War had eroded the models of heroic masculinity that dominated during the late Victorian and Edwardian period. In the light of the mass slaughter in France and elsewhere between 1914 and 1918, gentlemanly gestures of willing and calm self-sacrifice for the sake of the nation, like those widely ascribed to Victorian military idols General Gordon and General Havelock, no longer carried their earlier validity. Instead, many accounts published in the inter-war period incorporated passages that depicted masculine heroes in crisis. As Graham Dawson has noted, T. E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) frequently portrayed its protagonist on the brink of nervous collapse and full of remorse about his conduct during battle.89 Alan Cobham, by far Britain's most famed aerial hero, frankly admitted that he had to interrupt one of his flights in 1926 because ‘suffering from both mental and physical exhaustion’, had left him ‘so depressed that [he] felt it was hardly worth carrying on with the flight’ to Australia.90 Mollison included similar passages in his autobiographical writings. Rather than casting himself as an example of unshakeable masculine toughness, he openly conceded that he succumbed to fears and nerves while airborne. For instance, he made no secret of having been ‘scared stiff’ when encountering a storm front during his transatlantic flight in October 1936.91 This admission of weakness corresponded with a statement in his autobiography that ‘it is not necessary to be unacquainted with fear’ for a successful career in aviation.92 In general, Mollison preferred not ‘to give free rein to meditations on the future’ because he took ‘risks with his life’ so frequently that he was incapable of suppressing the fear of death.93 In contrast to Rosemeyer's media image as a paragon of unshakeable virile strength, Mollison's public persona combined male heroism with traits of vulnerability, thereby tending to undercut rigid distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Despite the strong emphasis on courage and death defiance noted earlier, the British pilot's character included features of weakness that could also be associated with femininity. In conjunction with the figure of the imperial woman, this comparative permeability of gender boundaries in nineteen-thirties Britain helped Amy Johnson to establish a public identity as a female national star. Early in her career, Johnson found it difficult to define her position as a woman in the world of aviation dominated by men. When a journalist named Charles Dixon visited the aviation workshop where Johnson trained in the late nineteen-twenties for a photo opportunity with ‘the lady engineer’, she likened changing from oil-stained overalls into ‘her smart flying suit’ and putting on make-up to adopting a disingenuous disguise in order to ‘appear for once as others would have me’. Johnson stated clearly that she felt more at ease in the dirty, ‘masculine’ clothes of a mechanic rather than in the pose of the fashionable woman.94 Nonetheless, her ability to move both in the male world of the workshop replete with grime, horseplay and rough language, and in environments in which she conformed to roles more readily associated with conventional femininity helped Johnson to gain public acceptance. To his relief, Dixon could inform his readers after his meeting that Johnson was ‘a “feminine” girl, a frail, fair-haired girl, sensitive, shy, animated and often vivacious’, rather than fitting the stereotype of ‘those modern, masculine women … with a blasé air, a loud, domineering voice [and] a firm aggressive step’.95 Put differently, Johnson did not strike contemporaries as a ‘flapper’. Instead her non-threatening presence allowed men to regard her as a harmless girl. Later in her career, Johnson transformed herself into ‘the glamour girl of the machine age’ who had outgrown her provincial origins, having toned down her Yorkshire accent in favour of ‘a West End lull’.96 During the mid thirties, reports regularly cast Johnson as a society lady, admiring her stylish haircuts, manicured fingernails and dresses.97 To emphasize that the aviatrix considered an elegant appearance of paramount importance even during life-endangering exploits, newspapers repeatedly claimed that Johnson's survival kit invariably included an ultra-feminine article, a little case of face powder.98 Thus, during the thirties, Johnson's star persona changed from an image of youthful innocence as articulated through the language of the ‘flying girl’ to an icon of the society lady who legitimately adopted a public role.99 Just as crucially, Johnson's status as James Mollison's wife did not conflict with her public position after 1932. On the contrary, the union between flying husband and flying wife provided opportunities to enact a series of public dramas dripping with sentimental romance that only increased the couple's marketability. On several occasions when Johnson or Mollison pursued solo exploits, the spouse staying behind assumed the roles of anxious lover and public commentator. After the conclusion of solo flights, the aviators, whose marriage was, in reality, anything but harmonious thanks to Mollison's perpetual infidelities, publicly reassured each other of their profound mutual love and concern. In a newspaper article celebrating Mollison's successful solo crossing of the South Atlantic in 1933, Johnson proclaimed that, in the midst of danger, she had been ‘with him’ in spirit.100 Johnson herself was shown to overflow with emotions when she returned from a record flight to South Africa, kissing, in this order, her husband, her mother, father, sisters and her dachshund Tina.101 Of course, joint expeditions such as the flight over the North Atlantic in July 1933 provided the ‘culmination of the greatest romance in the history of flying’, as the newly wed couple faced the prospect of being united rather than parted by death.102 In general, Mollison and Johnson were careful to project a public image of their relationship that emphasized the importance of mutual respect and altruistic support over competitive strife. To be sure, press accounts tended to cast Mollison as the couple's prime decision maker, but his repeated praise for his wife's expertise underlined her paramount position in British aviation.103 Marriage lent Johnson a degree of respectability that, in 1936, allowed the politically liberal, yet culturally conservative Manchester Guardian, which had initially viewed her rise to stardom with scepticism, to hail the aviatrix as a ‘symbol of feminism, of today's general interest in the women who can equal or surpass men in fields immemorially regarded as masculine’.104The Times and the Daily Mail– both politically conservative publications – also paid their respects to Johnson for achievements in ‘a department of activity that requires virtues which are supposed to be the peculiar endowment of the male sex’.105 As a young, married society lady, Johnson embodied an acceptable form of female initiative that could be integrated into British notions of modernity because it avoided the impression that a new type of woman aggressively invaded spheres conventionally regarded as male preserves. Unlike Beinhorn, who remained a marginal figure next to her husband in the iconography of a modern and National Socialist Germany, Johnson outshone Mollison. Thus, the Mollisons did not embody the ideal of private, domestic companionship recent scholarship has identified as a source of conservative modernity in inter-war Britain. Instead, theirs was a union of celebrities whose modernity derived from the very public handling of aeroplanes. In conclusion, the star images surrounding Johnson, Mollison, Beinhorn and Rosemeyer articulated interpretations of modernity which, despite the obvious political distinctions between Britain and Germany during the thirties, had common features. In both countries, media coverage emphasized the fact that pilots and racing drivers possessed the physical and mental qualities required to thrive in a harsh, competitive modern world whose fast rate of change confronted the individual with exerting challenges in rapid succession. Organized around this core theme, however, the star cults celebrating the daredevils of the air and the race track reveal significant differences between British and German understandings of modernity. To begin with, public eulogies in each country tended to resort to varying notions of temporality. While British admirers saw Johnson's and Mollison's aerial achievements in terms of an imperial tradition of modernity, German observers read Rosemeyer's triumphs in particular as evidence for a new era of modernity in Germany that the National Socialists were about to usher in. Ideas about temporal continuity and rupture thus distinguished British and German interpretations of modernity. Furthermore, differing ideals of gender and marriage also influenced the public appearance of both ‘fast couples’ as markers of modernity. As Beinhorn remained on the margins of a gallery of mostly male Nazi propaganda heroes like her own husband, consistently praised as unshakeably tough and virile, Johnson managed to claim her position as a national star next to prominent male British adventurers who displayed more vulnerable models of masculinity in public. Contrasting German and British models of femininity also contribute to an explanation for the varying success both women achieved in their quest for fame. Since Beinhorn did not fit the dominant maternal images of German women engaged in furthering ‘Germanity abroad’, she appeared as an unconventional public woman in her country. Johnson could claim a position as an imperial heroine more easily because of the overlap of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ traits this role allowed. Once married, Beinhorn grudgingly accepted a role as supporter of her husband within an unequally structured union of high-achievers working for National Socialist Germany. Johnson, by contrast, transformed her initial public image as a single flying girl and, after her marriage, cast herself as a glamorous society lady in a relatively egalitarian relationship. Thus, Johnson's celebrity persona included several culturally acceptable models of femininity ranging from the woman of empire to the girl and married society lady, while Beinhorn's public role only lost its ambiguous nature when she presented herself as the minor member of a star couple. As Johnson, Mollison, Beinhorn and Rosemeyer represented modernity as media celebrities due to their mastery of advanced technologies, the forms of partnership they displayed, and nationally specific gender notions, modified the meanings of the modernity they personified in Britain and Germany during the thirties. Finally, historians should not restrict themselves to asking which of the two ‘fast couples’ is to be considered more modern. After all, such a question easily leads to prioritizing one model of modernity over another, a step that can obscure the political and cultural logic informing alternative contemporary interpretations of the modern. Scholarly attempts to formulate universal theories of modernity risk failing because they tend to downplay the importance of frequently opposed notions of modernity in circulation at any given moment. Still, analyses of the semantic flexibility of modernity not only bring into focus diverse and often incompatible evaluations of the historical present in different national contexts, they can also provide a conceptual tool for historians who seek to take the study of anti-democratic regimes in inter-war Europe beyond the well-established and insightful comparisons between dictatorships.106 Investigating modernity's various meanings grants an opportunity to analyse cultural similarities in countries that, despite fundamentally different forms of government, shared an obsession about staging modernity in spectacular fashions. Rather than questioning the obvious dissimilarities between inter-war dictatorships and democracies, comparisons of Britain and Germany during the thirties explain how differing political motivations gave rise to public images of modernity that appear deceptively alike at first sight. Footnotes * The author would like to thank seminar audiences at the University of Iowa and the University of Munich for their comments. He is also grateful for suggestions from Liz Buettner, Lisa Heineman, Frieder Keißling and Johannes Paulmann. The expression ‘fast couple’ is taken from Beinhorn's biography of Rosemeyer (see E. Beinhorn, Mein Mann, der Rennfahrer: der Lebensweg Bernd Rosemeyers (Berlin, 1938), p. 136. 1 For enthusiasm about aviation as an example of the general fascination with technology, see P. Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 185–219; D. Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: an Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 43–9. On the media, see D. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (Oxford, 1988); K. Lacey, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923–45 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996). For an analysis of entertainment with an emphasis on the cinema, see E. D. Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife (Cambridge, Mass., 1996); J. Richards, The Age of the Dream Palace: Cinema and Society in Britain, 1930–9 (2nd edn., 1989). On the cult of celebrities in the film world, see S. Street, British National Cinema (1997), pp. 119–34; A. Ascheid, ‘Nazi stardom and the “modern girl”: the case of Lilian Harvey’, New German Critique, lxxiv (1998), 57–89; and K.-L. Neumann, ‘Idolfrauen oder Idealfrauen? Kristina Söderbaum und Zarah Leander’, in Idole des deutschen Films: eine Galerie von Schlüsselfiguren, ed. T. Koebner (Munich, 1997), pp. 231–43. 2 For some examples of this scholarship, see J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984); Science, Technology and National Socialism, ed. M. Renneberg and M. Walker (Cambridge, 1994); Science in the Third Reich, ed. M. Szöllösi-Janze (Oxford, 2001); Fritzsche; M. Nolan, Visions of Modernity: American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994); E. Schütz and E. Gruber, Mythos Reichsautobahn: Bau und Inszenierung der ‘Straßen des Führers’, 1933–41 (Berlin, 1996); Z. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Oxford, 1991), esp. pp. 18–52; D. J. K. Peukert, ‘The genesis of the “Final Solution” from the spirit of science’, in Re-evaluating the Third Reich, ed. T. Childers and J. Caplan (New York, 1993), pp. 234–52; R. N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J., 1999). From a biographical perspective, see U. Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft (Bonn, 1996). 3 E. Heineman, What Difference does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley, Calif., 1999); G. Czarnowski, Das kontrollierte Paar: Ehe- und Sexualpolitik im Nationalsozialismus (Weinheim, 1991). 4 See M. J. Daunton and B. Rieger, ‘Introduction’, in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late Victorian Era to World War II, ed. M. J. Daunton and B. Rieger (Oxford, 2001), pp. 1–20; P. Mandler, ‘The consciousness of modernity? Liberalism and the English “national character”, 1870–1940’, in Daunton and Rieger, pp. 119–44; R. Samuel, ‘Introduction: exciting to be English’, in Patriotism: the Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, i: History and Politics, ed. R. Samuel (1989), pp. xviii–lxvii. 5 On the ‘flapper’, see B. Melman, Women and the Popular Imagination in the Twenties: Flappers and Nymphs (Basingstoke, 1988); A. Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (1991); D. Ryan, The Ideal Home through the Twentieth Century (1997), pp. 33–85; C. Pursell, ‘Domesticating modernity: the Electrical Association for Women, 1924–86’, in British Jour. for the Hist. of Science, xxxii (1999), 47–67. 6 P. Wright, Tank: the Progress of a Monstrous War Machine (2000); S. O'Connell, The Car and British Society: Class, Gender, and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester, 1998). 7 For the figure, see Daily Herald, 5 Aug. 1930, p. 1; Daily Mail, 5 Aug. 1930, p. 9. 8 For descriptions to this effect, see Daily Mail, 24 July 1933, p. 12; Daily Express, 7 Jan. 1941, p. 3. 9 Street, pp. 130–1. Biographical information is taken from C. Babington Smith, Amy Johnson (1967); J. A. Mollison, Death Cometh Soon or Late (1932); and J. A. Mollison, Playboy of the Air (1937). 10 Biographical information is available in Beinhorn, Mein Mann; E. Beinhorn, Ein Mädchen fliegt um die Welt (Berlin, 1932); E. Beinhorn, 180 Stunden über Afrika (Berlin, 1933). 11 For receipts for such services for James Mollison and Amy Johnson, see Hendon, Royal Air Force Archive, file AC 77/23/500. 12 Beinhorn, 180 Stunden, p. 7. For a British example, see Daily Express, 9 June 1933, p. 11. 13 For instance, when Rosemeyer crashed lethally in January 1938, newspapers and radio stations reported on the event disregarding official guidelines (see H. Bohrmann and G. Toepser-Ziegert, NS-Presseanweisungen der Vorkriegszeit: Edition und Dokumentation, vi, pt. i, 1938: Quellentexte Januar bis April (Munich, 1999), pp. 95, 99, 105. 14 J. Curran and J. Seaton, Power without Responsibility: the Press and Broadcasting in Britain (1981), pp. 44–85; R. Graves and A. Hodge, The Long Weekend: a Social History of Great Britain, 1919–39 (1940; repr. 1991), pp. 290–3. 15 On the negotiations between Johnson's father, who acted as her representative, and the Daily Mail, see Babington Smith, pp. 214–17. 16 See W. Courtenay, Airman Friday (1937), pp. 98–100, 118–23, 251, 259–69. 17 On the phenomenon of the star, see J. Ellis, ‘Stars as a cinematic phenomenon’, in Star Texts: Image and Performance in Film and Television, ed. J. G. Butler (Detroit, Mich., 1991), pp. 300–15; R. Dyer, Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (Basingstoke, 1985), pp. 10–15. 18 Daily Mail, 16 May 1936, pp. 13–14. See also Daily Express, 16 May 1936, p. 1. 19 See the coverage in Daily Express, 31 Oct. 1936, p. 1; Manchester Guardian, 31 Oct. 1936, p. 13. 20 Motor und Sport, 6 Feb. 1938, p. 25. 21 Beinhorn, Mein Mann, pp. 42–3. 22 Berliner Tageblatt, 26 July 1932, p. 10; Vorwärts, 27 July 1932 (evening edn.), p. 6. No mention was made of Beinhorn in Frankfurter Zeitung. 23 Völkischer Beobachter, 8 Aug. 1936, p. 3; Motor und Sport, 16 Aug. 1936, p. 6. 24 Beinhorn, 180 Stunden, pp. 61, 124; Beinhorn, Mein Mann, pp. 37, 81. 25 On reception ceremonies, see The Times, 2 Aug. 1930, p. 13; The Times, 5 Aug. 1930, p. 10; Manchester Guardian, 5 Aug. 1930, p. 9; Daily Mail, 19 Dec. 1932, p. 11; The Times, 16 May 1936, p. 14. For coverage of a meeting with royalty, see The Times, 20 Oct. 1934, p. 12; Daily Mail, 20 Oct. 1934, p. 11. 26 Beinhorn, Ein Mädchen, p. 92; Motor und Sport, 26 July 1936, p. 12. 27 See, e.g., W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: the Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Leamington Spa, 1986); L. Kirby, Parallel Tracks: the Railroad and Silent Cinema (Durham, N.C., 1997); S. Kern, The Culture of Space and Time, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983). 28 Daily Express, 10 Feb. 1933, p. 10; Daily Mail, 20 Oct. 1934, p. 12. 29 A. Johnson, Sky Roads of the World (1939), p. 7. 30 Motor und Sport, 6 Feb. 1938, p. 2. 31 On motorcycle racing, see A. von Saldern, ‘Cultural conflicts, popular mass culture and the question of Nazi success: the Eilenriede motorcycle races, 1924–39’, German Studies Rev., cxv (1992), 317–38; J. Williams, ‘A wild orgy of speed: responses to speedway in Britain before the Second World War’, Sports Historian, xix (1999), 1–15. 32 Beinhorn, Mein Mann, pp. 154–6. The same book features descriptions of other crashes on pp. 54, 86, 94,164. 33 The Times, 7 Aug. 1930, p. 8. 34 On the United States, see J. J. Corn, The Winged Gospel: America's Romance with Aviation, 1900–50 (New York, 1983), pp. 71–90. 35 J. A. Mollison, Sky Riders: a Book of Famous Flyers (London and Glasgow, 1939), p. 92. 36 Motor und Sport, 26 Apr. 1936, p. 39. 37 Beinhorn, Mein Mann, p. 50. 38 Mollison, Death Cometh, p. 181. For similar passages by other pilots, see H. Koehl, J. C. Fitzmaurice and G. von Hünefeld, The Three Musketeers of the Air: their Conquest of the Atlantic from East to West (New York and London, 1928), p. 82; M. von Etzdorf, Kiek in die Welt: Als deutsche Fliegerin über drei Erdteilen (Berlin, 1931), pp. 20–2. 39 The quotes are from Daily Mail, 25 July 1933, p. 10; Daily Express, 25 July 1933, p. 2. 40 NSKK-Mann, 4 June 1938, p. 4, 28 May 1938, p. 4; Fränkische Tageszeitung, 14 Sept. 1936, p. 18; Völkischer Beobachter, 28 June 1936, p. 3. 41 Beinhorn, Ein Mädchen, p. 18. 42 Beinhorn, Ein Mädchen, p. 17. 43 Beinhorn, Mein Mann, p. 7. 44 Beinhorn, Mein Mann, p. 16; Manchester Guardian, 5 Aug. 1930, p. 8; The Times, 5 Aug. 1930, p. 10. 45 Motor und Sport, 6 Feb. 1936, p. 26; Daily Express, 6 Feb. 1933, p. 2. 46 Beinhorn, Mein Mann, pp. 24, 55, 57. 47 The Times, 8 May 1936, p. 16; Manchester Guardian, 16 May 1936, p. 12; Daily Express, 16 May 1936, p. 12. For statements emphasizing the importance of the ‘power of endurance’, see Mollison, Death Cometh, pp. 141, 163; Johnson, Sky Roads, p. 23; Beinhorn, Ein Mädchen, p. 77; R. Italiaander, Drei Deutsche Fliegerinnen: Elly Beinhorn, Thea Rasche, Hanna Reitsch (Berlin, 1940), p. 40. 48 Daily Mail, 8 June 1933, p. 11. 49 Daily Mail, 16 May 1936, p. 12; Mollison, Playboy of the Air, p. 21; Beinhorn, Ein Mädchen, p. 10; Italiaander, p. 40; Motor und Sport, 6 Feb. 1936, p. 26; NSKK-Mann, 28 May 1938, p. 3. 50 Mollison, Death Cometh, p. 150; NSKK-Mann, 18 June 1938, p. 4. 51 J. Oppenheim, ‘Shattered Nerves’: Doctors, Patients and Depression in Victorian England (New York and Oxford, 1991); E. Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1987); J. Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich, 2000); E. J. Leed, No Man's Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 163–92; J. Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain and the Great War (1996), pp. 107–23; R. W. Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914–39 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), pp. 59–67; M. Thomson, ‘Psychology and the “consciousness of modernity” in early 20th-century Britain’, in Daunton and Rieger, pp. 97–115. 52 Beinhorn, Mein Mann, pp. 144–8. 53 Motor und Sport, 26 Apr. 1936, p. 39. 54 Manchester Guardian, 7 Feb. 1933, p. 8. This newspaper repeated its criticism after the flight (see Manchester Guardian, 10 Feb. 1933, p. 9). 55 Daily Herald, 10 Feb. 1933, p. 1; The Times, 10 Feb. 1936, p. 12. 56 For a succinct overview of the attitudes to empire across the political spectrum, see P. J. Marshall, ‘1918 to 1960s: keeping afloat’, in The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire, ed. P. J. Marshall (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 84–5. See also S. Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: the Left and the End of Empire, 1918–64 (Oxford, 1993). 57 For a description of an imperial bombing campaign, see Mollison, Death Cometh, p. 68. 58 For a systematic exploration of these arguments, see D. Edgerton, ‘Liberal militarism and the British state’, in New Left Review, clxxxv (1991), 138–69. 59 See A. Cobham, Australia and Back (1926); A. Cobham, My Flight to the Cape and Back (1926); A. Cobham, Skyways (1925). 60 Manchester Guardian, 6 Aug. 1930, p. 8. 61 Melman, p. 140. 62 M. Procida, ‘Good sports and right sorts: guns, gender and imperialism in British India’, Jour. British Studies, xl (2001), 454–88, at p. 461. 63 On ‘women of empire’, see A. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), pp. 33–62; B. N. Ramusack, ‘Cultural missionaries, maternal imperialists, feminist allies: British women activists in India, 1865–1945’, in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. N. Chauduri and M. Strobel (Bloomington, Ind., 1992), pp. 119–36; T. R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 109–10. 64 Johnson, Sky Roads, pp. 31, 61. 65 The Times, 5 Aug. 1930, p. 10; Daily Mail, 5 Aug. 1930, p. 10. A biography of Johnson also claimed that her spirit of adventure had motivated Johnson to select Australia as her destination (see C. Dixon, Amy Johnson – Lone Girl Flyer (1930), p. 17). An unpublished report to Lord Wakefield, managing director of the Castrol motor oil company and sponsor of Johnson's flight, also emphasized that she was ‘a very valuable ambassadress for the British Empire’ (see R.A.F. Archive, file AC 77/23/677, letter to C. C. Wakefield, 1 July 1930). 66 See the obituaries in The Times, 8 Jan. 1941, p. 7; Manchester Guardian, 9 Jan. 1941, p. 6; Daily Express, 7 Jan. 1941, p. 3. See also the rousing, pro-imperial speech delivered by Amy Johnson, as played by Anna Neagle, in They Flew Alone in 1942. Street, p. 131. 67 For the call to politicize sport, see H. von Tschammer und Osten, ‘Sport – eine Sache der Nation’, in Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, v (1934), 385–90. 68 Attempts to avoid oversaturation with overt ideology are discussed in D. J. K Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life (1st edn., 1987; Harmondsworth, 1993); Rentschler, pp. 16–22, 99–117. 69 Motor und Sport, 21 June 1936, p. 16. For similar coverage, see Völkischer Beobachter, 29 Jan. 1938, p. 1; Illustrierter Beobachter (1937), p. 1091; Fränkische Tageszeitung, 6 July 1937, p. 3, 27 Oct. 1937, p. 9. 70 Völkischer Beobachter, 7 July 1937, p. 1; NSKK-Mann, 2 July 1938, p. 4. 71 Motor und Sport, 26 Apr. 1936, p. 41. 72 Völkischer Beobachter, 27 July 1936, p. 1. 73 Beinhorn, 180 Stunden, pp. 13, 17. 74 Italiaander, p. 29. 75 Beinhorn, 180 Stunden, p. 60; Beinhorn, Ein Mädchen, p. 26. 76 L. Wildenthal, German Women for Empire, 1884–1945 (Durham, N.C., 2001), pp. 172–96, esp. p. 189. 77 On German colonialism in the inter-war period, see H. Pogge von Strandmann, ‘Imperialism and revisionism in interwar Germany’, in Imperialism and After: Continuities and Discontinuities, ed. W. J. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel (1986), pp. 90–119. 78 This phrase is taken from a best-seller by the press secretary of the Nazi party (see O. Dietrich, Mit Hitler an die Macht: Persönliche Erlebnisse mit meinem Führer (Munich, 1934), p. 66). 79 On the celebration of aviation heroes in the Weimar Republic, see Fritzsche, pp. 146–53. On boxing triumphs as symbols of national regeneration, see S. Gehrmann, ‘Symbol of national resurrection: Max Schmeling, German sports idol’, International Jour. Hist. of Sport, xiii (1996), 101–13. 80 The quotes are taken from Motor und Sport, 19 Sept. 1936, p. 30; 30 Aug. 1936, p. 28; 10 Jan. 1937, p. 14; 6 Feb. 1938, p. 26; Völkischer Beobachter, 27 July 1936, p. 1. 81 E. Beinhorn, Grünspecht wird ein Flieger: Der Werdegang eines Flugschülers (Leipzig, 1935), pp. 51–60; Beinhorn, Ein Mädchen, pp. 7, 9, and see plates facing p. 219. 82 For Beinhorn's drinking and smoking habits, see Beinhorn, Ein Mädchen, pp. 35, 77. For National Socialist attacks on the ‘new woman’, see P. Siber, ‘Die Frauenfrage und ihre Lösung durch den Nationalsozialismus’, NS-Frauen-Warte, i (1932–3), 52. Similar themes are invoked in L. Gottschewski, ‘Eine neue Frauengeneration wächst heran’, NS-Frauen-Warte, i (1932–3), 531–3; T. von Trotta, ‘Volksneubau und Geschlechterfrage’, Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, v (1934), 875–7; G. Scholz-Klink, ‘Unsere Ausrichtung’, Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, vi (1935), 298–301. Other examples of prominent females in Nazi Germany also encountered problems (see Ascheid). For the best discussion of the ‘new woman’ in a European context, see M. L. Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France, 1917–27 (Chicago, Ill., 1994), pp. 19–88. On Germany, see U. Scheub, Verrückt nach Leben: Berliner Szenen in den Zwanziger Jahren (Reinbeck, 2000); A. Grossmann, ‘“Girlkultur” or thoroughly rationalized female: a new woman in Weimar?’, in Women in Culture and Politics: a Century of Change, ed. J. Friedlander and others (Bloomington, Ind., 1986), pp. 62–80; L. Frame, ‘Gretchen, girl, garçonne: Weimar science and popular culture in search of the ideal new woman’, in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. K. von Ankum (Berkeley, Calif., 1997), pp. 12–40; C. Usborne, ‘The new woman and generational conflict: perceptions of young women's sexual mores in the Weimar Republic’, in Generations in Conflict: Youth Revolt and Generation Formation in Germany, 1770–1968, ed. M. Roseman (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 137–63. 83 Heinemann, pp. 38–43. 84 For the term, see Czarnowski, p. 14. On marriage in Nazi Germany, see Heineman, pp. 17–74. 85 These are characterizations of the ideal couple by the leader of the National Socialist women's organization Nationalsozialistische Frauenschaft (see ‘Die Reichsfrauenführerin spricht in der Parteikongreßhalle zu den deutschen Frauen’, in NS-Frauen-Warte, iv (1935–6), 239–44). 86 Beinhorn's presence at race courses not only features in her autobiography but also in the contemporary press (see Beinhorn, Mein Mann, pp. 44, 46, 50, 152; Motor und Sport, 2 Aug. 1936, p. 17). 87 Beinhorn, Mein Mann, pp. 17–19. 88 Beinhorn, Mein Mann, pp. 125, 139. 89 G. Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (1994), pp. 195–201. On the inter-war crisis of masculinity, see Light, pp. 8–10. There is also the well-developed literature on shell shock quoted above (n. 51). 90 See Cobham, Australia and Back, pp. 6, 7, 27, 29, 72; Daily Mail, 1 Oct. 1926, pp. 9–10. 91 Daily Express, 31 Oct. 1936, p. 1. 92 Mollison, Playboy of the Air, p. 21. 93 Mollison, Death Cometh, pp. 218–19. 94 Dixon, pp. 28–9. 95 Dixon, pp. 10–11. 96 Daily Express, 7 Jan. 1941, p. 3. 97 Daily Mail, 24 July 1933, p. 11; 8 May 1936, p. 12; 16 May 1936, p. 12; Daily Express, 16 May 1936, p. 12. 98 Daily Mail, 25 July 1933, p. 9; Daily Express, 8 May 1936, p. 11; Daily Mail, 16 May 1936, p. 12. On make-up and femininity, see K. Peiss, ‘Making up, making over: cosmetics, consumer culture and women's identity’, in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. V. de Grazia and E. Furlough (Berkeley, Calif., 1996), pp. 311–36. 99 On the legitimacy of public roles for society ladies in Britain, see L. Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (1986). 100 Daily Express, 10 Feb. 1933, p. 1. For similar examples, see Daily Herald, 5 May 1936, p. 11; Daily Herald, 6 May 1936, p. 1; Daily Mail, 8 May 1936, p. 13. 101 Daily Express, 16 May 1936, p. 13. 102 Daily Mail, 24 July 1933, p. 11. 103 See Daily Mail, 8 June 1933, p. 11; Daily Express, 24 July 1933, p. 2; 10 Feb. 1933, p. 1; Daily Mail, 22 Oct. 1934, p. 16; Daily Herald, 7 May 1936, p. 1. 104 Manchester Guardian, 16 May 1936, p. 12. 105 Daily Mail, 16 May 1936, p. 12; The Times, 16 May 1936, p. 15. 106 C. Levy, ‘Fascism, National Socialism and conservatives in Europe, 1914–45: issues for comparativists’, Contemporary European History, viii (1999), 97–126; S. G. Payne, A History of Fascism (Madison, Wis., 1995); Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, ed. I. Kershaw and M. Lewin (Cambridge, 1997); Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts, ed. R. Bessel (Cambridge, 1996). © The Author(s) 2003. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of lnstitute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2003. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of lnstitute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - ‘Fast couples’: technology, gender and modernity in Britain and Germany during the nineteen-thirties
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/1468-2281.00181
DA - 2003-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/fast-couples-technology-gender-and-modernity-in-britain-and-germany-w9iq4tzaRm
SP - 364
EP - 388
VL - 76
IS - 193
DP - DeepDyve
ER -