by Clare Mulley
As Hirschberg offered the perfect environment for gliding, veterans started to run courses there for interested local lads. Girls were excluded but, although it was a good hike from her boarding house, Melitta would often join the spectators at the edges of the fields. At first the crowds were mainly groups of men, sometimes with carthorses or the occasional bull to help tow a glider back up the slopes. Soon, however, whole families would turn out to watch, along with classes of schoolchildren trooping down in lines, the girls in white dresses with black woollen stockings. Melitta was one of the few girls to roll up her sleeves and get involved, and the only one recorded as taking up a glider herself. She had always enjoyed testing the limits of what was possible, whether through the exhilaration of skiing and diving, or the intellectual pleasure she gained from amateur scientific inquiry. These passions came together in the cockpit. Between the adrenaline rushes of take-off and landing, Melitta’s modest first glide consolidated her fascination with every aspect of flight. Although she was proud of her achievement, it was against her nature to brag. Nevertheless, the news that a girl had flown in the Hirschberg valley quickly made ‘considerable waves’, Lieselotte noted.21
It was Easter 1922 when Melitta took her final school exams, achieving outstanding results. To celebrate, she and some classmates took a last skiing trip into the mountains. The gossip next morning was that Melitta had swum across the lake near the mountain peak, most of which was still frozen solid. But when Lieselotte went to congratulate her, Melitta was already focused on her next challenge – she had been offered a place at the Technical University of Munich. ‘There it lies in front of you, your freedom,’ Lieselotte sighed enviously. But Melitta saw things differently. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘Freedom is here. Here we were able to do whatever we wanted; they looked out for us and looked after us . . . all responsibility now lies with us.’22 Melitta would chase freedom all her life, but she would never recapture the wonderful irresponsibility of her childhood.
One of the things that had attracted her to Munich was its reputation as a cultural centre, but by the time she arrived most artists were deserting a city that was rapidly becoming better known as a centre for the German extreme right.* As Hitler gained support, walls in the Schwabing area where Melitta had a room were plastered with bright-red National Socialist German Workers Party posters. Local and, increasingly, national newspapers filled their columns with reports of Nazi meetings in the city’s traditional beer halls and rallies in the streets. Melitta may well have recognized the future Führer in his trilby and white-belted raincoat, perhaps sporting a whip; an affectation that he later dropped. She may even have heard some of his speeches and, like many, considered him too extreme to attract much lasting support.
The photograph on Melitta’s university registration papers shows a fresh-faced young woman, her long hair pinned up, wearing an embroidered white peasant-style blouse.23 The overall impression is of old-fashioned modesty, but her gaze is direct. Living in country towns during war and recession, Melitta had always worn simple clothes: soft pleated blouses with long sleeves buttoned at the wrist, dirndls and sailor dresses. On high days friends remembered her looking ‘charming, in a dress of strong blue linen’, sometimes with a few cowslips decorating her neckline.24 The move to fashionable, urban Munich brought a radical new look. At some point Melitta must have decided that her long dark hair was too much trouble and she cut it off, or perhaps it was with a sense of liberation that she had it cropped into a fashionably sleek flapper’s bob, shocking her parents as she marked her irreversible transition to adulthood and independence.* ‘German youth no longer felt bound, in any way, by conventions and traditions,’ she later wrote happily.25 A natural ‘new woman’, self-confident, athletic and ambitious, she soon took up smoking, and learned to ride the motorbike that provided her with an adrenaline rush as she hared through the city. But neither bob nor bike were as radical as the fact of being a woman studying engineering at the prestigious Technical University of Munich.
Surrounded by male students, it was not long before Melitta found her first romance. Wolfgang Schlotterer, a veteran of the German Imperial Navy during the war, had enrolled at the university a few years before Melitta, and shared her love of hiking, art – and mechanical engineering. The two quickly became close, spending weekends at the Schlotterer country home just outside the city. In 1923 they spent the summer break in Krotoschin where, despite the offence of failing to arrive in a hat, Wolfgang charmed Melitta’s parents. He then wrote for permission to marry her. But, for reasons that have never emerged, there would be no wedding, and Melitta returned to college with a renewed sense of purpose. She now attended additional lectures on flight mechanics and aerodynamics, for which she would sit a special supplementary exam when she took her finals.
Having turned her studies towards aeronautical engineering, Melitta became determined to earn her pilot’s licence. Since schools dealing with engine-powered aircraft did not admit women, she had to find creative ways to gain experience, ‘exploiting every slightest opportunity’, as she put it.26 In 1923 she applied to join the fledgling ‘Academic Fliers’ Group’, but was rejected on the basis that membership required service in the event of war. Melitta was quite happy with this condition; the Group’s committee was not. Undeterred, she managed to cadge rides on local commercial ferry flights. A visit to the Udet aircraft works at Schleissheim gave her the opportunity to beg Ernst Udet, the greatest surviving fighter ace of the war and an acquaintance of Melitta’s uncle Ernst, for a ride during his stunt flights. From then on Udet ‘often took her with him to his daredevil flying displays’, her sister Jutta wrote.27 That year a monument to German pilots killed in action was erected at Wasserkuppe, the highest peak in the Rhön mountains, where annual gliding contests had been held since 1920. Over 30,000 people attended. Inspired, Melitta applied for a gliding course, but she had neither the time nor the money to take up her place.
Melitta’s father, Michael Schiller, was now investing all his salary in the education of his youngest daughters, Jutta and Klara. Lili was training to be a radiographer in Berlin, and Otto was studying agriculture in Breslau.* Melitta, whose limited university grant was technically Polish, applied for scholarships and borrowed money from Otto, but she mainly paid her own way through college by tutoring fellow students. She never faced real hardship but was frustrated to find her horizons limited once again. At the same time, she watched with despair as war reparations, hyperinflation, economic stagnation and public protest forced the government to declare a state of emergency. One afternoon her mother and younger sisters were arrested and charged with smuggling some dollars and a butchered rabbit across the border as they travelled to a family wedding. Although they were released, the dollars were confiscated and the family felt utterly humiliated. ‘It was too horrible,’ Klara later recounted.28
In the autumn of 1923, members of Hitler’s National Socialist Party, supported by many local students, failed in an attempt to overthrow the Bavarian government in Munich, an action that later became known as the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’. Although Hitler was arrested and given a custodial sentence, the German chancellor was soon forced to resign after a vote of no confidence. The new coalition would last for less than a year. Things stabilized a little as foreign troops withdrew and economic treaties enabled some assistance, but anti-Semitism and both communist and nationalist movements were still on the rise. Melitta’s parents now moved to a ‘little pink house’ in the pretty town of Oliva within the Free City of Danzig* where Michael could still draw his pension.29 It was here, surrounded by woods and close to the Baltic coast, that Melitta wrote her dissertation in the summer of 1926, and immediately started to apply for work.
In October she was interviewed by the head of the aerodynamics department at the prestigious German Research Institute for Aeronautics, better known as DVL,* at Berlin-Adlershof airbase. Having temporarily closed its doors during the war, the institute was now aiming to restore Germany’s
international reputation in technology, and was keen to employ the brightest graduates. Invited to watch a test flight, Melitta was deep in conversation when the plane she was there to observe plummeted from the sky to crash only a hundred metres away from her. The entire crew was killed on impact. Although she was shaken, Melitta’s resolve did not falter. The following year, aged twenty-five, she received her diploma and started work at DVL as a flight mechanic and mathematician in experimental aerodynamics research. Her initial brief was the operation of propellers, then known as ‘airscrews’, with particular focus on the sound and drag caused by high altitudes.
Although she had taken rooms within sound of the planes at Berlin-Adlershof, at first Melitta kept her distance from her colleagues. A woman’s presence at DVL was a complete novelty for the men there. Her manager frequently ribbed her, and few colleagues gave her the recognition she deserved. Insulted, she began to gain a reputation for being ‘dainty and reserved’, and ‘outwardly distant and cool, even aloof’.30 Socially she was in any case monopolized by her current boyfriend, a possessive Danish student called Hendrik who, her sister Jutta felt, was ‘jealous of everything close to her’.31 But when Hendrik gave Melitta an ultimatum: flying or him, ‘there was no doubt as to the outcome’, as Jutta put it.32 Free to focus on her work, over time Melitta’s ‘very meticulous and reliable’ approach attracted growing approval until, as the engineer Paul von Handel noted, ‘she was always consulted, and her advice sought, even by much older colleagues’.33 As a result Melitta relaxed. She was soon taking part in the general chat, and sometimes even showing off her gymnastic abilities, using her office desk or a chair as a prop. Soon she was rubbing along well as a sort of honorary man, ‘welcomed everywhere, liked by all’, one colleague wrote, and she even started to make a few close friendships.34
Georg Wollé, another engineer, owned a magnificent motorbike that he would ride round the concrete perimeter of the airfield in his lunch hours. Caught admiring the machine, Melitta was soon making laps in its sidecar, and then riding it herself. After a while she also started to spend time under Georg’s expensive sunlamp. Georg was intrigued by Melitta’s ‘delicate, attractive personality’ and, aware of how reserved she could be, he was proud of their friendship. However, he had yet to manage first-name terms or use the more familiar du with her, ‘although there were many suitable opportunities’.35 Your soul is like a ‘steep coast’, he wrote to Melitta, trying to tease her out.36 Although in time they became ‘very close’, Georg always saw their friendship as more ‘comradely’ than ‘that of a trusted friend to whom she would open her heart’. He put her reserve down to ‘her modest way of never drawing attention to herself’.37
Melitta and the rather scrawny and serious Paul von Handel developed a very different relationship, built on their shared fascination with the new basic problems of physics: ‘the theory of relativity; quantum mechanics; the problems of causality, determinism and coincidence; and the probability of free will and biology’. As tenants in the same block, they often met to read together, ‘always with a notepad lying at the ready’, so they could test new theories as they went.38 To Paul, Melitta was ‘an extraordinary human being’.39 Neither a typical engineer nor the usual flying type, he found her hard to categorize, and all the more interesting for it. They would become close lifelong friends.
Another colleague, Hermann Blenk, who would later head the Institute for Aerodynamics during the war, appreciated the breadth of Melitta’s interests, and realized how frustrated she was, working at an airbase while tied to the ground. Melitta ‘did not only want to know something’, Blenk understood, she ‘wanted to be able to apply that knowledge . . . it was her greatest wish to learn to fly’.40 Georg told her the idea was nonsense. Not only did he feel that, as ‘a very sensitive person’, she would make a hash of things, but flying was an expensive business, and Georg knew Melitta was earning as little as he was.41 He would not be the last person to underestimate her.
In July 1929 Melitta enrolled at the flying school at Staaken, the airfield west of Berlin where the famous Graf Zeppelin airship had landed the year before. It was a two-hour journey from her apartment, but just possible to combine with her work, given a very early start and absolute commitment. Hastily scribbled postcards kept Georg up to date. One day Melitta reported that she had taken her first solo flight. Within two months she had earned her provisional licence for light aircraft, which – ‘with an iron will’, she later said proudly – she converted to a full licence the following spring.42
Over the next few years Melitta invested all her spare time and salary in flying lessons for every class of powered land- and seaplane. She was well aware that ‘any basic mistake, any moment of failure, every lapse of concentration’ could cost her not only her career but her life, but she also knew that she had to ‘always achieve more than average results in my training, and as a result take more risks than male flying students, just to get through’.43 Correspondingly, she ‘grabbed indiscriminately at every opportunity’, she admitted, ‘whether it was in the most precious, untested or old aircraft, or under the worst weather conditions’.44 Sometimes she flew demonstration flights or took people sightseeing to earn both flight hours and cash for her lessons. Georg helped to arrange events, for which she thanked him in notes addressed, ‘Dear Impresario’. Her strong will and tenacity earned her the admiration and sometimes envy of her male colleagues, but her escapades did not always end well.
One December weekend, Melitta managed to get hold of a ‘fast, open-cockpit fighter’, in which she hoped to have some fun while building up her hours for her next licence.45 The morning was thick with freezing fog, so she donned her fur-lined flying suit, gauntlets and goggles and flew from Berlin to Cologne. On arrival she decided to creep up the Rhine, keeping low over the surface of the water. As she took off again, a thick snow squall blew in, hiding even the cathedral from sight. She was soon caught in a violent gale that ricocheted between the cliffs flanking the river, tossing her machine about ‘in a mad vortex’.46 Hail and snow stuck to her windshield and goggles, and wiping her fur glove across them produced only ‘a thin and completely opaque layer of ice’.47 She was forced to remove her goggles, but her eyes were immediately pelted with ‘sharp needles of ice’.48 Ripping off a glove, Melitta desperately tried to scratch a hole in the ice on the windshield with her stiff fingers. Half blind, she was lucky to fly beneath a power line that stretched between the riverbanks.
Eventually she turned a bend in the Rhine and the winds died down. Thick snow clouds now forced her south-west until, running low on fuel, with no map and still limited vision, she spotted a small airfield and managed to land. It was only when the muffled figures she called out to for help failed to respond that she realized she had inadvertently entered the French border area – a feat that during the tense interwar years could mean her arrest and the confiscation of her borrowed machine. ‘With a commanding gesture’, she later reported, ‘I waved the people away from my aircraft, gave it full power, and took off.’49 She only just cleared the boundary fence. Shortly afterwards her engine failed and she was forced to land in a ploughed field on the German side of the border. As she touched down ‘the undercarriage sank deeper and deeper into the very soft ground’, pitching forward until it had completely upended.50 Then, in one fell movement, ‘the machine turned over and lay on its back’.51 Melitta was lucky not to be decapitated in the process. Pinned in the cockpit between the control column and banks of mud, however, she could not move to release her harness and, to complete her humiliation, the last of the ‘fuel was streaming over me’.52 When she finally heard voices, it was two farmers wondering whether they should put out their cigarettes. ‘It is not a pleasant feeling,’ Melitta wrote, ‘to be stuck helpless in a mouse hole, soaked in fuel, knowing there is a lit cigarette near you.’53
Eventually the farmers returned with spades and dug her out. On seeing a woman emerge from the wreck they asked where the pilot was and, despite her e
xplanations, a rumour soon spread that he must have bailed out. ‘This impossible behaviour by the pilot of an aircraft seemed to them more likely than a woman flying a military machine,’ Melitta wrote contemptuously.54 It took even more effort for Melitta to dig herself out of the trouble she had landed in. The forced landing itself was faultless, and one of many on that stormy day. The French stopover, however, was unacceptable. Melitta was banned from further flights. In near-despair, she ‘fought doggedly and bitterly’, but friends in the Foreign Office, and even the French ambassador, failed to sway the decision. Eventually it was Ernst Udet who stuck his neck out for her and got the ban lifted.
Melitta was the first to admit that she had become ‘thoroughly addicted to the enchantment of flying, in theory and practice’ during her years at DVL.55 Long days spent analysing the manipulation of airflow, and experimenting with power, wing shape and control mechanisms, led to the development and testing of various propeller types and other equipment. Eventually she started conducting her own test flights. She was popular among the pilots, most of them young men, ‘not only because she was very pretty’, Paul noted, but because they admired her courage and passion. Hers was not the bravado of the enthusiast, he appreciated, but bravery ‘based on knowledge of the risks . . . real courage’.56
Even Melitta’s free time revolved around flying, with hours spent on the road between airfields, events and training schools. Occasionally she relaxed with sport and clay sculpture, creating busts of her colleagues, but she had few other interests and rarely saw her family. By the early 1930s, however, even Melitta could not completely shut her eyes to what was happening outside the world of flying.