http://interfas.univ-tlse2.fr/nacelles/847 Publications de Auteurs Robert W. Rennie fr 0 http://interfas.univ-tlse2.fr/nacelles/846 My doctoral dissertation explores aviation’s influence on German cultural and social history between 1908 and 1925. Before the First World War, aviation was part of a larger landscape of a rapidly modernizing Germany. While some imaginative inventors and futurists viewed powered flight as either a transformative tool or a potential weapon of war, most Germans had little exposure to the airplane beyond the spectacle of the air show.The outbreak of war in 1914 dramatically shifted aviation away from spectacle and speculation and into the new and unprecedented reality of armed conflict in the air. Germany’s fliers initially served as aerial observers, noting troop positions in the war’s frenetic opening weeks. As the Western Front stagnated into trench warfare by the autumn of 1914, military aviation, in concert with photography, became a method of gathering vital military intelligence. By the end of the year, aviation had compressed time and space, reordered the spatial arrangement of the battlefield, and transformed the human relationship with killing. The camera shaped the identity and iconography of the aviator both in public and in private photographs. The growing importance of military aviation also created a privileged space for combat pilots to engage with, or ignore, the consequences of killing as aerial violence became commonplace. The new, modern experience of killing and dying in the air, intersected with older superstitions and cultural tropes to render this novel kind of violence knowable. The German general staff, too, became increasingly obsessed with killing in the air, and this fascination fed a new system for understanding the air war. Germany’s regional identities were also reflected in aviation and directly influenced both the composition of the Luftstreitkräfte and the machines issued to its pilots. Aviators were again privileged in their use of cultural markers to signpost individual, regional, and national identities. The end of the war, however, shattered previous perceptions of war time, and left living aviators to struggle to make sense of a new present, while the nation’s lost fliers were repurposed for contradictory social and political ends. ven., 24 janv. 2020 14:19:50 +0100 ven., 24 janv. 2020 14:19:50 +0100 http://interfas.univ-tlse2.fr/nacelles/846