ABSTRACT
From 1960 to 2003, the grave of Rudolf Berthold, a decorated First World War German aviator, vanished within the fortified border between East and West Berlin. This chapter explores the relationship between military aviation and the experience of time on the part of Germany's fliers. The men who served in the German air service were shaped by the culture of a rapidly modernising Germany in the years before the First World War. The chapter argues that the routine of fliers – of time spent behind the lines between sorties, combined with intense moments of punctuated terror – created a different understanding of chronos which created generational gaps between men of the same age – defined only by their entry point into the conflict. Finally, the chapter examines the way regimentation of time was broken by the war's end, and how the mentalities and physical bodies of aviators remained markers of a time that no longer existed.
