Michael Neufeld: Von Braun, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Kurzbeschreibung

Chief rocket engineer of the Third Reich and one of the fathers of the U. S. space program, Wernher von Braun is a source of consistent fascination. Glorified as a visionary and vilified as a war criminal, he was a man of profound moral complexities, whose intelligence and charisma were coupled with an enormous and, some would say, blinding ambition. Based on new sources, Neufeld's biography delivers a meticulously researched and authoritative portrait of the creator of the V-2 rocket and his times, detailing how he was a man caught between morality and progress, between his dreams of the heavens and the earthbound realities of his life.

Beschreibung

Michael J. Neufeld, curator and space historian at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, delivers a brilliantly nuanced biography of Wernher von Braun.

Chief rocket engineer of the Third Reich and one of the fathers of the U. S. space program, Wernher von Braun is a source of consistent fascination. Glorified as a visionary and vilified as a war criminal, he was a man of profound moral complexities, whose intelligence and charisma were coupled with an enormous and, some would say, blinding ambition. Based on new sources, Neufeld's biography delivers a meticulously researched and authoritative portrait of the creator of the V-2 rocket and his times, detailing how he was a man caught between morality and progress, between his dreams of the heavens and the earthbound realities of his life.

Rezension

"Surpasses all previous books about [von Braun]. . . . Deeply researched, vigorously written, and balanced in its judgments."
- The Boston Globe

"A serious, important book that does justice to its subject's moral complexity and place in history."
- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Neufeld's thoroughly satisfying biography . . . written in clear, fast-paced prose, offers the most complete, fully documented and critical account that the imperfect documentary record is likely to yield."
- The New York Times Book Review

"A historian's masterpiece, will become the definitive biography."
- American Scientist

Klappentext

Curator and space historian at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum delivers a brilliantly nuanced biography of controversial space pioneer Wernher von Braun.

Chief rocket engineer of the Third Reich and one of the fathers of the U. S. space program, Wernher von Braun is a source of consistent fascination. Glorified as a visionary and vilified as a war criminal, he was a man of profound moral complexities, whose intelligence and charisma were coupled with an enormous and, some would say, blinding ambition. Based on new sources, Neufeld's biography delivers a meticulously researched and authoritative portrait of the creator of the V-2 rocket and his times, detailing how he was a man caught between morality and progress, between his dreams of the heavens and the earthbound realities of his life.

Auszüge aus dem Buch

CHAPTER ONE

The Wheel of Progress
to 1925

"Demagoguery and democracy are brothers in etymology and spirit . . . for the German ear the word democracy awakens memories of complete chaos after the First [World] War." - Magnus Freiherr Von Braun

When Wernher von Braun was about ten years old, his tall, elegant mother, Emmy Freifrau (Baroness) von Braun, asked him what he would like to do with his life. "I want to help turn the wheel of progress" was his answer, a response that sounded odd and surprising to her, coming out of the mouth of a small boy. An unusually abstract statement, it prefigured a lifetime of fascination with science and technology.

Equally surprising, it came from the mouth of a true son of the Junkers - the noble caste that had once dominated the Prussian civil service, officer corps, and landowning elite. Engineering and science were not careers that Junker sons often chose, even in the 1920s. It seemed to reflect some inner compulsion of Wernher's, but it also reflected the tenor of the times - a time of dramatic technological and political change. He had been born in 1912, in a traditional prewar world; his massively built, mustachioed father, Magnus Freiherr von Braun, had been a rapidly ascending civil servant in the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm II, while his intellectually gifted mother was the orphaned daughter of an estate owner. Less than ten years later his father would be forced out of the civil service in the political turmoil of the new Weimar Republic. The family moved to the modern world city of Berlin. Yet as much of a maverick and a Berliner as Wernher von Braun would turn out to be, his Prussian Junker upbringing influenced his values, his abilities, and his choices - more so, in fact, than his father would later be willing to credit.

Of his parents' two families, the von Brauns and the von Quistorps, the former was of much older aristocratic stock. Magnus von Braun, who inherited from his father the hobby of genealogical research, eventually traced the male line back to 1285, although in all probability an ancestor had battled the Mongols at Liegnitz in 1241. The von Brauns arose from the soil of Silesia, a verdant and rolling province on both sides of the Oder River, east of the Czech heartland of Bohemia and Moravia. In 1573 the Holy Roman emperor elevated two of them to the rank of Reichsfreiherr (imperial baron) for their military accomplishments.

Magnus von Braun came, however, from an even more distant outpost of Germandom, East Prussia - a province that would disappear from the map in 1945, when Stalin divided it between the Soviet Union and Poland. In 1738 one descendant of the family, Gotthard Freiherr von Braun, entered Prussian service as a lieutenant in the garrison of the province's capital city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia). There he married the daughter of a wealthy local burgher. His fifth child, Sigismund, also a Prussian officer, purchased the estate of Neucken, about fifty kilometers southwest of the city, in 1803 and erected a new house - Magnus von Braun's ancestral home. One of the family's close acquaintances in Königsberg had been the philosopher Immanuel Kant; the silver sugar spoon he gave to Sigismund as a wedding present was a holy object in the glass cabinet of the mansion, along with a golden snuffbox from Czar Alexander I of Russia. But in February 1807, not long after the house was finished, Napoleon fought the bloody and inconclusive Battle of Preussisch Eylau against the czar's army around Neucken. Napoleon's troops killed or stole all the farm animals, wrecked the estate buildings, and plundered the house, although valuables like Kant's spoon were successfully carried away or hidden. It took the family years to recuperate economically from the damage - but the starvation and death infli