Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War

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

Michael Neufeld

"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