WAR

when hellmuth von zastrow began flying an Eindecker during the Battle of
Verdun he had already begun work on Palmstrom als Flieger, a burlesque on
aviation derived from the works of Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914). Morgenstern
created a family of personages, human and fabulous, who appear repeatedly
in his verse, most of which is amiable satire cloaked deceptively in nonsense. One
of his poems is about an architect who stole the spaces between the pickets of
a fence and built therewith a great house. Palmstrom is one of his characters, so
Palmstrom the Aviator seemed a good title to Hellmuth, since a more inept type
for an aviator than Palmstrom would be hard to imagine.
Der Monoplan is one of Hellmuth's parodies that expresses his own wry
humor and seems a prodrome of the sense of futility that later produced such
a bitter satirist as Berthold Brecht:
A monoplane there was anon
With landing wheels to land upon.
The Monoplane
An Army pilot who saw the thing,
Came quickly there one evening
And flew the 'plane away, but found
He'd left the wheels upon the ground.
The monoplane felt perfectly silly,
Its wheels all knocked off willy-nilly;
An unseemly sight of disarray.
The Inspector-General had it hauled away.
The pilot,
From B.A.O. to
meanwhile, had to scram
B.AM.
During the rainy weather of the spring and summer of 1916, Hellmuth
continued his project, working on it at odd moments and while grounded by
bad weather.
Hellmuth flew an Eindecker as a scout and escort pilot until June 1916. On
August 26 he was transferred to Jasta 2 as Oswald Boelcke's adjutant, a position
he held during the late summer and fall when Boelcke successfully launched
German fighter aviation and then needlessly lost his life in an accident.
Hellmuth was promoted to Oberleutnant and from early 1917 to the end
of the war served in the Office of the Inspector General for Air in Berlin, where
further disillusionment awaited him, for his
stables of graft and profiteering that war creates everywhere.
job was to help clean up the Augean
Hellmuth von Zastrow survived the war, but succumbed a short time after
to depression and illness.
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