The memorial evening came off six months later, at the Secession Hall in Charlottenburg. In the meantime he’d been granted his petition to join the Air Force. He arranged his transfer to coincide with the memorial, which turned out to be dedicated to two poets, Hans and Georg Trakl, a suicide. Lasker-Schüler delivered the eulogy, which he found disappointing. Afterwards Hans’s publisher talked to him about bringing out a new edition of the poems now, rather than waiting until the end of the war, since it was clear the war would never end.

A few weeks after leaving Mary Degele, he had seen his first military airplane, a Fokker Eindekker. The prewar flying machines, once considered so wondrous, were by that point everyday transportation. Mechanics drifted back and forth, bored, while the Fokkers’ engines turned over. He stood transfixed, as if by the noise and power of a hundred lions. This was good news, since what he needed most of all was to rediscover the possibility of joy. Joy was the equivalent of strength. Men who lived without it were corpses.

The required medical tests were less than severe, due to the mounting casualty rate among pilots and observers. So lenient was the medical establishment in its quest for bodies that during his eye test at Halberstadt, his examiner said, “The second line, third letter: I see a ‘B.’ What do you see?”

His early training was a similar joke. The technique was that of governesses teaching toddlers to swim. The novices perched in the noses of old Taubes while the instructors ran up the engines and shouted incomprehensible things into the slipstream.

The Taubes had dual controls. Verbal instructions were impossible. The pupil rested his hands and feet on the joystick and rudder bars, as if palpating a sunburn, while the instructor flew. The theory was to allow the pupil to feel the instructor’s instincts.

Eventually, if they hadn’t killed themselves, they were shipped as flying pupils to the Aviation Replacement Section at Johannisthal. There they trained in LVG two-seaters.

Wherever he went, his peers found him hard to get along with. He was a fastidious introvert. His attitudes toward women seemed puritanical. He spent his off-duty hours with his correspondence.

But his grief refused to dissipate, and flooded everything. What he responded to in flying was the way that all that was important and distinctive on the ground was of no consequence to the aviator. The aviator soared above the catastrophe, his eyes elsewhere.

Murnau soloed after fifty-four dual flights, and nine days later passed his preliminary certification. He was moved to replacement section Number 2, at Adlershof, for advanced training. There he survived a minor crash. For his final tests, he made two flights to Döberitz and a long cross-country flight. He graduated in early February and awaited orders. He began active service a week later at Rethel, flying mail and spare parts to the front.