Melli Beese, Germany's First Aviatress, 1911 – Porcelain Art Mug

On 13 September 1911, her twenty-fifth birthday, Amelie "Melli" Beese passed her pilot's examination at the Johannisthal airfield near Berlin and became the first woman to hold a German aviator's licence, number 115. The achievement had not come easily: her male colleagues at the flight school sabotaged her aircraft on the day of her first attempt, and she was forced to repeat the test. She passed anyway, flying the required figure-eights and altitude trials with the composure that would mark her whole career. Within months she had founded her own flying school at Johannisthal and was training other pilots.

The photograph on this mug is a real-photo postcard from that airfield — printed from the negative onto photographic paper, not reproduced in ink. Two captions are scratched into the negative itself: Flugplatz Johannisthal across the top, and at the foot, in quotation marks, „Frl. Beese auf Rumpler-Taube“. The „Frl.“ dates the card. Beese married Charles Boutard on 25 January 1913, so the picture was made in 1911 or 1912, in the months around the licence she had taken on a machine of exactly this type. She sits at the wheel in flying helmet and light coat, one hand on the rim, looking straight out of the frame.

The same negative also went to the illustrated press. A second sheet in this collection, shown in the gallery, has it as a printed plate: a wider frame that keeps the whole leading edge of the wing and the distant hangar, set in a ruled border, captioned in Fraktur „Fräulein Beese, die erste deutsche Flugzeugpilotin.“ and credited at the right to the Internationale Illustrations-Agentur in Berlin. Two things follow. The picture was agency work — syndicated, not made for one client — which is why the same frame appears both as a postcard and on a printed page. And the two captions on the card are no part of the photograph: the press plate carries neither of them. They were scratched in for the postcard edition, and the wider frame was trimmed away at the same time.

The card had been in circulation and shows it: foxing in the sky, a soft crease along the upper edge, the small marks that a century of pockets and albums leaves behind. Those have been taken out for this edition. The tone, the photographic grain and both captions are as they are on the card.

Fine porcelain, 10 oz — 104 mm high, 75 mm across the base. The image runs around the body; handle and rim stay white. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Real-photo postcard, „Frl. Beese auf Rumpler-Taube“, Flugplatz Johannisthal, Berlin, 1911–12. Photographer unrecorded; the negative was distributed by the Internationale Illustrations-Agentur in Berlin, whose credit stands under the press reproduction of the same frame. Both sheets from the collection of Dr. Walther Fuchs; the card scanned from the original at 600 dpi. Public domain.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.