Black Tulip

The Life and Myth of Erich Hartmann, the World's Top Fighter Ace

By: Erik Schmidt

Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright

With over 1,404 wartime missions, Erich Hartmann claimed a staggering 352 airborne kills, and his career contains all the dramas you would expect. There were the frostbitten fighter sweeps over the Eastern Front, drunken forays to Hitler's Eagle's Nest, a decade of imprisonment in the wretched Soviet POW camps, and further military service during the Cold War that ended with conflict and angst.

Hartmann was adopted by a network of writers and commentators personally invested in his welfare and reputation. These men, mostly Americans, published elaborate, celebratory stories about Hartmann and his elite fraternity of Luftwaffe pilots. Hartmann's legacy became loftier and more secure, and his complicated service in support of Nazism faded away. A simplified, one-dimensional account of his life has gone unchallenged for almost a generation.

Black Tulip locates the ambiguous truth about Hartmann and so much of the German Wehrmacht in general: that many of these men were neither full-blown Nazis nor impeccable knights. They were complex, contradictory, and elusive. This book portrays a complex human rather than the heroic caricature we're used to, and it argues that the tidy, polished hero stories we've inherited about men like Hartmann say as much about those who've crafted them as they do about the heroes themselves.

©2020 Erik Schmidt (P)2021 Tantor

Didn’t like it.

The author started out writing about an aviator and his wartime exploits and after just a few chapters went off on a rambling commiseration about NAZIs and how bad they were. I guess I just expected something different.

Mediocre and predictable

Me Schmidt tries harder to remind us that nazis were bad than to understand the life of Hartmann

Nothing new

No new ground. However entertaining as narration was excellent and subject matter is very interesting

Way too much nazi politics.

The story was great about Erich. I felt a lot of the book was about Nazi politics. So much so at times I thought I was reading another book altogether.

No good

Was waiting for this. The ww2 aviation aspect seems to be only few mins long. This is some sort of awkward thesis on him not being closely examined enough for his knowledge and complicity in all things Nazi. Fair enough but not really a compelling book. Peppered with Wikipedia grade research on a few topics (eg, paragraph on me163). Accuses previous authors of being armchair/ part time historians. Most of the time ,while I attempted to listen, my main thought was “what the heck is he trying to get at here”