Amelie Hedwig Beese, known almost everywhere as Melli Beese, was the first woman to hold a pilot’s licence in Germany and one of the earliest women to design aircraft as well as fly them. She was born on 13 September 1886 in Laubegast, then a village on the edge of Dresden, to Alma Wilhelmine Hedwig Beese and Friedrich Karl Richard Beese, an architect and master mason. The family was comfortably off. She had a younger brother, Edgar, and two half-siblings, Hertha and Kurt, from her father’s first marriage. In the German Empire a daughter of the educated middle class was expected to prepare for marriage, household management, and church. Beese treated that expectation as an obstacle rather than a plan.
In 1906 she decided to become a sculptor. German art academies did not admit women, so she left for Stockholm and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts until 1909. She produced a bronze bust of the painter Allan Egnell that has survived, and she won a prize for a group sculpture called The Soccer Players. In Sweden she also learned to sail and took up skiing. Aviation reports reached her there as well. Louis Blériot’s flight across the English Channel in September 1909 made powered flight a public spectacle in Germany, and when she returned to Dresden that year the subject entered family conversation. Her father built her a studio at the family’s new house in Blasewitz and, hoping the novelty would wear off, sent her to lectures in mathematics, mechanics, shipbuilding, and aeronautical engineering at the Dresden technical school. It did not wear off. Within a year he agreed to pay for training and living costs at a flying school in Berlin.
In November 1910 she arrived at Johannisthal, the first airfield in Berlin, then a rough field of sheds, early factories, and Café Senftleben, where pilots gathered. Several schools refused her. The Wright company sent her on. Robert Thelen, Norwegian chief of construction at the small firm Ad Astra, finally accepted her as a student in whatever spare time he had, on condition that she also work in the shop. On 12 December 1910 a chain broke in flight. The machine crashed. Beese suffered a badly injured foot, broken ribs, a broken nose, and broken leg bones. Her older half-sister Hertha was watching. Morphine given for the pain is said by later accounts to have begun a dependence that followed her for years. Her father died of a heart attack soon afterward. The family urged her to stop. Thelen, according to accounts of the period, declined to continue teaching her, on the ground that a woman in the machine brought bad luck. She went back to Johannisthal in January 1911 anyway.
Regulations for the flight test were tightened that year, and an inexperienced pupil found instructors harder to secure. In May she flew at Weimar with Robert von Mossner and, for the first time, took full control of an aircraft, an old Wright machine. She wanted more air time than repair work allowed. Georg von Tschudi, director of Johannisthal, persuaded Edmund Rumpler to take her on. Both men expected publicity from a woman pilot at the coming flying display. Hellmuth Hirth became her instructor. Male students treated her as an intruder. Lessons were cancelled or taken by others. Fuel disappeared. Machines were declared unserviceable. On one occasion the bracing wires of a wing had been loosened; she noticed in time. Hirth called it a prank and suggested she had entered a man’s territory. Training, already expensive, dragged on for months.
On the morning of 13 September 1911, her twenty-fifth birthday, she reached the field before the other pupils, with witnesses she had arranged herself, and flew the prescribed manoeuvres in a Rumpler Taube. She received German pilot’s licence number 115, the 115th person and the first woman officially permitted to fly in Germany. Élise Deroche had been the first woman in the world to pass a pilot’s test, in France in March 1910. By the start of the First World War only a handful of other women had qualified in Germany—among them the Russian princess Eugenie Shakhovskaya, Charlotte Möhring, Martha Behrbohm, and Else Haugk—and contemporary counts put the worldwide number of licensed women pilots at about thirty-four.
Within weeks Beese was competing. At the Johannisthal autumn flying weeks she set a women’s record for altitude and endurance with a passenger, reaching about 825 metres and remaining aloft for two and a half hours. In 1912 she opened the Flugschule Melli Beese at Johannisthal with the French pilot Charles Boutard and Hermann Reichelt, backed by her mother and by Karl August Lingner, the Dresden manufacturer of Odol mouthwash. They bought aircraft; Adolf Ludwig worked as mechanic. Boutard received German licence number 176 in April 1912 and helped teach. The school’s safety record was good, but pupils were scarce, and Reichelt left. Beese and Boutard also built their own monoplane, a cheaper development of the Rumpler Taube known as the Melli Beese Taube or Colombe, which annoyed Rumpler. She patented a collapsible aircraft in 1912 (German patent DE278879) and later a method and device for automatically determining the drift of aeroplanes and airships (DE306635, 1915). She and Boutard also worked on a flying boat. She is therefore remembered not only as Germany’s first woman pilot but as an early woman aircraft engineer and entrepreneur.
They married on 25 January 1913 and lived in the Trützschler villa on what was then Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse in Johannisthal. Under German law of the time a woman took her husband’s nationality and lost her own. Beese became a French citizen. That change, and Boutard’s nationality, barred the firm from military-related work just as the National Flying Donation was funding German aviation for war. When war began in 1914 the school and factory were closed. They were forbidden the airfield. Boutard was interned as an enemy alien; both were later held under restrictions in Wittstock. After the armistice they sued for compensation for confiscated property. Litigation lasted for years. Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic reduced what little was awarded, and poor investments consumed the rest. They planned a flight around the world in two aircraft as a publicity venture and could not raise the money. Some footage intended for a film about her flying survives and later appeared in a 1940 compilation.
By 1925 the marriage had failed and Beese was living alone in Berlin-Schmargendorf. While trying to renew a licence she crashed at Staaken and survived unhurt. On 21 December 1925—some records say the 22nd—she shot herself in her flat. She was thirty-nine. She is buried in the cemetery at Berlin-Schmargendorf. A line she is said to have quoted from a fellow flyer runs, in Latin, that to fly is necessary and to live is not.
Johannisthal itself has vanished under later Berlin, remembered mainly in street names. Her name remains on a street in Treptow, another in Frankfurt-Bockenheim, a promenade in Tempelhof, a small park in Wilmersdorf, a school near the old airfield, the access road Melli-Beese-Ring at Berlin Brandenburg Airport, and the Aeroclub Melli Beese, founded in 1993. A plaque marks her birthplace in Dresden-Laubegast. Charles Boutard, who died in 1952, later worked as a chauffeur in Berlin; a street there also carries his name. Her life supplied the basis for Aris Fioretos’s 2020 novel Nelly B.s Herz. The short public career—from late 1910 to the outbreak of war—contained a licence won against sabotage, records, a school, patents, and a factory, then citizenship law, internment, inflation, and a private collapse. That sequence is why she is still cited whenever the early, almost entirely male, history of German aviation is rewritten to include the people it tried to keep out.