The Red Baron is back in the German skies

Germany is preparing to break a 61-year-old taboo by celebrating the life of World War One flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, also known as the Red Baron.

The Red Baron shot down 80 British, Canadian, and Australian warplanes during the First World War, and now film director Nikolai Mllerschn is making a film on him, which will be released in German cinemas next year, Timesonline reports.

Hollywood actor Val Kilmer was to play the German pilot, who though not a cult figure in Germany, has an iconic status in the West. The role will now be essayed by German actor Matthias Schweighfer, first, as a young pilot who is happy only in the air, then as a swaggering figure bloated by success and, finally, as someone with doubts about how he is being manipulated by the propaganda apparatus.

The US appetite for the Red Baron is legendary. His name features in a Peanuts strip cartoon with Snoopy. There are Red Baron computer games and Red Baron pizzas.

So, it isn't surprising that the Germans now want to reclaim their flying ace and turn him into a truly modern hero.

The film portrait is historically accurate: von Richthofen was a style-conscious maverick. Typically, members of his squadron did not salute other officers. He had his planes painted red and accommodated his men in extravagant tents - hence the squadron's nickname, used by both the British and the Germans, of Richthofen's Flying Circus.

Von Richthofen may thus be a German fighting hero but the director is careful to depict him as a rebel against the establishment.

Decades of debate about the cause of the Baron's death followed his fatal shooting down in April 1918. There are two views - one that he was killed in a dogfight with Canadian pilot Roy Brown, and the second that he was shot by an Australian soldier on the ground.

It is the British who have always hailed von Richthofen as a brilliant pilot. In fact, says historians, the Red Baron was not particularly gifted as a flyer but he was a very accurate shot. It is this that gave him his exceptionally high success rate.

The Germans acknowledged the British role in cherishing the Red Baron by sending his great nephew, Hermann von Richthofen, as Ambassador to London between 1989 and 1993.

What better way to remember a war hero than with a film about him after 88 years? (ANI)

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