Abstract Summary
In the rapidly growing recent historical and literary scholarship on the genre of biography, a quote from Virginia Woolf has achieved classic status: "How can one make a life out of six cardboard boxes full of tailors' bills, love letters and old picture postcards?" It pointedly frames the biographer's unresolvable dilemma in terms of her sources. How to navigate between an empiricist faith in a subject speaking through these paper traces, and the constructivist awareness of the biographer's role in "making" this life? My contribution is concerned with how scientific practice changes the generic forms in which the biographical subject is traditionally taken to speak --- such as letters or diaries --- in the case of the German test pilot and physicist Melitta Schiller-Stauffenberg (1903-1945). The fragmented records of Schiller's life have left room for much biographical controversy about her work for the Luftwaffe as a woman of Jewish descent, and her potential involvement in her husband's family's resistance to Hitler. Placing her diary and other texts in the context of the recording and note-taking practices that were developed as part of the professionalization of scientific test flying, I argue that the construal of Schiller's predicament in terms of politicized ethnicity alone leaves aside her own understanding of her work in aviation research as epistemically and morally meaningful. Hers is a case where biography can serve to examine how scientific practice shapes the practitioner by reconfiguring older cultural technologies of self-articulation.
