Renz Waller

Renz Waller was a German falconry organizer and painter whose work connected T. H. White’s private attempt to train a goshawk with the state-sponsored falconry of Nazi Germany. He sent White Gos, and, after the hawk disappeared, answered White’s appeal for another bird with a promise to try to obtain a passage goshawk. The replacement never arrived, but Waller’s role places White’s intimate, troubled pursuit of a hawk within a much larger political and institutional history.

Role in German falconry

Falconry had a prominent symbolic place in Nazi Germany even though the country had no more than fifty falconers. The Deutscher Falkenorden received state patronage, and a large State Falconry Centre, the Reichsfalkenhof, was built in the forest at Riddagshausen. Waller headed the association, helped arrange its state backing, and designed the centre. These activities made him a significant organizer of the Reich’s falconry institutions, not simply a supplier of birds to individual falconers.

Waller was also an artist: he painted Hermann Göring’s gyrfalcon, presenting the bird in a manner that followed the conventions of Nazi portraiture. The book places that image alongside the regime’s use of the hawk as a figure of power and hierarchy. Waller’s documented involvement in the institutions and imagery establishes his professional proximity to that political project, though it does not specify his personal beliefs.

Connection to T. H. White and Gos

Waller sent Gos to T. H. White. When Gos vanished, White searched for the hawk and eventually wrote to Waller in Berlin asking for another. White knew that the season might be too late for a young bird and that passage hawks were uncommon, but he ended the letter hopefully. Waller replied a few weeks later that he would try to obtain a passage goshawk for him.

The hoped-for bird did not reach White. The day before it was due to arrive, he was taken to hospital with appendicitis. Before that interruption, White had begun planning for the new hawk, writing a detailed training scheme inside his copy of Edward Bert’s treatise. Waller’s promise therefore reopened the possibility of continuing after Gos’s disappearance, but the replacement remained unrealized.

A link across two histories

The book connects Waller’s role in White’s falconry to a later archival encounter with a goshawk that had belonged to Hermann Göring. The mounted bird still wore its jesses and bells; the narrator could not establish its identity but considered it quite possible that it was related to Gos. That possibility rested on a concrete connection: Waller had sent Gos to White and was also associated with Göring’s hawk and the institutions surrounding German falconry.

Waller consequently serves as a point of contact between two very different scales of the subject. His correspondence with White concerns the uncertain fate of one bird and the prospect of another; his institutional work belongs to a national system that gave falconry political patronage and symbolism. The juxtaposition does not make the birds interchangeable. Instead, it shows how the same network of people and practices could connect a falconer’s personal loss to the public history of falconry in Nazi Germany.