Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930-1970 (review)

Roads are complex and multifaceted artifacts. They are not only links in transport systems, but also symbols of modernity and expressions of the aspirations and ideologies of the interests that clashed over their creation. Once in place, they tend to remain for extended time periods, embodying the ideology of their creators at the time of construction. Yet their meaning is by no means settled once and for all, but remains open to reinterpretation by each subsequent generation. These themes are well-known to historians of technology, but they have rarely been communicated as convincingly as in Thomas Zeller's Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930-1970. Driving Germany is a revised version of Zeller's 1998 Ph.D. thesis, originally published in German in 2002 as Strasse, Bahn, Panorama. For the English edition the editor has dropped a chapter on high-speed railways in postwar West Germany, an omission that is not regretted, since it adds focus to the book. A new chapter 3 has been added to provide context on German infrastructure, landscape, and environmental histories. A new paperback edition was published in 2010.

Zeller establishes at the outset, with reference to recent historiography, that the autobahn was neither a military project (the armed forces opposed it) nor a means of creating employment and inducing economic recovery (the direct and indirect effects were negligible). Neither can it be construed simply as a transport project, since the diversion of resources from the German National Railway and from the ordinary network of state, provincial, and municipal roads was not conducive to the promotion of transport in general or motorization in particular. Rather, the autobahn was from beginning to end a project primarily driven by Hitler's "personal predilection for the automobile as a vehicle that embodied a promise of modernity, and the propaganda potential of the project" (p. 56). The propaganda value of the autobahn was closely linked to its relation to landscape, and Zeller's main addition to scholarship is linking the history of technology to environmental history by means of analyzing the landscape of the autobahnen. Rather than an expression of the natural world, landscape is presented as "a cultural product that must be continually redefined," contested and overlaid with various normative signs, "a stage and rhetorical resource for the clashes between various social groups" (p. 6).

The focus on landscape leads Zeller to link the autobahnen to the heritage established by the Heimatschutz (homeland protection) movement, which he claims has been ignored by previous research. Rather than focusing on ideas about landscapes or roads, Zeller then draws on research on the polycratism and bureaucratic dualism of the Nazi regime and analyzes the design and construction of the autobahn as the result of a clash between three groups: the Berlin agency of General Inspector for the German Roads under Fritz Todt; the civil engineers of the local administrations of the Reichsautobahnen association (a subsidiary of the German National Railway charged with the construction); and the landscape architects led by Alwin Seifert who acted as consultants to the project. The study in chapter 5 of the clashing preferences in road layout between the straightways preferred by the civil engineers and the sinuous curves advocated by the landscape architects is especially revealing. In the end Zeller establishes that the landscape architects and their conservationist ideas were as a rule marginalized, and the National Socialist regime did not live up to its proclaimed conservationist stance, at least as far as roads were concerned.

In the final chapter Zeller analyzes how the autobahnen were radically reinterpreted to play a part in the creation of a new identity in the Federal Republic of Germany, despite strong continuities in terms of personnel and substance. This reinterpretation relied on a shift of focus from aesthetics to science in construction and design, and a new emphasis on the rational function of the autobahn as a quotidian...