Begrenzte Mobilität: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Autobahnen in der DDR (review)

At first glance, a monograph on the autobahn of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) would appear to be a dead-end street. Anyone who ever drove on the four-lane highways bequeathed to the communist state by the megalomaniac designers of the Nazi Reichsautobahn project would realize that leaders in East Berlin had other priorities than roads. Axel Doßmann tells us that by the late 1980s, almost half of the 1,378 autobahn kilometers existing in 1945 in East German territory had been virtually untouched for forty-five years; because of the potholes, there was little need to enforce speed limits. But neglect is only half the story; the other half (and the story of dereliction also) is a fascinating analysis of an infrastructure that was both ignored and loved, supported and rejected. Doßmann's well-written and important book adds considerably to our understanding of engi-neering, technology, and state symbolism in postwar Europe.

The autobahn, a propagandistic symbol for the Nazis, left an ambivalent legacy for the communist regime. On the one hand, the GDR strove to distance itself from the fascist dictatorship and its icons; but in the case of the autobahn, the East German state did not come up with an indigenous building style, as Doßmann shows convincingly. Most civil engineers who had worked for the Nazis in what became East Germany left the country before the building of the Wall in 1961, preferring the pay-scales and political climate of West Germany, with its more ambitious road-building programs. Indeed, West and East German Autobahnen became one of the many items of competition and contention between the two Germanys. The west's extensive construction projects spurred the east into countering with its own new autobahn project, a road from Berlin to the Baltic harbor city of Rostock. It was planned as early as 1958, yet fell victim to political maneuvering after 1961. In fact, one writer likened the Wall, which was built in that same year, to a vertical autobahn "hung out to dry" between East Germany and West Germany (p. 227). Construction was paramount for the GDR, and Doßmann analyzes the close relationship among planning and building roads, border walls, and housing. Thus he contributes to the historiographical debate over consumerism in East Germany, which—in constant reference to West Germany—was meant to pacify citizens and achieve a modicum of support for the regime.

Doßmann's tale is one of constant cross-referencing and relationships. In one chapter, he subtly analyzes the postwar history of a bridge smack on the border between Bavaria and Thuringia, which became parts of the two opposing Germanys. During the 1950s and 1960s even the most minute details of reconstructing the bridge that had been dynamited by the Wehrmacht had to be negotiated on the highest levels; both sides fashioned it into a symbol of either capitalist arrogance of socialist incompetence, when less than a generation earlier the Nazis had speculated on the bridge's aesthetic qualities and its meaning for a master race.

After the rapprochement between the two countries during the early 1970s, West Germany paid exaggerated amounts of hard currency to the GDR so that westerners could drive on eastern autobahns to West Berlin. What is more, the Bonn government also supported two-thirds of the costs of repairs and widening, turning the GDR's autobahn-construction brigade into a de facto western-supported unit. The Federal Republic paid for the completion of the Hamburg–Berlin transit autobahn. The 1970s also saw the only new autobahn construction projects of the GDR: a stretch between Dresden and Leipzig, opened in 1971, and the long-delayed construction of the Berlin–Rostock route, finished in 1978, which was to cement the east's reliance on the Baltic rather than...