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

The Autobahn: this term often connotes German efficiency and precision engineering, conjuring up images of Mercedes and BMWs flying through a green landscape. Although widely known to have its origins in the Nazi era, the autobahn nonetheless has come to embody the "positive" and apolitical achievements of that otherwise murderous regime. A huge public works project, it supposedly put the unemployed back to work, lifting Germany out of the Depression. Moreover, landscape planners reputedly played a key role in its construction, integrating this network of superhighways into the German landscape, demonstrating the "green" side of Nazism. It is precisely such commonplaces that Thomas Zeller seeks to explode with this book. Although other scholars have arrived at critiques of these myths in a piecemeal fashion, Zeller challenges these popular notions in a sustained analysis of not only the construction of the Autobahnen under the Nazis, but also their reinterpretation in the Federal Republic.

Zeller's discussion of the planning and construction of the autobahn system under the Nazis demonstrates just how far from the mark these myths fall. Far from a project grounded in economic (or even military) rationality, the Autobahnen—the subject of several films, glossy magazine articles, landscape paintings, and radio broadcasts—served mainly as a propaganda project for the regime. "Adolf Hitler's Roads" had apparently sprung from the genius of the Führer, never mind the Weimar Republic's plans for a superhighway network (the Hafraba) upon which the Nazis built. Low levels of mo- torization and weak support from industry scuttled the proposal in the 1920s, but the Nazis enthusiastically pressed forward with the project starting already in 1933, despite the continued lack of need. This meant a shift of resources and personnel from the state railways, which badly needed the investment, into the autobahn project. For the regime, the Autobahnen stood as an emblem of modernity, demonstrating the Nazis' intent to lead the nation into an auto-friendly future along roads that harmonized engineering and nature through "German technology," in contrast to the supposedly "soulless" technological landscapes of the United States or the Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding the propaganda, the Autobahnen were far from harmonious. Zeller explores the central conflict between landscape architects and civil engineers over the routing and landscaping of the roads. Challenging historians like William Rollins, Michael Prinz, and Simon Schama, Zeller argues that the inclusion of environmentally sensitive landscape architects like Alwin Seifert as consultants on the project does not indicate that the Nazis were green. Instead, Zeller demonstrates how the civil engineers steadily marginalized Seifert and his colleagues, who failed to implement their vision of parkways following the contours of the landscape and lined with native plants. Far more important for the engineers—committed to efficiency and cost-containment—were straightways that allowed for the experience of speed. Both of these groups were overridden by Nazi officials, however, who insisted on the importance of landscape panoramas to the experience of driving, creating roadways that ascended unnecessarily over hills to provide spectacular views of the surrounding countryside. Efficiency-minded engineers and landscape architects wanting to line the roads with native trees lost out to the Nazi emphasis on panorama.

Conflicts over the Autobahnen did not disappear with the Third Reich, although landscape architects found themselves in a weaker position after the war, when mathematization and safety took priority over native plants and aesthetics. Rather than a Nazi propaganda project riddled with inefficiencies, engineers in the Federal Republic, often holdovers from the Nazi period, remarkably transformed the autobahn into an emblem of the efficient modernity of the German economy.

While Zeller's work is solidly researched, using the national archives and several collections of Alwin Seifert's papers, there remain a few questions connected to this project that (admittedly) extend beyond his source base. First, aside from debates within the bureaucracy (and starting in the 1960s, including drivers as well), Zeller provides little evidence of who...