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Germans Germans at at the the Wheel: Wheel: Cars Cars and
and
Leisure Leisure Travel Travel in in Interwar Interwar Germany
Germany
Rudy Koshar
Serious historical analysis of the automobile has been dominated by an emphasis
on production and design rather than on daily usage, leisure practices, or consumption.
1 One could make the same point about many areas of cultural history,
about economic and business history, or about the history of technology. But this
imbalance is particularly notable in automotive history, where the analysis of
producers (manufacturers, engineers, or workers), transportation networks (both
structures and builders), and designers (the darlings of art history) have shaped
scholarly discussion almost from the beginning of the automotive age. When
scholars have turned to the history (or philosophy) of the everyday consumption
of the car, they have dealt in themes of destruction and excess. Paul Virilio’s
sweeping theory of the “dromocratic revolution,” which defines modernity by an
ever-more violent acceleration of speed and circulation even more profound than
advances in production, is only the most dramatic example. 2 Many other recent
works discuss the exploitation of workers, the dissimulation of the advertising
industry (matched only by the gullibility of consumers hooked on “auto opium”), 3
the misguided policies of the auto manufacturers, and the environmental ruin
brought on by the automobile. 4 Scholarship aiming for a more complex understanding
of both the positive and negative effects and uses of the car is the
exception that proves the rule – and it originates largely in the United States, not
Europe. 5 In German historiography, both tendencies, the stress on production and
everything associated with it, as well as the focus on the negative “externalities”
of increased automobility, are pronounced. 6 Much scholarship on the car in
German history does not deal with the automobile per se, much less with the
history of leisure travel, but rather with the automobile’s military-politicaleconomic
functions within the Nazi regime. The machine itself – along with its
drivers, passengers, mechanics, salespeople, and all the others associated with its
everyday existence – becomes lost in the narrative of political evil. Some of the
best recent examples include studies on slave laborers at the Volkswagen plant;
the Mercedes workforce in peace and war; Daimler-Benz’s policies under Nazism;
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