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Germans at the Wheel
Gothic cathedrals, automobiles were also part of the political imaginary, in the
broadest sense of the term. But unlike cathedrals, cars are mobile, and they are
adapted to modern democratic civil societies in which participation and “voice”
are predicated on movement and circulation. The argument here is that a great deal
may be learned about the newly mobile German political culture of the interwar
era by focusing on the quotidian itinerary of the car, and above all on a central
element of the car’s public use and imagery: the experience and representation of
driving for pleasure.
Stated in this manner, the argument puts leisure culture at the center of an
understanding of political and social identities rather than treating it as an effect
or function of other forces associated more directly with the state or economic
production. Despite its many practical uses in business and urban transport
systems, in the period between the world wars the automobile was still a vehicle
of pleasure, of weekend outings, and of motoring vacations. This was true
throughout industrialized Europe, and it reflected one of the major differences with
the United States, where the car was already embedded in the rhythms of public
transport and business, and where it was already well deployed for the daily
commute from burgeoning suburbs into sprawling cities. But it was even truer in
Germany, with its relatively low rates of auto ownership. Significantly, when Adolf
Hitler made his famous speech at the 1934 Berlin Motor Show declaring the need
for a “people’s car,” he emphasized that the private automobile would be an
important instrument of the working-class family’s recreation, not a vehicle for
commuting and the daily grind. He thereby linked the automobile not with
“pledged,” or work-related time, not with “compulsive” time spent on everyday
transport or official formalities, but with “free” time, or leisure. 14 To drive for
pleasure, to experience the freedom and mobility of motorized leisure, was in this
sense an important prerequisite of citizenship, and of the mastery of a whole set
of social competencies associated with it. That citizenship in Nazi Germany was
woven around a language of “race” and “blood” – rather than one of civic or
political belonging – should not lead one to overlook this constitutive relationship
between leisure and societal engagement in all its permutations. That the interwar
leisure culture – and the car as its central symbol – could be rearticulated with a
program of democratic politics and neo-liberal prosperity in the Federal Republic
of Germany after 1949 is evidence of the malleability of leisure’s political
connectivities.
Historians of the automobile have mined car magazines for many years, but
cultural and social historians of Germany have done relatively little to exploit this
source, especially for the period between the wars. Dozens of such magazines
existed, including the Allgemeine Automobil Zeitung (AAZ), published by the
Allgemeine Deutsche Automobil Club and appealing to a general audience; the
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