Untitled

Rudy Koshar
Unlike some German and foreign commentators, who worried about the boredom
that would occur when driving long, uninterrupted stretches of steely-gray
concrete on the new superhighways, 26 Hauser maintained that driving on the
Autobahn was an “uncanny experience.” 27 The driver relaxed, the car seemed to
move effortlessly, and the feeling was almost as if one was flying. 28 What is more,
the driver was able to appreciate the landscape’s beauty in unexpected ways.
“In short,” wrote Hauser, “the fast Autobahns bring us, as unusual as it may sound,
a more thoughtful driving experience, they help us to develop a social skill
[Lebenskunst], which up until only a few drivers really mastered, the art of
automobile wandering.” 29 To develop his point, Hauser made the distinction
between “automobile travel” (Autoreisen) and “automobile wandering,” and he
used North America as the positive referent. In the United States, drivers understood
the art of driving with only a more general or far-away goal in mind. This
enabled them to experience “a happy sense of timelessness and a pleasant
willingness to be steered by the landscape, the sun, and nature.” 30 Automobile
wandering thus represented a kind of “nonfunctional” driving that was hardly
aimless but that allowed for a degree of flexibility between “home” and “away”
that more rigidly defined itineraries overlooked or excluded. Implicitly, this form
of driving also foregrounded the pleasurable sensations of the motoring experience
itself, the sights, sounds, smells, and kinesthetic sensations emphasized among
others by the American writer-driver George R. Stewart. Having undertaken a
continental trip on the legendary US 40, Stewart wrote that “the continuous
joggling from the springs, doubtless good for the digestion and the nerves and the
general well-being” was “reminiscent perhaps even of the joggling of the child
within the womb.” 31
Hauser was convinced that leisure driving of this kind was something entirely
new for Germany. Of course, he also remarked that the practice of automobile
wandering was already known to a few drivers, and he later referred to it as a “lost
art,” which is to say that it had been available to Germans before this time. One of
the first major accounts of a German road trip, by the novelist Otto Julius
Bierbaum, promoted the idea that the car driver should “travel, not race.” 32
Bierbaum advocated a more settled and responsible approach to leisure driving
that not only avoided excessive speed, sine qua non of the devil-may-care
“automobilist” of pre-World War I Europe, 33 but also allowed car passengers to
gain a better appreciation of nature and culture than the train passenger could get.
The automotive press was using the term Autowandern in a generic sense, often
with reference to the early camping movement, for which America was once again
the model, but also with reference to the Autobahn experience. 34 More broadly,
the term Wandern may have reminded Germans of the long tradition of artisan
travel, and like English “rambling,” it had populist connotations for everyone from
bourgeois youth groups to working-class travelers.
220