Untitled

Germans at the Wheel
Even so, Hauser insisted on the novelty of the Autowanderer, arguing that her
appearance could be attributed not solely to the Autobahn but also to an important
political transformation. “There could be no real automobile wandering here in
Germany before,” he stated, “because there was no real national community
[Volksgemeinschaft]. This is also part of the concept: a personally felt sense of
social opening, the wanderer’s feeling of resonance not only with the landscape
but also with its people.” 35
By emphasizing automotive travel’s broader cultural resonances, Hauser
implied that a new kind of socially engaged tourism was on the horizon. This idea,
too, was not completely unprecedented, but Hauser’s original view gave the point
a unique twist. When Social Democrats or other left-wing writers advocated
collectivized tourism in the Weimar Republic, they called for working-class
travelers who would look beyond normal tourist sites to focus on labor conditions,
technology, and political history. The politically inflected gaze was to be the
workingman’s answer to bourgeois tourism’s alleged superficialities; it was an
attempt to infuse leisure travel with critical energies rather than only with
consumerist fantasies and “distraction.” It necessitated its own unique set of
markers, symbols, and guidebooks as well as its specific accounts of the relationship
between leisure and power. 36 Hauser did not advocate such critical engagement,
but he was in effect applying the idea of a more focused and socially aware tourism
to automobile travel. In doing so, he reflected on how the automobile could insert
itself into the culture, and how it could be used to realize new connectivities. But
just as nationalist ideology rather than socialist revolution determined his view, it
was the image of individualized automobile travel rather than mass leisure, as
represented by the Nazi cultural organization Strength through Joy (Kraft durch
Freude), 37 that was at the heart of Hauser’s perspective. For Hauser, the Volksgemeinschaft
enabled but also demanded new, more individualized driving
practices, which is to say that the new driving experience went to the heart of both
the state’s claims on its inhabitants as well as the individual’s claims on the state.
Leisure driving was a deeply political issue, filled with nationalist meanings but
also social reciprocities, and it is to this central feature of Hauser’s commentary
that we now turn.
Hauser averred that changes in the design of the car itself had played a constitutive
role in bringing about the new relevance of automobile wandering. Until recently,
the German auto was “incomprehensible to the ordinary person and had a bad
reputation”; it created a “dividing wall between people.” Lacking maneuverability
and speed, ponderous in both body design and engineering, the German automobile
of just a few years ago was “much more bound to the road than it is today,
above all in the minds of the driver.” 38 Hauser’s observation must be viewed
against the backdrop of a larger conversation already going on in German culture
221