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Germans at the Wheel
In stressing the need for lightweight travel oriented to local cultures, Hauser
anticipated his argument from the post-World War II era that Germany should
reject both the attractions of American mass consumption and the totalitarian
seductions of Soviet collectivism in favor of Prussian “austerity.” 46 But this
argument was still not fully worked out; it would take the massive destruction of
the war and the abysmal state of German society under the early years of the
Occupation to sharpen Hauser’s perspective on this score. In the 1930s, his ideas
about lightweight travel were deployed for another purpose: to make a point about
speed. It has been noted that rapid travel by car was the explicit counterpoint to
the idea of auto wandering, but it is necessary to consider the issue from another
angle to understand what was at stake. It was easy, wrote Hauser, to become
seduced by the “hypnotic force of attraction” one felt looking over the hood of a
fast car, an experience only increased by Autobahn cruising. 47 But one has to be
cautious as to how one interprets this seductive effect. It is worth remembering
that historiography’s emphasis on the “passivity” of the Autobahn driving
experience – which doubles as the passivity of the German populace in the face
of genocide – regards speed as the primary force of manipulation. From the side
of theory, there is Virilio’s work, of course, which as noted above identifies speed
as the constitutive moment of modernity. But there is also Ross, who writes that
“going fast . . . has the effect of propelling the driver off the calendar, out of one’s
own personal and affective history, and out of time itself.” 48 In this approach, the
absence of historicity, of being able to situate oneself with reference to known
temporal (and spatial) coordinates, is one of the inevitable functions of motorized
speed, which creates a culture of disjointedness, a sense of constant displacement.
Yet it is precisely the opposite effect one notices when reading travel accounts of
the period. English tourists in Germany were quite specific as to the time and place
in which they thrilled to speeding along on the Autobahn, and they were quite
aware of the unique – which is to say: German – nature of the roads they
traversed. 49 As for German drivers, they were by no means immediately drawn to
the pleasures of high-speed driving. Automotive writers referred again and again
to German drivers’ lack of preparedness for traveling at fast speeds and the
slowness with which they learned to use the fast lanes only for overtaking other
cars. 50
Eventually, German drivers did learn how to drive very fast, and it was the
alarming rise in Autobahn accidents, to say nothing of the waste of human and
material resources needed for the impending war effort, that prompted authorities,
at Hitler’s insistence, to impose speed limits. In a February 1939 speech that
was extraordinary for its violent imagery, Hitler declared that those who killed
7,000 people annually and injured another 30,000–40,000 people on German
roads were “parasites on the Volk.” Furthermore: “They act irresponsibly.
They shall be punished as a matter of course, provided they do not escape the
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