Untitled

Germans at the Wheel
and visions emanating from the broader automotive culture for which Hauser (and
even Victor Klemperer) wrote. Such claims and visions did little openly to
challenge the Nazi state, but they nonetheless implied a degree of give and take
over “the rules of the road.” It is significant not only that these rules were still very
contingent and unformed in Germany and most of Europe before the era of mass
automobility, but also that they were being shaped directly by what was still
primarily a leisure practice. Such facts make the history of driving a central subject
for further investigation into the relationships between leisure culture and political
community in the broadest sense.
Notes
1. For the argument of this paragraph, see Rudy Koshar, “On the History of the
Automobile in Everyday Life,” Contemporary European History 10, 1 (2001), pp. 143–
54.
2. Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (New York: Semiotexte,
1986); see also the discussion on Virilio by Christoph Maria Merki, “Plädoyer für eine
Tachostoria,” Historische Anthropologie 5, 2 (1997), pp. 288–92.
3. David Gartman, Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design
(London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
4. Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How
We Can Take it Back (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
5. A more balanced view of automotive history is taken by Virginia Scharff, Taking the
Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (Albuquerque, NM: University of New
Mexico Press, 1991), which deals only with the United States, and Michael L. Berger, The
Devil Wagon in God’s Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America,
1893–1929 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1979). But see also Sean O’Connell, The Car in British
Society: Class, Gender, and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1996). A more balanced perspective can also be derived from analyses of the vast
“road trip literature” that, again, is much more ubiquitous in US than in European culture.
See for example Kris Lackey, RoadFrames: The American Highway Narrative (Lincoln,
NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); Ronald Primeau, Romance of the Road: The
Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 1996); Roger N. Casey, Textual Vehicles: The Automobile in American
Literature (New York: Garland, 1997). One might have expected more in this context from
Kristin Ross’s Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French
Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), but its view of the car’s embeddedness in
modern culture is still one-sidedly negative, and it has little to say about the daily uses of
the automobile.
6. See Thomas Kühne, “Massenmotorisierung und Verkehrspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert:
Technikgeschichte als politische Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte,” Neue Politische Literatur
41, 2 (1996), pp. 196–229; Barbara Schmucki, “Automobilisierung. Neuere Forschungen
227