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Book Review
| Strasse, Bahn, Panorama: Verkehrswege und Landschaft-sveränderung in Deutschland von 1930 bis 1990. [Road, Course, Panorama: Traffic Routes and Landscape Changes in Germany from 1930 to 1990.] By Thomas Zeller. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2002. 451 pp. Bibliography. Cloth 45.00 (Euro).
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| This innovative dissertation examines the changing social construction, cultural representation, and environmental significance of transportation landscapes in twentieth-century Germany. The book's main focus is highway planning and landscape design along the German Autobahn system between 1930 and 1970, although it also includes a chapter on the German railway expansion of the 1970s and 1980s. Zeller offers a bold synthesis of environmental history and the history of technology, historical subfields that have enjoyed a closer alliance in Germany than in the United States. Both fields have largely avoided landscape because of its association with Romantic aestheticism and, more ominously, völkisch nationalism. Drawing on recent theoretical work in historical geography, Zeller rescues landscape as a category of environmental historical analysis, positing it as the physical and symbolic bridge between the realms of nature and technology. In Zeller's hands, landscape emerges as a zone of social and ideological conflict, rather than a picturesque refuge from urban ills. |
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The chapters devoted to landscape and the Autobahn network are the strongest and will elicit the most interest among environmental historians. In these sections, Zeller refutes the popular image of the landscape-friendly Autobahn by concentrating on the conflicts that emerged between roadway engineers and the so-called "landscape advocates" under Alwin Seifert, who desired naturalistic, curvilinear roads and indigenous vegetation in areas disturbed by roadway construction. Though their goals meshed well with Nazism's promise to purge German technology of "Jewish materialism," the landscape advocates' environmental aims remained almost wholly unrealized because of their uncertain status in the hierarchy of road building, the constant pressure to lower costs, and ceaseless conflicts among landscape advocates, highway engineers, and nature conservationists. |
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Postwar roadway engineers abandoned Nazism's "Romantic deviant path" by embracing a supposedly apolitical vision of highways as corridors for rapid economic circulation and individual spatial mobility, rather than national integration or visual consumption. Road building became an exact science subject to quantification and standardization; the mathematically derived clothoid curve, not the aesthetic contours of nature, provide engineers with their optimal highway curvature. Zeller shows that this new discourse of functionality and efficiency marginalized landscape architects' aesthetic ideals, while democratization brought new safety concerns into the environmental debate. Behind Zeller's analysis of the changing parameters of highway design is a sophisticated treatment of the relationship between expert knowledge and power, as shifting claims about nature based on climax ecology, racial science, social utility, and mathematics legitimized competing claims to professional authority. |
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Zeller's portrayal of the transition in landscape design from the Third Reich to the Federal Republic analyzes shifting ideological constellations effectively, but is less successful in depicting the material and ecological results of transportation planning. One wishes that the author had included case studies on the aesthetic and ecological consequences of different design solutions. More effective analysis of the physical and ecological transformation of the landscape beyond the concrete perimeter, such as habitat destruction, would have engaged broader environmental historical questions about large-scale technological projects. |
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Rather than flesh out the Autobahn discussion, the author shifts gears in the fifth chapter to examine the most important recent expansion of German transportation infrastructure: the construction of high-speed rail lines and the introduction of fast-paced inter-city express trains. The chapter includes a long introductory section on the institutional and financial difficulties that the German Federal rail system faced in the 1950s and 1960s because of contradictory legislative mandates and a declining share of the transportation market. The comparative focus on landscape ideology and design gets somewhat lost in this section; the author returns to environmental questions only late in the chapter. The analysis in these final sections, however, is strong. Heightened environmental awareness in the 1970s brought unexpected local protests against landscape destruction and noise pollution in rural areas. Zeller argues that such protests forced railway planners and landscape architects to modify routing decisions, railway car design, and environmental mitigation measures. Engineers laid rail lines surrounded by embankments and tunnels or hid them behind sound-proof walls, for example, while designers compensated for the loss of panoramic landscape views by equipping the rail cars with state-of-the-art seating, video terminals, and climate control. Here Zeller demonstrates effectively how competing interest groups "author" transportation landscapes in conflicting and sometimes contradictory ways. |
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Zeller thus successfully illustrates the potential for landscape analysis to spur cross-fertilization between environmental and technological history. One hopes that a publisher will consider translating the Autobahn portions of the book into English in order to reach the broader scholarly community interested in the environmental dimensions of "Hitler's roadways." |
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Thomas Lekan is an assistant professor of history at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. His first book, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945, will appear in January 2004. |
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