Motorway and Easter: An exhibition in the Munich Traffic Center – Munich

Everyone wants to go south at Easter. The ADAC has predicted this in the past few days and therefore warned of traffic jams on German autobahns. In Bavaria, for example, the A 8, A 9 and A 93 were affected, and it was said that a lot of traffic was to be expected, especially on Maundy Thursday and Easter Monday. The reason? After two years of Corona, the Germans have become more willing to travel again. And when they travel, they still prefer to travel by car (or, in the meantime, increasingly in a mobile home). Where are they going? To Austria, Italy or to the Upper Bavarian recreation areas. Get out of the gray everyday life is, one can assume, the motto. Except that this first leads to the gray highway.

The exhibition

Berlin photographer Michael Tewes has also been on the Autobahn a lot in recent years. He just didn’t want to go anywhere, he wanted to stay right there. At least until he had found and captured the right motif. Then it was on to the VW bus. “Auto Land Scape” is the name of the resulting photo book (Hatje Cantz, 48 euros). And that’s what it’s called his exhibition, which can be seen in the traffic center of the Deutsches Museum. Tewes’ motifs: streets, noise barriers or pillars. And then there are other things that he discovered on or near the largest contiguous building in Germany, which is 13,200 kilometers long.

This includes, for example, a herd of cows looking for shelter under a motorway bridge (A 40) in the Ruhr meadows. A small forest that stands near Schnaittach between two autobahn routes (A 9). Or a sky-blue table with benches that, with their bright colors, stand in the landscape like modern sculptures near Silberbach (A 6). The bridge pillar near Berchum (A 45) also looks like a monumental sculpture. In contrast, the advertising pylon near Thurnau (A 70), which was photographed from below at night, has something of science fiction about it. Maybe because of the mysterious mood lighting. Or because it reminds you of the tripods from the British television series of the same name.

The “highway native”

In any case, these are things that are easy to overlook at 130 km/h or only see out of the corner of your eye. You have to brake down to 0 km/h for this. Something you normally only do when there is a traffic jam or a breakdown. With the result that you don’t even notice a lot or the Autobahn as such. According to the photographer, who lives in Berlin but grew up in Remscheid, he intends to “realign the view”. A city that was sometimes known with the slogan “Remscheid – 1 a on the A 1!” advertised As a “highway native” he has almost a home connection to the freeway.

silent messages

What you don’t see in Tewe’s pictures are people. Not much to see on signs either. In the end, they are something like the “instruction manual” for the Autobahn, instructing us about exits, the route or traffic junctions. Or ask us in the form of flashing letters to drive more slowly. The question is who is speaking to us, at least one gets the impression that there is constant communication here.

In addition to blue, there are also brown and white traffic signs that say things like “Stauferland. Drei-Kaiser-Berge” or “Ringelnatz-Stadt Wurzen”. There are more than 3,400 of them nationwide and around 800 in Bavaria to point out nearby sights to us. One could call the signs that have been in Germany since the 1980s “local history in passing”. And according to a survey conducted by the Harz University of Applied Sciences in 2019, every sixth person was tempted to spontaneously leave the motorway.

Open detailed view

The beginnings

It almost sounds as if the autobahn is closely linked to culture and nature. Even if you can’t see them from the car. The fact that the Autobahn does not damage the landscape, but on the contrary improves it: the Nazis saw it that way, by the way. For example, Fritz Todt, the chief civil engineer of the motorway project, advocated a “landscape-accentuated layout”. And when he describes the “captivating” descent from Irschenberg towards Chiemsee, he almost sounds like a romantic.

The first German autobahn? That was today’s A 555 (from Bonn to Cologne), remains of the original can be seen in the exhibition. It was inaugurated in 1932 and therefore not built by Hitler. However, he made the motorway construction a prestige project and had more than 3000 kilometers paved. But: only about every sixtieth German had a car at the time. Traffic grew in the Bonn Republic thanks to the economic miracle. It was all about driving fast, curves were considered dangerous, and the freeways increasingly became a service and safety-oriented parallel world.

Open detailed view

The Autonauts

A sense of the aesthetics of the Autobahn can also be traced back to the 1970s. “Before us lies a wide valley / The sun shines with a glittering ray” is also said almost romantically in the song “Autobahn” by power plant, which simulate a car ride with a monotonous, repetitive structure and rising and falling tones. The musicians of the electronic band explained that the inspiration for this was the fun of driving on the freeway. “We’re driving, driving, driving on the Autobahn” is the name of the most well-known line. The song became a hit, and the album of the same name is considered a musical milestone.

In 1982, Julio Cortázar and Carol Dunlop proved that you can actually drive on a motorway yourself. They were on the Paris-Marseille motorway for a whole month. They drove to every rest stop and stayed at every second one. And what they experienced there with their VW bus called “Fafnir” is something they take with them “The Autonauts on the Cosmobahn” one of the most original travel diaries made. A book for “all the crazy ones”, which, among other things, borrows from “Don Quixote”. And that, just like Michael Tewes’ pictures, allows us to see the autobahn in a new way. Good ride!