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Driving Germany: The Landscape of the German Autobahn, 1930-1970. By Thomas Zeller. New York: Berghahn, 2007. viii + 289 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, index. Cloth, $85.00. ISBN: 1-845-45309-3.
Reviewed by Christopher Kopper
Thomas Zeller's book, Driving Germany, is devoted to a topic that has fascinated numbers of German scholars of technology and transportation: the building of a two-thousand-mile highway network in just six prewar years of the Nazi regime. Unlike cultural historians who looked at the Autobahn as a multiple aesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk (collective art), Zeller examines the propagandistically acclaimed "roads of the Führer" from the perspective and with the methodological tools of an environmental historian.
Zeller's book-the American version of his 2002 German dissertation-looks at the landscape design of a road project that exceeded the demand of Germany's motorization in the 1930s by far. Hitler's highway planner Fritz Todt pursued the idea of designing a whole national highway system like a comprehensive artwork. The author looks at how the National Socialist road builders tried to turn driving on a highway into a stimulating sensual,...