I remember my first visit to the USA decades ago. Leaving the airplane and entering the airport, my first impression of the USA was a large billboard for BMW, the famous German car brand, and next to the typical BMW-face the slogan proclaimed: »Tested on German Autobahn«.
The German autobahn is famous for its alleged lack of speed limits. It must be a provocation for red-blooded Americans. Doesn’t “No speed limit” sound like the land of the truly free?
Well, there is some truth to the Myth-of-the-Autobahn: I have driven on the Autobahn at speeds over 240 km/h. That is about 150 miles per hour. It was perfectly legal.
And yes, even while driving 240 kilometers per hour in the fast lane, it is still just a matter of time before you will experience another phenomenon, that also has a very German word attached, a word that I know no translation for: Lichthupe.
“Licht” means “Light”, and “Hupe” means “horn”. You will be flying at 150 miles per hour, and then a stronger car than yours will come up right behind you. So scarily close you can see the blood shot white in the driver‘s eyes. The car behind you flashes its high beams. If this happens at night, you may be blinded for a couple seconds, while still racing along the Autobahn. Additionally, the other car honks its horn to make sure you can hear it, while you are driving blind. Yes, “Lichthupe” is how you know you‘re still too slow and should move out of the way.
Yes, I have indeed experienced the freedom of the German Autobahn. However, this experience is not the norm for driving in Germany. Although you can still have this experience, for example by driving at 3 am on the first day of Christmas, it is not the everyday reality of driving in Germany.
The German Autobahn constitutes less than 2 percent of all roads in Germany. While technically 70 percent of the German Autobahn has no permanent speed limit, there are frequent „temporary“ speed limits due to construction, traffic volume, weather conditions, or, I guess, bureaucratic spite.
And then, of course, there is the ultimate speed limit: other drivers.
“Hell is – other people”, Jean-Paul Sartre says. One excellent way to experience the truth of that phrase is the German Autobahn. One could say: “Die Hölle, das sind die anderen Fahrer”.
If there are enough others drivers on the legendary Autobahn – and the bar for “enough” is set quite low here, and only here! – then flashing your headlights won’t help anyone move ahead. You would need the flashing blue lights of an ambulance, the Sondersignal, and then hope that Hell has moved to the sides to form a Rettungsgasse.
Getting to work in or around any larger German city means a lot of being stuck in the “Stau”, the German word for “traffic jam” or “heavy traffic”. With a lot of Stop & Go – “Stop & Go” actually being an English term used in Germany too. (The German equivalent would sound weirdly history-channel: “Stehenbleiben und Weiterfahren”. – I apologize.)
I remember a graffiti saying: “Du stehst nicht im Stau, du bist der Stau.”
That roughly translates to: “You are not stuck in heavy traffic, you are the heavy traffic.” – My brain understands the conceptual logic of that. I tried to feel the truth of it while sitting in traffic. But alas! I didn’t succeed, I failed to feel it. Hell is Stau, and Stau is all the other drivers but me.
Over the years, every time I got stuck in the Stau, with all the other cars that unlike me were the Stau – be it Volkswagen, Toyota, or, yes, beautiful BMWs – I thought about that slogan: “Tested on German Autobahn”.
Every time I thought: “If only the Americans knew!”
“Tested on German Autobahn” really means: A car capable of easily and smoothly driving 250 kilometers per hour, with still a lot of additional Lichthupe-potential, stuck in “Stehenbleiben und Weiterfahren”, every verdammten morning, every verdammten evening, every fucking Tag.
To this day I still find it mildly amusing, that the land of the free could be selling the German Autobahn as the paradigm of automotive freedom.
Is it a case of “grass is greener on the other side”? Yes and no.
Traveling on the German Autobahn still can feel quite free, but these are only rare moments for most Germans. A few minutes maybe. Maybe less. Usually at times when regular people are fast asleep in their beds like the doped white mice in the college lab, and you press down the pedal and hope that nothing dangerous happens.
Germany has changed and is continuing to change. Germany is mutating into a post-democratic propaganda state, with the government actively harming the German car industry – and the rest of the economy too.
Whatever will happen to Germany and Autobahns and all of the rest of the West in upcoming years and decades, one thing I know, one thing makes me smile: For a short time in human history we, the Germans, were selling freedom to Americans: tested on the German Autobahn.
