essay
Sometimes I see a car in the woods. German forest roads are wide and tidy. If you know driveways without barriers and the secret paths, it is not difficult to complete the walk sitting and driving. Once I also saw a dog owner, who carried his animal on a long leash from the driver's window and at walking pace.
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So it makes only a minority, but the others go but as close as it is with the car in the forest, then there is traffic jam and parking in the middle of nature. Many only keep the car in order to get into the green once in a while. Or to be able to live in the country, to escape at least after work or in the morning early the impositions of the city.
The love of nature, the forest and the car in Germany is not contradictory, but complementary. The car as a symbol of freedom to escape all this - the work, the stress, the city - what made this purchase possible in the first place. Would you feel the need to get out, to travel even if you did not have to work so alienated and alienated to afford such an expensive, rapidly losing value car? And on the other hand, would you still love nature so much, if you did not come to the café or home with the top products of the German automotive industry in the rain, lightning fast, warm and dry? Both are interwoven.
Eternal festival in the realm of the car
That is why the current debate about the social and environmental costs of the automobile is so tormenting, especially in Germany. It's like people have to be between father and mother; Food and drink decide. Rational is not in this debate. Just as the IAA and other auto shows are a festival of madness. Frankfurt taxi drivers rave about the guests at the major motor shows, whereas book fair visitors are very poor people - how far the car drivers can be hired, what expenses are made, the glamor, the excesses - life in the car's realm, at least in these descriptions eternal festival.
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Car opponents are considered as fun brakes, although the many cars are already blocking themselves. The free ride is just a projection. In everyday traffic, it is tedious and dangerous. The car, a symbol of prosperity, is an incalculable risk for any private budget, with depreciation, repairs, fines and insurance.
Now the environment whistles from the last hole and Germany is still so car enthusiasts, has fallen in love and bungled economically placed on this industry, as the crisis was announced long ago. Now we are in an embarrassing situation - the love of the car went far too far, the money earned there has blinded, the costs were simply ignored. Bills pushed behind the shelf, continued to be bought in bulk and pretended that nothing was happening - Europe's largest economy behaves in part like the worst cases of television debt advisor Peter Zwegat.
We are also in a tight spot: Huge traffic jams make driving impossible, the roads are too narrow, the bridges should be rehabilitated. But even by train or even by plane, every trip is a study in improvisational art. Why can one rush through China, through Japan in fast, quiet trains, while here such facilities are evidence of transport refusal performance?
The automobile is German identity
Hardly anyone today would travel through Germany and find that the primacy of fossil-fueled, expensive private vehicles is the smartest way to get people moving and to live well together. Inner cities are nicer without cars. But do you think something new? How do you get the confidence, the enthusiasm to think of a country where cars are a hobby, but not the mainstay of the economy and certainly not the normal way to move people.
It would be nothing less than a new foundation of the country, because these topics reach into the depths of German history and culture. The Federal Republic invented itself as autoland, with it essential elements of our identity connect.
60 German cars
Childhood memories of today's adults are always memories of the car. On the Saturday cleaning ritual, on ever-long vacation trips, unfortunately also breakdowns, accidents, disasters. Former men were rarely seen in buses and trains or if so, then with number plates in their hands, between two cars, so to speak. Who was something who was boss, who had a driver or at least a parking space. Social mobility was measured by these signs.
The car was and still is the symbol of growth ideology. It consumes irretrievable resources, is vulnerable, subject to dynamic fashion and technology, soon you want a new model and the old one becomes almost worthless. This industry is all about consumption and transience, so it's more and more, the whole glorious madness of growth is at home here. Is it possible to redirect this enthusiasm, this attitude towards life and worldview to other patterns? In the Hessian province, a company specializes in converting beloved car models and collectibles, then they are electrically on the move. Silently accelerates then an old Saab coupe. In individual cases this will work, although the thing is not cheap. But how does Germany earn its money if it no longer sells cars?
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In the narrow street behind our house, the absurdly scarce parking was even less, markings in pink color separated a strip next to the curb. I suspected a bike path, expected another chapter in the long, deadly battle between bike and car. Nothing like this: The road is torn open, because the ground must be searched after World War II ammunition. The whole cars parked on old bombs.
The car debate is national therapy. Two totalitarian systems existed here in the last century, and families are still suffering from the consequences today. Is the comforting thought of the fueled-up car at the door an echo of such fears? There must be something in the way. The touching, long-lasting hold on the car was a sign of longing for the permanent present, it is the essential feature of contemporary Germany, as much a fear of the future as a fear of the past.
