Finding the German Heimat: Space-Producing Practices of the Reichsautobahn 1933-1941

"The automobile developed analogously to the bourgeois home, becoming a site for ‘dwelling within the car’ rather than ‘dwelling on the road’. [...] technical, safety and design increments added up to a cumulative change that was nothing short of…

The intense dynamic between the engineers and the “landscape advocates” involved in the Reichsautobahn designis best illustrated in the debate on how the highways should be laid upon landscape. The engineers, following the logic of the…

Planned at a construction pace of a thousand kilometers per year, the Reichsautobahn—or Straßen Adolf Hitlers—was to crisscross all of the Reich’s territory. Combined with intense motorization—exemplified in the concept…

Finding the German Heimat from Igor Ekstajn on Vimeo. https://www.vimeo.com/127927782

On 23 September 1933 the construction of the Reichsautobahn started south of Frankfurt. Hitler himself took a shovel to make the first dig. The planned pace was to construct around 800 miles of highways every year, for the overall projected length…

Published in "Raumforschung und Raumordnung" - the monthly journal of the Reich's Society for Spatial Science, and the prestige venue for exhibiting the Reich's plans for the "East" - this sketch shows the proposed extension of the Reichsautobahn…