German Listening Comprehension
Geschichte der deutschen Autobahn
Study Guide 2
Study Guide 2: Notes/Comments
Also see: Study Guide 1: Vocabulary - Grammar
The following background information should help you better understand the Autobahn audio file.
| Notes | |
| 66 | Autobahn, as German as Blitzkrieg and Sauerkraut, needs no translation. Germans defend their right to barrel down the highway as fast as they please with as much ferocity as Americans defend their right to bear arms (in this the Allgemeiner deutscher Automobilclub, or ADAC, is a kind of German version of the National Rifle Association). In car-crazy Germany, the home of high-performance vehicles and high-strung drivers, massive pileups with multiple fatalities are one consequence. The problem of aggressive driving on the autobahns was highlighted again in a heavily publicized trial last winter. A 34-year-old man—a test engineer for DaimlerChrysler, no less—was sentenced to 18 months in prison for causing the deaths of a 21-year-old woman and her 2-year-old daughter on the A5 autobahn in southern Germany. A court in Karlsruhe found that the woman's small car, traveling at an estimated 150 kilometers (93 miles) per hour, had veered off the road when she apparently panicked at the approach of the man's big Mercedes. Witnesses said he had been traveling at about 250 kilometers (155 miles) an hour just moments before he came to within a meter (3.3 feet) of her rear bumper in an attempt to force her out of the passing lane. |
| 67 | Maserati - The Italian carmaker Maserati is one of the greatest names in auto racing. The company was founded in Bologna in 1914 by Alfieri Maserati, the fourth of seven brothers. In 1929, Maserati set a world speed record of 246 kph (153 mph). Maserati moved to Modena, Italy, in 1940 and was acquired by Ferrari in 1997. |
| 68 | 210 km/h - 210 kph is about 130 mph. |
| 69 | Nazis - The radical right-wing Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party, NSDAP, Nazis) was founded in 1919 as the German Workers' Party, and beginning in 1921 was led by Adolf Hitler. The Allies abolished the party at the end of World War II. |
| 70 | Hitler - Born in the Upper Austrian town of Braunau am Inn, Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) gained dictatorial powers in Germany in 1933, and precipitated World War II by invading Poland in 1939 (after invasions of Austria and Czechoslovakia). He committed suicide in Berlin as Soviet forces were storming the city. See note 61 in the 17-7 issue of Schau ins Land, and note 85 in the 17-6 issue. |
| 71 | Arbeitslosigkeit - In 1932, a year before Hitler became chancellor, there were some 6 million registered jobless persons in Germany, a third of the labor force. By 1937, there was no unemployment. A number of external factors, including the easing of the Great Depression, contributed to the turnaround, along with work-creation programs (some conceived by the previous government) and rearmament. The cost of this success was high, however, including a threefold rise in German debt between 1933 and the start of World War II in 1939. During the war, Germany faced a shortage of workers. It helped solve the problem by importing slave labor. |
| 72 | Fritz Todt (1891-1942), born in the Baden-Württemberg city of Pforzheim, earned a doctorate in civil engineering with a dissertation titled Fehlerquellen beim Bau von Landstraßendecken aus Teer und Asphalt (Sources of Defects in the Construction of Road Surfaces With Tar and Asphalt). An early Nazi member, he rose quickly within the party, becoming an Oberführer in Hitler's Sturmabteilung (or "storm troopers," a militia that intimidated and murdered the Nazis' opponents) in 1931. After Hitler became Germany's chancellor in 1933, Todt was given the post of inspector general of the country's roads and the job of building an autobahn network. Five years later, he was named head of the whole German construction industry. One of his chief projects was Germany's defensive Westwall (the Allies dubbed it the Siegfried line, after the hero of the Nibelungenlied, a famous 13th-century German epic poem), a system of heavy fortifications along Germany's western frontier consisting of tank traps, bunkers, pillboxes, ammunition depots, etc. (German historians say that while Nazi propaganda succeeded in fanning Allied fear of the Westwall, its military effectiveness was minimal. It helped prevent a two-front war during Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland. But after France and the Low Countries fell the following year, it was disarmed and abandoned. Hastily rearmed in 1944, it didn't seriously impede the Allies' advance into Germany.) In 1940, Todt was named minister for armaments and ammunition (Reichsminister für Bewaffnung und Munition). With a growing army of slave laborers at his disposal, he set about boosting the German war machine and building the Atlantikwall, a system of fortifications along the coasts of Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. After an inspection tour of the Eastern front in 1941, he unsuccessfully sought from Hitler a better-equipped force, and began to express doubts that the war could be won. Todt died when his plane went down shortly after takeoff following talks with Hitler at the Führer's headquarters in East Prussia. Some people believe that Hitler was behind the crash. Albert Speer replaced Todt as armaments minister. |
| 73 | Landsberg - Hitler was imprisoned in Landsberg, a Bavarian town about 50 kilometers west of Munich, after his abortive attempt in November 1923 to launch an insurrection from the Bavarian capital against the struggling Weimar Republic (see note 46 in the 17-3 issue of Schau ins Land). Bavaria at that time, like the rest of post-World War I Germany, was in turmoil. Its premier, Eugen Ritter von Knilling (1865-1927), who had no party affiliation, was the sixth since the November 1918 overthrow of Bavaria's last king, Louis III (Bavaria had remained a kingdom after joining the German Empire in 1871), and the proclamation of the Freistaat Bayern by Kurt Eisner of the Independent Social Democratic Party. Eisner's assassination by a right-wing radical in 1919 led to the brief establishment in Munich of a Bavarian "soviet republic" (Räterepublik), which was crushed by the military at the cost of more than 600 lives. Traditionally conservative, particularist, and anti-Prussian, Bavaria was a hotbed of right-wing agitation against the national government in Berlin, headed by President Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, and Chancellor Gustav Stresemann of the National Liberal Party. Munich became the headquarters of the Nazi Party, which had been banned in the states of Prussia and Thuringia. Bavaria's powerful "general state commissioner" (Generalstaatskommissar), former premier (1920-21) Gustav Ritter von Kahr of the Bavarian People's Party, saw Bavaria as an island of order in a Jewish-dominated republic wallowing in Marxist chaos. He and his comrades wanted to scrap Germany's new parliamentary system and restore the monarchy. Such was the situation when Hitler and his storm troopers, firing shots into the ceiling, pushed their way into Munich's Bürgerbräukeller beer hall, where Bavarian leaders had gathered to hear a speech by Kahr. Hitler, who had the backing of retired general Erich Ludendorff (1865-1937), Germany's chief of staff during World War I, announced that he was overthrowing both the Bavarian and national governments and would now lead the country. The new governments' top ministers, whom Hitler named, included officials who were present. The packed hall roared approval, and the Bavarian leaders agreed — they were surrounded by gunmen, after all — to join in taking Hitler's "revolution" to Berlin. But when some 3,000 Nazis marched the next day, police fired on them. Some 20 people died in the ensuing shootout, most of them Nazis. Convicted of treason, Hitler received a predictably mild sentence: five years imprisonment in Landsberg's fortress, where labor wasn't required. He served just eight months, time spent writing most of Mein Kampf (My Struggle). The book set out Hitler's political philosophy—rabid anti-Communism, Jewish culpability for Germany's World War I defeat, the superiority of the "Aryan" race, Germans' need for Lebensraum in the East, etc. It became the Nazis' bible. |
| 74 | A8 - German autobahns are designated with the letter "A" and a number. The major ones have single digits. Odd-numbered autobahns run north-south, even-numbered autobahns east-west. |
| 75 | Stauwarnungen - There are now more than 53 million registered motor vehicles in Germany. According to a recently published report by the German government, an average of some 48,000 vehicles daily use the autobahn system. To help prevent massive traffic jams, school vacations are staggered across the country's 16 states. But backups as long as 25 miles still occur, especially on national holiday weekends. Analysts at the German carmaker BMW estimate that traffic jams cost the economy as much as €200 billion per year. |
| 76 | Thüringer Wald - The Thuringia Forest is a region of wooded highlands extending southeast from the Werra River in the state of Thuringia to the Frankenwald in northern Bavaria. Heavy pollution has seriously damaged the forest. |
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MORE > German Myth 8: The German Autobahn from your Guide
FOTO > Autobahn A1 bei Lübeck
NOTE: This sound file, transcript, and notes were originally published in Schau ins Land audiomagazine (read my review) and are used with the permission of Champs-Élysées, Inc.
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