Architecture on Film: Reichsautobahn, introduced by Tom Wilkinson

This screening will be introduced by Tom Wilkinson (writer, historian, and History Editor at the Architectural Review).

Reichsautobahn (Hartmut Bitomsky, Federal Republic of Germany, 1984, 91 mins)

“Where Germany ends,” said Hitler, “the potholes can begin”. Bitomsky's piercing essay film narrates its web of images to critically excavate Germany's “biggest edifice”: 3,870 km of Nazi-built autobahn.

Far from a conventional chronol­ogy of construction, Reichsautobahn compiles footage from the multitude of Third Reich produced newsreels, films, propaganda and artefacts, supplemented with interviews and the critical reflection of Bitomsky’s voiceover, to dissect the reality, symbolism, myth and legacy of what at the time were termed ‘Hitlers Highways’.

Initiated in 1933, and designed to be an agent of employment and national unification, a “cultural monument” to modernity, purpose and progress, at a time of great socio-economic turbulence, the socio-political project of the Autobahn had to be sold back to a population for whom this infrastructure was so new as to be alien, through images, movies, poetry, novels, paintings and even oratorios, produced to inform Germany both how to use, and how to see, its new roads.


In Bitomsky’s approach “one picture answers another”, to reveal the complexities, imaginariums and contradictions of a project of social, as much as industrial, engineering.