Speed tourism: The German Autobahn as a tourist destination and location of “unruly rules”

Abstract

The German Autobahn has inspired many people’s imagination with its lack of a general speed limit, the quality of its road surface as well as its allegedly well-behaved drivers. One of the consequences of this positive reputation has been the emergence of a phenomenon I would like to call “speed tourism.” In this article, I treat speed tourism as a special form of tourism that involves viewing the driving experience as an opportunity for either testing the capacity of one’s own car or driving it at high speed as a way of experiencing the native culture at firsthand. I explore speed tourism as an alternative way of getting to know the real Germany as a tourist. Based on an analysis of several of its peculiarities, I argue that the Autobahn can be understood as a location where tourists can mix with “locals” while keeping a distance from them, since the interaction is restricted to learning and obeying the country’s rules of the road. The Autobahn then becomes a time-bound “dream location” created by the ideal of limitless driving freedom on the one hand and the paradoxical requirement of unruliness in relation to strict rules on the other; together, these are believed to offer an “authentic” driving experience according to local cultural customs.