Autobahn 38
Channel: VEB FILM Leipzig
Date: 2009-04-21

Why do people visit places where other people were born, lived, fought, or died? What does it mean to be a tourist?

There was no time to waste on October 3rd, 2008, the 18th anniversary of the German reunification. This journey along the German autobahn A 38, from East to West, from Leipzig to Göttingen, could only take one day. 21 sleepless hours, to be precise.

This is not a movie. This is a wild 23-minutes crossover combining elements of documentary, mockumentary, travel clip, freestyle, different subcultures, YouTube chic, and a load of explicit or obscure allusions to German and Western culture.

Thus it follows a tangential structure. Most of the things are just mentioned or shown briefly, it is more like an index to actual contents. Among others, Gustav II Adolf, Nietzsche, Goethe, Cortázar, Pushkin, and infamous German field marshal von Hindenburg are referenced. There is also room for phantasmagoric approaches, like an excessive dialogue about the origin of ABCs hit series Lost.

A visit to the worlds biggest rose collection with more than 8,300 breeds represents historys vulgar romanticism. But also the battlegrounds of the great European wars are passed by, as are poets and philosophers birthplaces, and obscenely large national monuments. Wikipedia is quoted briefly to exemplify the triumph of in-situ knowledge; Creative Commons music by Revolution Void adds some style, not to forget the voice-over hommage à Werner Herzog.