Deutschland von Oben

Germany is covered by a network of cities. In addition to the ten major cities of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Dusseldorf, Dortmund, Essen and Bremen, there are hundreds of small and medium-sized cities. 85 percent of Germans living in these cities, towns and villages. The second season of "Germany from above" looks from the air on Germany's cities and draws from them the most unusual perspectives, and some secrets. About the trip with the only German Zeppelin: A mission of the Research Center Jülich measures of air pollutants from ships and their distribution in the atmosphere. If the air is via Frankfurt and Ludwigshafen actually worse than in the Black Forest and Freiburg? From the air, identified the aerial archaeologist Klaus Leidorf the buried remains of the oldest city in Germany. The Upper Bavarian Manching, near Ingolstadt, was the metropolis of the Celts. Up to 10 ° 000 people lived here during the Iron Age - more than any other city north of the Alps. Klaus Leidorf can show up today part of the seven-kilometer-long city walls of ancient Manching. Even in the Iron Age, the towns starting point of wealth and culture. But why the old disappeared oppidum of Manching, which later took on the Romans for centuries from the scene? Almost all major German cities have been created in Roman times or in the High Middle Ages and were able to defend their position over the centuries. Roman-ups such as Cologne or Mainz grew into its current plan of the Roman garrison along roads. Cities such as Bamberg and Münster were more than 1,000 years important bishoprics. Port cities such as Bremen, Hamburg and Duisburg on the Rhine fought over the centuries by their traffic access to the sea and stood constantly on ever larger ships. In the Ruhr, the former steel giant Dortmund and Essen to the de-industrialization of newly invented and become magnets for young people. Why do we remain for centuries in the same places, although the old pull of the cities do not understand it? When is a place for the abandoned gold mining town, as once Manching? From a bird's eye view you can see, for example, are buried in places where the dead. Like no other city is the metropolis of Cologne seen from above their city of the dead. The most radical upheaval in German cities caused by the bombing. Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne and Dortmund, Nuremberg and Stuttgart were razed to the ground 1943-1945. After that decision had to citizens and city officials how much they build up again - or whether they would be in the same city almost a modern city are made new. Nuremberg and Münster built parts of its medieval old town to - in a simplified form, but with success. Other German cities, a total planned on the drawing board and built from the ground: Planned cities like Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Baden and Freudenstadt baufreudigen of kings, artificial cities like Wolfsburg or Eisenhüttenstadt of the two German dictatorships. The growth of large cities today, the squares are planning to see. The modes and aberrations of the city planning can be seen from the air everywhere and feel sometimes. In Berlin for instance can be different from the air heat zones of different urban areas to measure accurately. Because of the heat blocks of buildings in the summer, some districts of five degrees more than other districts. The World Heritage Site of Bamberg, which is on its seven hills, as the German Rome and Bremen, which is classified as the most English city in Germany and towns researchers as the "most livable city in Germany" are, however, not only of the amount considered a delight. The symmetry of chance and moderate building rules is obviously what we today on the image of our cities particularly fascinating. A visit to the medieval times in our purged Nordlingen in Swabia, once a free imperial city, it seems like time travel.

Germany's cities light up when you look at our country from the satellite. But between the optical nodes of densely populated areas are the much larger dark areas, where the fox and hare say goodnight. From a bird's eye view you can see that Germany is indeed a developed country, a lot more but one of the most forested countries in Europe - almost a third of our country is covered by forest. And trees mean we obviously have always been more than most of our neighbors. Thus, the camera floats for the second episode of the new season "Germany from above" on the tops of oaks and pines, the epitome of the German version of romance. And higher up, above the tree line, we look down into the area of ??the ibex and chamois at 2500 meters, at breakneck steep ridges and ravines on Geißhorn and foghorn in the Alps, Oberstdorf. And in the remote national park Berchtesgaden the "Germany from the top" team accompanying special helicopters that carry trees infested by bark beetles through the air from steep slopes. A dispute, because the National Park you really want to leave everything to the natural processes - but then has to help. Even the last 500 wild horses in Germany, who live only thirty miles from the mega-metropolis Ruhr removed Merfelder break is helped indirectly if once a year, the young stallions from the herd is out caught, what is done to avoid inbreeding. The clash of nature and heavy industry, is typical of wilderness and high-tech industry for the nation of Germany: Four-fifths of our land, forests, moorland or farmland. However, extensive wild are found only rarely - along the former inner-German border or in the inaccessible mountainous regions. We live in a country where the opposites in a confined space are amazing: the moonscape craters of lignite mining in Lusatia, whose infinite dumps are measured using laser scanning from the helicopter, the wine harvest in the bizarre terraces of the extinct volcano Kaiserstuhl deep in southern Baden, to to the largest heavy metal festival in the world in the pastures of Wacken in Schleswig-Holstein Kuhdorfs. In 1800 inhabitants there every year 75 000 concert-goers. The traffic chaos at departure and arrival days will be monitored from a helicopter as well as the largest tent city in Germany, the loud there every year for three days produced. In sharp contrast, there are other events that take place over our heads: The Cranes einschweben over the Elbe river and only 100 000 wild geese arrive at the Ems estuary and in the Lower Rhine, when the young ones of the season for their first departure to the south gather or make the foal of the wild horses in their first steps into Dülmen life is a spectacle that one has never seen before from the air. "Germany from above" shows it, as well as native wild animals that are so invisible that they can follow only by satellite from space - such as the lynx in the resin or in the Bavarian Forest. "Germany from the top" also accompanied the team of the German Center for Aerospace in Oberpfaffenhofen at the start of one of the satellites that make our complex life on the ground a little easier: Without satellites, there would be no GPS navigation, no high-tech espionage, no Satellite television. And none of the animation in "Germany from above." And it is not those predictions, under which we suffer Germans would most like: the weather. Over 2,000 stations are in Germany - but also on the ground. The second highest of them is on the Wendelstein, one of the highest jobs in Germany. Radiant sunshine finds Claudia Hinz, the weather woman from Wendelstein boring.

Compared with France, Italy or Spain, Germany has only relatively short stretches of coast. But nothing characterizes our country the way the water. That Germany from the air looks so green, full of trees and forests, meadows, fields and parks, is mainly because it rains a lot from us. And along the many rivers were goods, information, culture and last but not least people travel early. The German waters have already been used as transportation routes, when travel was difficult and slow. Today, we model the network of water to everywhere: in our flow of goods on the streets, in the distribution of electricity, gas, coal and oil. Everything flows - in the industrial country, Germany. Sometimes even a port must follow the river to where he moved his bed. As the giant inland port of Duisburg-Ruhrort at the confluence of the Rhine and Ruhr. The Romans took advantage of Germany's most important river, the Rhine, to advance northwards. In Xanten on the Lower Rhine, they stamped their times, largest city north of the Alps from the ground. The Bochum aerial archeology Bao Song currently investigated by propeller plane from the visible remains of the Roman camp on the northern edge of the Ruhr area today. Also that camp in the refuge general Varus and the oppressed Legionnaires after the battle against the Hermann Cherusci. The Rhine remained for two millennia, the cultural axis of Germany. The castles of the Middle Rhine, Burg Katz and Burg Maus to the mighty Rhine rock, today is a Unesco World Heritage Site. As an architecture and exhibition of power, they perched on the spurs of the steep banks of the Rhine. Today, along the Rhine move very many large industries, including large-scale chemical plants from BASF, through maximum to Bayer, framed by huge power plant complexes, which draw the Rhine water for cooling of nuclear reactors and conventional turbine and then reheated in the power back pumps. The waste water, even from the wastewater treatment plants, are now generally cleaner than the actual flow of water. But the heating of the water flows generated our problems. In many places the police is checking out with infrared cameras and from the helicopter, which is pumped with water temperature in the Neckar and the Rhine. But not only the Rhine and its tributaries, much used Neckar, Main and Ruhr rivers shape the land. From the air at the same time seems almost to stand still. Nowhere is so much room for water birds such as on the Elbe, where in late summer to make the young ones ready for the winter holidays in the south. All alone, without parents. Exactly the opposite can be found on the Lower Rhine and the Ems estuary, hundreds of thousands of wild geese from the Arctic and Siberia to winter in one - because our December and January are actually very mild for them. On Helgoland, Germany's only offshore island, it will find the stately gray seals comparatively so pleasant that they now bring about Christmas on the beaches of the dune to its young. And a little further south, on the beach of the East Frisian island of Juist, the helpers are from the seal breeding center in northern dike every autumn from the hard-aufgepäppelten Howler. From the air you can see best how difficult some of the farewell. On both sides.