Jörg Brüggemann photographed the Autobahn, the roughly thirteen-thousand-kilometre asphalt network that both cuts through and stitches together Germany. Published by Hartmann Books in 2020, the book gathers that work, which the publisher describes as the product of about five years of photographing the motorway in the second half of the 2010s. Brüggemann approaches the highway not simply as a feat of engineering but as a contested piece of national infrastructure whose future is genuinely uncertain. His attention falls on the ordinary life conducted along its edges: traffic, convoys of trucks, accidents, and the wide, flat landscapes the road divides.

Working in colour across the country, Brüggemann treats the highway as a cultural artefact as much as a physical one. According to the publisher, the Autobahn was designed in the 1920s, and its first segments were constructed in the 1930s under the Nazi regime; it later became associated with postwar faith in the future, with German engineering, and with driving without a speed limit—associations reinforced by Kraftwerk’s 1974 musical tribute. Against that inherited imagery the photographs set the daily reality of congestion and delay, so that admiration and scepticism are held at the same time.

The book’s implicit question is whether such a vast infrastructure can remain appropriate or sustainable, now that demands for unlimited growth and individual freedom sit visibly at odds with ecological and public concerns. Brüggemann does not answer it directly; instead the sequence lets description accumulate into argument, which is why the publisher suggests the pictures may increasingly read as historical documents. Hartmann Books issues the volume as a 96-page hardcover measuring 26.8 by 32 centimetres (ISBN 978-3-96070-052-4).