Germany from Above

Episode 1

Stadt

43 mins

Unique aerial images of Germany- once again as striking and beautiful as ever. The bird's eye perspective adds new light to German cities, from Roman founded Trier to former colour capital Erfurt, from the impact of train tracks back to the first settlements in the stone age. Geography has never been more intriguing and entertaining than here. People liked to settle down in big cities hundreds of years ago, like they do today. One of the oldest and biggest Roman city in the German territory is Trier. With sophisticated CGI animation, we reawaken the past and we show what is left of the Roman Trier today - and why. Erfurt too can look back at a proud history. Camp fires burnt already in the Stone Age and Germany populations settled down by the river Gera. In the Middle Ages, Erfurt was the fourth largest city in Germany, after Cologne, Nuremberg and Magdeburg. Erfurt owned the monopoly over the pigment to blue colouration. But India and America - and Indigo - were discovered and the city lost its dominant position. We show through CGI the stages of Erfurt's growth and its trade connections. Krämerbrücke, Erfurt's Merchants Bridge is still the only bridge north of the Alps to be built over entirely with houses. Its floating houses along the bridge can be seen best from above. Yet, we owe German modern cities not only to the Romans and flourishing trade in the Middle Ages. Steam engines and train stations radically transformed small villages into influential cities - or they determined their decline. The medieval city of Dinkelsbühl has been living in a time bubble since the railway cut off this once influential city. We show with CGI the amazing growth of the railway network, we follow the helicopter of the German Deutsche Bahn measuring via laser and from the air Cologne and Dusseldorf. We look at how they are building the ICE paths of the high speed trains in Thuringia, just side by side to the 90m high masts of the new high voltage power lines, where helicopters place the towing ropes of the controversial new long-distance power wires. Probably the most special network of otherwise invisible connections between two major cities is woven by the journey routes of soccer fans travelling on the Easter Holidays to see the match of all matches in Germany: Borussia Dortmund versus Bayern Munich. The CGI animation sequence on that match day was the biggest Facebook hit for ZDF Terra X.