Curves – four days on the most beautiful roads in southern Germany

The volumes of the series “Curves – soulful driving” are travel books of a special kind. The photographer Stefan Bogner collects vast amounts of photos that depict the route of a “Grand Tour”. Volume 13 of the series covers southern Germany – Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. There are also maps – even with a height profile – and encounters with people along the route.

Not for car enemies

The volumes are only suitable for car lovers – because the main characters are the curves that you are allowed to circle on the drive. Some of the photos show the world from the driver’s perspective of the passionate Porsche driver – taken from waist-high view from below. In other photos, taken from the helicopter, the asphalt strip meanders through the landscape. In many of the volumes in the series, which are devoted to higher passes, Bogner transforms the landscape into a dead, dead zone in which blue and gray tones dominate. But southern Germany is an area of ​​the forest, a landscape that shines in vital green. Southern Germany, it says in the book, “does not exist at all. Not as a coherent landscape. Not as a unit. The former European great powers pulled over the Baden, Swabians and Bavaria too much to have time to get together.” And so the quite surprising four-day tour from Baden-Baden to Berchtesgaden seems to lead through very different countries.

Driving school for the road trip

If you like, you can only go on a journey with the tape from the sofa and follow the route curve by curve with your eyes. Many will use the book as a previous experience to go on the Grand Tour themselves. The route with its four daily stages should be best experienced on a long weekend with long days.

Travelers can learn two things from Bogner: his book is a school of seeing and driving. And it’s not about the car. Certainly the route is more fun in a Porsche than in an Opel Corsa. But when leafing through, another question arises. “Why don’t I see things the way Bogner does?” Why do you drive carelessly through the landscape, which has so much to offer. Only when you are ready to look like the photographer does the route through southern Germany turn into a journey into an exotic world bursting with nature. And you can only experience something like this if you drive accordingly.

Bogner, the committed sports car driver, does not celebrate racing or chasing curves – he teaches driving with the soul. Soulful Driving. To do this, you have to get up as early as a hunter on the prowl. Because, as with all volumes, Bogner shows a world without people and, incidentally, also without disruptive traffic. An essential stylistic device of Bogner’s photographs, which shifts landscapes and buildings into an almost unreal sphere. The route needs to be planned well in time for subsequent drivers, otherwise you will spend a few sections bumper to bumper with little soul.

People – all of whom are caring fans – can only be seen from page 253 onwards.

This volume in the series is also one of the most beautiful travel guides for motorists that one can imagine. Without any booking or restaurant tips. The challenge remains to experience the beauty that Bogner captured on the route.

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