GERMANY FROM ABOVE
4th Season


Episode 10: Cities

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 inpact of train tracks back to first settlements in the stone age. Geography have never been more intriguing and entertaining than here.

People liked to settle down in big cites many hundreds years ago like they do today. One of the oldest and the biggest Roman city in the German territory is Trier. With sophisticated cgi animation we reawaken the past and we show what is left today of the Roman Trier – and why it is so. Erfurt too can look back at a proud history. Camp fires burnt already in the Stone Age and Germanic populations settled down by the river Gera. In the Middle Ages Erfurt was the fourth largest cities 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 , 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 cites – or they determined the decline of cities. The medieval city of Dinkelsbühl has been living in a time bubble since the railway cut off this once influential city. We show with CGIs the amazing growth of the railway network, we follow the helicopter of the 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 90 meter 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 Easter Holiday to see the match of all matches in Germany: Borussia Dortmund versus Bayern Munich. The CGI animation sequence on that matchday was the biggest facebook-hit for ZDF Terra X.

People liked to settle down in big cites many hundreds years ago like they do today. One of the oldest and the biggest Roman city in the German territory is Trier. With sophisticated cgi animation we reawaken the past and we show what is left today of the Roman Trier – and why it is so. Erfurt too can look back at a proud history. Camp fires burnt already in the Stone Age and Germanic populations settled down by the river Gera. In the Middle Ages Erfurt was the fourth largest cities 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 , 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 cites – or they determined the decline of cities. The medieval city of Dinkelsbühl has been living in a time bubble since the railway cut off this once influential city. We show with CGIs the amazing growth of the railway network, we follow the helicopter of the 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 90 meter 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 Easter Holiday to see the match of all matches in Germany: Borussia Dortmund versus Bayern Munich. The CGI animation sequence on that matchday was the biggest facebook-hit for ZDF Terra X.

Facts

First aired on Sunday, 17th May 2015, 19:30 pm, ZDF

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Credits

Written, directed and produced by: Petra Höfer and Freddie Röckenhaus

Aerial Photography: Peter Thompson, Irmin Kerck, Stefan Urmann
Director of Photography: Jarno Cordia, Tobias Corts, Tobias Kaufmann, Sebastian Meien, Oliver Köppel

Video Editor: Johannes Fritsche

Producer: Susanne Rostosky, Kay Schlasse, Francesca D’Amicis

Line Producer: Franziska Gößling, Svenja Mandel

Narration: Leon Boden

Commissioning Editors: Friederike Haedecke (ZDF), Katharina Kohl (ZDF)

A colourFIELD production commissioned by ZDF

Full credits

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