Hardly any other country in Europe is as urbanised as Germany. Germans are distributed throughout almost the entire country. Satellite pictures reveal the big light dots: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich. And they show especially the gigantic Milk-Road of the Rhine and Ruhr area that stretches from Cologne to Dortmund.

The first episode of „Germany From Above“ looks from the air over the cites where most Germans live. When you look at cites from above, they reveal the secrets of the their construction plants, the inner logic and some of their hidden vital lines. It is a fascinating glimpse that enriches us with new insights. And it is a sensual pleasure, just like flying.

„Germany From Above“ looks at the roofs and the towers of smaller and bigger towns, at railway tracks and at streets, where over 40 millions Germans travel every day and almost at the same time to go to work or to school. When you look at the Brandenburger Gate from above you discover a different site, and you wonder how trees could ever get enough sun in the small gorges between the house quadrants in Friedrichshain. From the bird´s perspective you can enjoy the luxury of Hamburg suburban areas on the river Alster with their large and green pieces of land. And you can see the contrast between the old Speicherstadt, the City of Warehouses, and the new neighbouring buildings of the Hafen-City.

Where does the apparently disorganised labyrinth of the streets in the old cities of Rothenburg, Regensburg or Lübeck come from? What is their hidden plan? And why do streets in the centre of many big cities still follow the same course as in old times, even in those industrial cities that were completely destroyed during the war like Dortmund?

The bird´s perspective shows that the allegedly iron and coal city of Dortmund has preserved almost completely its medieval outline, when Dortmund was a „free imperial and Hanseatic“ town. And how can the Munich Oktoberfest, the world´s biggest fair, still work when almost all of the up to 500,000 visitors want to join the party and go home by taxi at the same time? And what do the ortophoto experts discover with their 195 megapixel cameras when they fly over the forests in Berlin, the most wooded metropolis in Europe? And how can experts identify from the aerial pictures that were taken 65 years ago after 2WW where unexploded bombs can still be hidden? Nothing has changed German cities so deeply like the destruction of 2WW. And when you look at towns from above this is all very evident.

Aerial archeologist Klaus Leidorf, who from his propeller plane has discovered and documented hundreds of remains of old settlements in Bavaria alone, brings it to the point: „ If I am an ant and walk on a carpet, I cannot see the pattern of the carpet. I can only see it from above, with some distance.“. Why did some settlements, castles or military camps develop into powerful cities while the hidden places that Klaus Leidorf discovers from his aircraft were eventually left and forgotten?

„Germany From Above“ invites the audience to fly over German cities and look at them from a perspective that most of us has never seen before: from above. Look at the roofs of big cities and romantic small towns, marvel at the elaborate animations that give shape and meaning to GPS data and satellite pictures, enjoy the charm of time lapse images and the knowledge of Germany´s leading urban researcher, Professor Hartmut Häußermann.