Hardly any other country in Europe is as urbanised as Germany — and its population is spread across almost the entire country. Satellite images reveal the great starry clusters of Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich - and the gigantic ‘Milky Way’ of the Rhine-Ruhr region stretching from Cologne to Dortmund.

The first episode of Germany From Above looks from the air over the cities where most Germans live. Seen from above, cities reveal the secrets of their construction, the inner logic and some of their hidden vital lines. It is a fascinating glimpse that enriches us with new insights — and a sensual pleasure, like flying itself.

Germany From Above looks at the rooftops and towers of towns large and small, at railway tracks and roads where over 40 million Germans travel every day — almost simultaneously — to work or school. Seen from above, the Brandenburg Gate reveals a completely different sight, and you find yourself wondering how trees could ever get enough sun in the narrow gorges between the city blocks of Friedrichshain. From a bird’s-eye view, you can take in the leafy luxury of Hamburg’s suburban Alster shores with their generous green plots. And you can see the contrast between the old Speicherstadt — the City of Warehouses — and the gleaming new buildings of the neighbouring HafenCity.

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 routes as they did centuries ago, even in those industrial cities that were completely destroyed during the war like Dortmund?

From a bird’s-eye view, the iron-and-coal city of Dortmund appears to have preserved almost its entire medieval outline — from when Dortmund was a free imperial and Hanseatic town. How can the Munich Oktoberfest, the world’s biggest folk festival, still function when up to 500,000 visitors all want to leave by taxi at the same time? And what do orthophoto experts discover with their 195-megapixel cameras when flying over the forests of Berlin, the most wooded metropolis in Europe?  How can experts identify from aerial photographs taken 65 years ago, in the aftermath of WWII, where unexploded bombs may still be hidden? Nothing has changed German cities so profoundly as the destruction of WWII — and when you look at towns from above, this becomes startlingly clear.

Aerial archaeologist Klaus Leidorf, who from his propeller plane has discovered and documented the remains of hundreds of ancient settlements in Bavaria alone, sums it up: “If I am an ant walking on a carpet, I cannot see the pattern. I can only see it from above, with some distance.” Why did some settlements, castles or military camps grow into powerful cities, while the hidden places that Klaus Leidorf discovers from his aircraft were eventually abandoned and forgotten?

Germany From Above invites audiences to fly over German cities and see them from a perspective most of us have never seen before: from above. Look at the rooftops of great cities and romantic small towns, marvel at the elaborate animations that give shape and meaning to GPS data and satellite images, enjoy the beauty of time-lapse sequences and the insights of Germany’s leading urban researcher, Professor Hartmut Häußermann.