The original is back! It shows Germany from the bird´s perspective in three new episodes „City – Country – River“ with new surprising and overwhelming aerial pictures and appealing animations based on satellite and GPS data. With the aerial DOP from New Zealand Peter Thompson, the award-winning directors Petra Höfer and Freddie Röckenhaus once again accomplished a visually stunning flight over Germany.

The third season of „Germany From Above“ makes, as usual, very few intermediate stops. Seen from above, the viewers experience a new, magic sight of a country they believed to know. And yet they found out: We didn‘t.

When bakers turn on the lights of their bakeries, then from the universe you can get an idea of where Germans live: German big cities are placed along the river Rhine and Ruhr; Hamburg and Bremen sparkle on the northern shores, in the east of the country we have Berlin and in the south Munich and Stuttgart.
And when you look at this carpet of lights of the bakeries in small and larger cities, you get a clear idea that cities originally develop to sustain people: that´s where markets were held to trade the goods produced in the hinterland, and that´s where customs were paid for the goods transiting on the major trade routes.

When you look down from an helicopter you can tell: surprisingly many German cities have kept the structure and buildings of the old and wealthy cities – or they rebuilt them. Landshut on the river Isar, for instance, was much more important worldwide than Munich. The rise and fall of cities over the centuries can be observed particularly well when you look from above at their current architecture and the growth rings.

„Germany From Above 3“ shows from the air the success and the crises of German cities: from Frankfurt, that owes its continuous success to its geographical position, to Dusseldorf that made it to the top as the „writing desk of the Ruhr Area“, to Hannover that after the war rebuilt some destroyed old buildings in a single block. From Aachen, where most German kings were crowned, to Cologne that still today crowds around the famous cathedral and that during the early Middle Ages with its 30,000 inhabitants was the biggest city of Holy Roman Empire.

When we film from above the last two coal mines and the last steel plant in the Ruhr Area, or the chemical giant BASF in Ludwigshafen or the Volkswagen plant in Wolfsburg, then you can feel the power of German industrial cities. And you can understand why they never became administrative cities.

And when you film from above Leipzig, Stuttgart or Munich, you immediately understand the importance of the railway system in the development of big cities: railway stations and and tracks still occupy huge areas in the inner cities. Or they have become vital lines in the cities, like the suspension railway in Wuppertal.