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속도 대신 촘촘함을, 광기 대신 성찰을… 독일 교통의 길을 걸으며

A journey by tram and train through Frankfurt and Nuremberg becomes an inquiry into public transport, modernity, propaganda, and the perilous distance between collective intelligence and collective madness.

Pressian · By 박흥수 사회공공연구원 철도전문위원 · 14 June 2026 · read the original in Korean →

Though it was early morning, the sun already stood high. From Galluswarte, where my lodgings were, there were two ways to reach Frankfurt Central Station: take the S-Bahn, the regional rail, or use the tram. From Galluswarte S-Bahn station it was only one stop to the central station, easy and quick, but I had time to spare, so I decided to take the tram.

At the stop, citizens on their way to work were waiting for the tram. The tram stop was structured much like a bus stop in a large Korean city. There was a roof to keep off the rain, with seats installed beneath it. Advertisements were pasted on the transparent walls, and an LED board displayed the tram number, destination, and time remaining until arrival. What differed from Korea was the presence of a ticket machine where one could buy a fare.

Because trams run on rails, they cannot pull over toward the sidewalk at a stop. On roads with many lanes, to Korean eyes the tram appears to have stopped unlawfully in the middle of the street. Passengers at the stop naturally cross the lanes and board the tram. At such moments, the cars traveling in the lanes nearest the stop remain halted until the tram passengers have finished getting on and off. The cars running alongside the tram did not speed up, as though following a well-rehearsed script, and drove in a way that posed no threat to the tram passengers.

The trams consisted of three cars with articulated connecting sections. On the roof of the middle car was a pantograph to draw power from the overhead line. Because each tram set had three cars, it could carry many passengers. During the morning commute the headway was roughly ten minutes, but since some stops overlap depending on the route, the interval passengers actually feel seemed likely to be about five minutes. Since no one tapped a transit card or paid the driver, boarding and alighting proceeded quickly. After running for about fifteen minutes with the citizens on their way to work, the central station appeared. As expected, many passengers got off there.

In Korea, trams were expelled long ago, and only recently have some local governments begun introducing them again. In many European cities, by contrast, trams function as essential infrastructure for urban public transport. The largest factor that drove trams out of Korea was a car-centered transport system. A tram that occupied perfectly serviceable lanes and moved slowly was considered a major impediment to road traffic. The explosive rise in registered automobiles after the period of economic development left no room for trams to enter.

Walking through German cities, even large ones such as Berlin or Frankfurt, it is not easy to encounter the severe traffic congestion one sees in Korea. The better equipped a city is with public transport infrastructure such as railways, trams, and buses, the better its road traffic environment tends to be as well. Urban traffic conditions are shaped not only by infrastructure but also, crucially, by government transport policy. As long as policies are carried out that, whether openly or not, favor, encourage, or at the very least tolerate automobiles, the public transport environment cannot improve. Only when the major premise of modal shift, that is, the transition from a transport system of mass fossil-fuel consumption to environmentally friendly transport, becomes the foundation of transport policy will the traffic environment change at another level.

Frankfurt Central Station, befitting its role as the rail hub of central Germany, was crowded with passengers from early morning. The central station has a terminal structure, with the railway lines ending there. Every train entering Frankfurt Central Station must stop, let passengers off and on, then leave by reversing its direction of travel. A terminal station has the advantage that users can access all of its platforms without using an underpass or overpass. The platforms are connected as the tines of a fork separate from its neck when one eats. Passengers buy burgers, sandwiches, coffee, and other food from the food stands set up at the place like the neck of that fork, then head for the platforms.

One way Germany’s train-use environment differs from Korea’s is that rail fares are not fixed. On German railways, train fares become more expensive as departure approaches. Even on the same section, prices also differ according to the time of day. Trains running at times when people crowd in cost more. I had booked the ticket I used that day in advance from Korea. Another feature is that, in principle, seats are not assigned on any train ticket. One can tell from this that there is a certain margin in the supply of seats. If there is a preferred seat, or if passengers are expected to crowd in, one can pay an additional 5.50 euros and reserve a seat.

The train I had booked was ICE 525, a high-speed train departing Frankfurt for Munich at 7:57 a.m. It would take two hours to reach my destination, Nuremberg. As I walked along the platform, I opened the DB app and checked the seating situation; there seemed to be only a few empty seats. As soon as I reserved one, a notification appeared on my phone screen saying that 5.50 euros had been charged.

From my experience using the apps of railway operators in several countries, I thought the DB app might be among the very best in intuitiveness and ease of use. I boarded the train and found my assigned seat. Except in some older high-speed-train cars, there is a small LED window beside each seat, and there the destination of the passenger who has reserved it is displayed. Passengers without seat reservations can use seats marked as empty in place of a destination.

The train departed on time, crossed the Main, and left the city behind. Though it was a high-speed train, it traveled a considerable distance at around 130 kilometers per hour. On some sections it exceeded 200 kilometers per hour. In Korea there is also an atmosphere that praises high speed and speaks as if speed were everything in railway technology, but to properly realize the railway’s nature as a network, many elements must be well integrated. In modern railways, speed is an important factor that heightens competitiveness, but one must not lose sight of other important things in the name of raising speed. We must not commit the folly of excluding major cities from the design stage, or installing stations outside the living environment of citizens, merely to shorten the time between starting point and terminus.

The purpose of railway development is not simply to increase speed or elevate technological capability. High-speed operation and technological advancement should contribute within a plan to shift a road-centered transport system to rail, and, as far as possible, to replace aviation with rail. While expanding track infrastructure, high-speed rail, conventional rail, regional rail, and urban rail should complement one another and connect cities and regions in a dense mesh.

The plains of south-central Germany unfolding outside the train window brought ease to the eye. The landscape was projected through the screen of the train window like a film. In The Railway Journey, a humanistic classic on railways, Wolfgang Schivelbusch described railway travel as a journey that opens out like a panorama. Schivelbusch declared that for travelers of Goethe’s age, who walked or at most rode in carriages, the whole synesthetic unity of smells, noises, and sensations that belonged within the route no longer applied in the railway age. Agreeing with Schivelbusch’s remark that monotonous scenery was, for the first time, placed in a fascinating perspective by the train, I enjoyed the view beyond the window.

As soon as I got off on the platform at Nuremberg Central Station, I went to a ticket machine inside the station, bought a one-day city transit pass for 10.60 euros, and went back up to the S-Bahn platform. Three stops and five minutes away on S-Bahn line 2 or 3 was Dutzendteich, my first destination in Nuremberg. Slightly outside the city center and bordered by a park, Dutzendteich station was quiet. I was the only person who got off. Dutzend means twelve, and Teich means pond. Perhaps it is, or once was, a neighborhood with twelve ponds. I opened Google Maps and searched for my destination; it showed a four-minute walk. Following the map app, I walked and came upon a pond. In fact, it was large enough to look more like a lake than a pond. Now and then, joggers passed by along the quiet lakeside path.

Nuremberg was where Nazi Party rallies began to be held in 1927. The first Nazi Party rally, held in Munich in January 1923, was interrupted after the putsch at a Munich beer hall that November led to the Nazis being outlawed and Hitler arrested. This incident became the occasion that made Hitler a political star on the national stage in Germany. After a party rally for the reconstruction of the Nazi Party was held in Weimar in 1926, the rallies were held in Nuremberg from 1927 onward.

On one side of the lakeshore stands the modern building of the Documentation Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds, and behind it is the Colosseum, the site of the party rallies. The Colosseum of Dutzendteich, modeled on the Colosseum in Rome, was in the midst of renovation for reopening. Fortunately, a space for visitors had been opened on one side of the construction site, so the place could be viewed. It was also striking to see high-school students on a field trip listening to an instructor’s explanation. What were those students thinking there? How did they understand the bizarre acts carried out less than a hundred years ago by people who would have been of their great-grandfathers’ generation?

The Nazis planned the party rally as a mass gathering on a grand scale. Goebbels, master of propaganda that he was, conceived the rally as a blockbuster show. Huge Hakenkreuz flags, the symbol of Nazism, fluttered, and mass games filled the square. In a space packed so tightly with crowds that there was no room to set foot, the Nazis praised the superiority of the German people.

The entire process was filmed, and riding the wave of cinema’s popularity at the time, scenes from the party rally were screened across the country. The film director Leni Riefenstahl, invited by Goebbels, made Victory of Faith in 1933 and Triumph of the Will in 1935, opening a new epoch in propaganda film. Once the parade of crowds full of conviction began in Nuremberg, all Germany became a furnace of nationalism.

Leaving the party rally grounds behind, I walked along the lakeshore toward my next destination. It was the Zeppelin Field, the place where the Nazis’ enormous mass rallies actually took place. Zeppelin is a common noun referring to the rigid airship that enjoyed a brief revival in Europe in the early 1900s. Baron Ferdinand von Zeppelin, fascinated by airships, founded a company and devoted himself to making them. After Zeppelin, who became a count, flew through the sky in 1900 in an airship of his own making, his name came to stand for the airship itself. The aviation industry developed along two paths, the airship and the airplane. At that time, it is said, the steadily advancing airship looked more promising than the airplane.

Guillaume de Syon, author of Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900-1939, says the rigid airship left a strong impression on Europeans’ collective memory of machinery. To fly in the sky was an ancient human dream. In the 1900s, this dream was realized before people’s eyes as an enormous flying object. To float a structure with a steel frame into the sky by filling it with gas lighter than air required a gigantic air bag. It was a machine perfectly suited to maximizing the imagination of those who saw an airship flying overhead. Hitler and Goebbels did not miss this feature of the airship. Consider the following description of the scene in which the Zeppelin appeared as the highlight of the Nuremberg rally held in 1933 to bless the “Hitler era.”

“With a thunderous sound, the airship flew majestically over the heads of Germany’s youth. The Hakenkreuz emblem shone on its tail fin. Cheers approaching frenzy shook the entire stadium. At the sight of the giant in the sky, more than one hundred thousand voices screamed out, expressing a single joy and pride. Tinting Nuremberg silver, the Zeppelin drifted slowly.” From Zeppelin! Germany and the Airship, 1900-1939.

As I entered the mouth of the broad square stretching south of the lake, the Zeppelin grandstand revealed its imposing form. Its old majesty was no longer visible. The concrete of the stepped stands was worn, as if showing the traces of time, and pieces had fallen away. Here and there in the stands, students on field trips sat gathered and resting. The structure of the Zeppelin grandstand has stepped stands extending to either side of a central tribune like an ancient Roman temple. Because the central tribune was under renovation, it was hidden by screening and scaffolding, and its grotesque form could not be seen.

Even so, the force of the structure emerging through the shell around it seemed to overwhelm everything in every direction. Its structure, good for gathering crowds, and its concise, simple layout made it look at once like a space for watching some show staged in ancient times long ago and like a place where a massive crowd scene in a science-fiction film might unfold. They say history repeats itself like a whirlwind. The Zeppelin Field is a space where the sensation of a past yet to come and an old future seem to overlap.

I looked down on the field from the central tribune where huge Hakenkreuz flags had once fluttered. Directly in front of the stands, a road runs straight, well suited for people or vehicles to form ranks and be reviewed. Across the straight track is a lawn surrounded on three sides by concrete embankments; this was the mooring ground where Zeppelins took off and landed. Even now, with aviation technology having developed by leaps and bounds, it seemed there would be no one whose heart would not race if they were to see a Zeppelin from these stands.

The most famous Zeppelin in the history of rigid airships is the Hindenburg. If a Zeppelin were built and christened in the United States today, it would probably be named the “Donald Trump.” The new Zeppelin LZ 129, whose construction costs were funded by the Nazi regime and which began operations in 1936, was named not “Adolf Hitler” but the Hindenburg, borrowing the name of Paul von Hindenburg, the hero of the Battle of Tannenberg, where Germany won a great victory over the Russian army during the First World War, and a former president of the Weimar Republic.

After its first test flight in March 1936, the Hindenburg was mobilized for Nazi propaganda. On March 7, 1936, the German Reich army abruptly occupied the Rhineland. The Rhineland, a strategic point bordering the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France, had been declared a demilitarized zone under the Treaty of Versailles after Germany’s defeat in the First World War. Hitler claimed that Germany’s rearmament and the occupation of the Rhineland were “preemptive measures” to defend the fatherland. European countries, just as they now fail to respond in any meaningful way to Netanyahu’s Israel when it indiscriminately bombs Gaza or Lebanon, could do little in response to Hitler’s show of force. After occupying the Rhineland, Hitler dissolved the parliament of the Weimar Republic and held a referendum, saying he would ask the people to judge the legitimacy of the preemptive measure.

Ahead of the referendum held on March 29, the Hindenburg flew all over Germany beginning on March 26, scattering leaflets that read, “Vote for the Führer!” The referendum received 98.79 percent approval, and Hitler and the Nazi Party became a government enjoying the full support of the German people. On August 1, 1936, the opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics was held. At the moment Hitler declared the Games open, the Hindenburg, bearing the Olympic flag, flew over the main stadium amid the cheers of the spectators. Sohn Kee-chung, who competed in the marathon for the Japanese team, had already arrived in Berlin in June by way of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Sohn, the Korean who was facing his great contest on the ninth, must also have seen the Hindenburg.

Propelled from beneath its enormous body by four gondolas fitted with Mercedes engines, the Hindenburg was put on the Frankfurt-New York route and in 1936 alone made seventeen round trips across the Atlantic. A luxurious airship equipped with passenger lounge, bar, and bedrooms, it linked the continents by covering the distance between Germany and the United States in nineteen hours and fifty minutes.

The Hindenburg, which had seemed to be achieving a shining accomplishment, was engulfed in flames on May 6, 1937, just after arriving at Lakehurst Airport in New Jersey in the United States, as it was descending toward the ground at its mooring mast. The crowds gathered to watch the Zeppelin arrive were horrified by the disaster unfolding before their eyes. Images of the Hindenburg in flames remain in film and photographs. This is because a radio broadcaster was carrying the arrival live, and reporters dispatched by various media organizations recorded the catastrophe. After the fire, in which 34 of the 97 people on board died, the airship began to disappear into the back pages of history.

Both the collective intelligence that corrects the errors of society and the collective madness that leads it to ruin arise from human beings. Where does the difference come from? Walking across the empty Zeppelin Field, I kept asking the question.