Traffic reports are no more Tailback in Lederhose

Along with the disappearance of the traffic reports from Deutschlandfunk radio, wonderful places such as Wandersleben, Hannoversch Münden‑Hedemünden, Herzsprung and Lederhose were lost from the media too. We pay tribute.

Federalism prevails in Germany. This means the individual federal states make their own decisions in many aspects. Students in German schools are on holiday at different times, depending on which state they live in. And there is a regional abundance of public radio stations, for example Bayerischer Rundfunk, Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Norddeutscher Rundfunk.

There’s a national broadcaster as well, Deutschlandfunk. It originated from RIAS – “Radio in the American Sector” – the radio station established by the US military administration after the Second World War in West Berlin because the Soviets would not allocate any programme time to the West on Berliner Rundfunk, which belonged to the GDR.

Fun fact: RIAS was originally called DIAS: Drahtfunk (wired radio) rather than Rundfunk. So it was from this Drahtfunk that Deutschlandfunk emerged, and on 1st February 2020 Deutschlandfunk did away with the traffic reports. That’s relevant here because this edition is dedicated to the motorway, and congestion is a crucial theme in the context. Furthermore a whole load of bad stuff has happened since 1st February 2020, and you have to ask yourself whether getting rid of the traffic reports has anything to do with it.

Only the longest ones made it into the report

The traffic reports had been broadcast at the top of the hour before each news bulletin since 1964. They were a maximum length of 120 seconds. As Deutschlandfunk had to cover motorways throughout Germany, only the longest jams were included in the report. For car drivers currently out and about in northern Germany, news about tailbacks many kilometres in length might have caused them to gloat maliciously, but did not otherwise have any informative value. For this reason, two-thirds of the 5,328 Deutschlandfunk listeners surveyed in summer 2019 rated the traffic news as unimportant or minimally important. And that was it, they were gone.

Let’s head for Lederhose!

We haven’t missed them, some will now say. But they forget that it’s not just the traffic bulletins that have disappeared, along with them we have lost the places that never made the news other than as a traffic report. We are taking this opportunity to name and honour these places. And our readers who don’t live in Germany and who have never heard of these places before are invited to visit not Neuschwanstein, Berlin or the Oktoberfest on their next European trip, but Wandersleben, Hannoversch Münden‑Hedemünden or Lederhose instead.

Yes, there’s a town named Lederhose, it’s in Thüringen and has a population of 264. And if they’re honest, many fans of the traffic report must confess that the main reason they liked the bulletins so much was because of the eager anticipation as to whether Lederhose, the most amusing motorway exit in the world, would feature. German comedian and musician Helge Schneider made a video about the traffic news, in which he paid tribute to Lederhose, among others. You can watch it on the Deutschlandfunk website.

And here’s the list of fantastic places that have disappeared from the media along with the traffic reports: 
 
This article first appeared in the Stillstand Magazine.