Guest worker route

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The guest worker route, in today's European road network              The guest worker route ↔ red ↔ green: host countries and guest worker countries
↔ dark level: transit and source / destination countries

Guest worker route is the colloquial term for the former travel route between Munich and Istanbul or Thessaloniki , which emerged in the late 1960s . It was the preferred car route for Southeast European guest workers in their home countries during vacation times. In the broadest sense, it runs along the route of the historic European route 5 (north-south axis; via Vienna - Budapest).

From the end of the 1960s onwards, influx of guest workers on this route caused chaos, mainly at the beginning of the summer holidays, at Christmas and at Easter, especially on the Austrian and Yugoslav roads, which at that time were not designed for the transit of around two million people within a few days. The guest worker route often led through narrow villages and towns; By-pass roads and the expansion of the motorway were mostly still in the planning stage. For many years, the route recorded enormous traffic jams and high numbers of accidents.

course

The " Autoput Bratstvo i jedinstvo "
Former 'guest worker route' E 5 (today: D-100) in Güzelyali, Pendik (Istanbul)

The guest worker route led from Munich to Salzburg , from there via Bischofshofen  - Radstadt  - Liezen  - Leoben  - Bruck an der Mur and Graz to Spielfeld at the former Yugoslav border crossing at Spielfeld / Šentilj , thus often through narrow Alpine valleys, but as the only Alpine transit route over no significant pass . In Yugoslavia, the guest worker route ran from the border to Maribor and on via Varaždin , Zagreb and Belgrade to Niš . There the route split and led on the one hand southwards via Skopje and Evzoni to Thessaloniki in Greece and on the other hand eastwards along the ancient Via Militari via Bulgaria to Turkey to Istanbul . The entire course corresponds to today's European roads E 52  - 55  - 651  - 57  - 59  - 70  - 75 or 80 .

An alternative to Graz was the route via Villach with the car loading through the Tauernschleuse between the Böckstein and Mallnitz stations , especially since it was shorter and faster. However, this route did not lead via Jesenice over the Wurzenpass with an 18% gradient, but through the Loibltunnel between Ferlach and Tržič (Neumarktl) on to Ljubljana .

The section of the route running from Zagreb in a south-easterly direction was then called Autoput Bratstvo i jedinstvo (Road of Brotherhood and Unity).

History and regional problems

After the first generation of guest workers had come primarily from Italy and the Iberian Peninsula in the later post-war years, the transition from the period of reconstruction to the economic miracle , the countries in south-eastern Europe and increasingly also Turkey were advertised from the 1960s. In transit traffic from there to the north-western European industrial centers in Germany, the Benelux countries, northern France (the developing EEC ), to England and Scandinavia, the neutral or non-aligned countries Austria and Yugoslavia formed the bottleneck along the Iron Curtain . Because of the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy , the two wars with the occupation and the division of Europe during the Cold War, trunk roads were not designed for this north-west-south-east transit.

The congestion phenomenon first appeared at Christmas 1969, when mass traffic, with ice and snow, caught the authorities unprepared. At the Austro-Yugoslav border crossing at Spielfeld / Šentilj, unrest broke out in a traffic jam, so that the Austrian Armed Forces had to move out with 120 men to maintain order. In the years that followed, the line became increasingly congested. Up to 40,000 vehicles were counted on peak days. Inadequately roadworthy , heavily overloaded vehicles and overtired drivers led to unprecedented accident figures. Around 1975 Austria and Yugoslavia were the countries with the highest number of accidental deaths in Europe; more people died on the guest worker route during vacation times than on all German motorways combined.

The situation only began to ease in the late 1980s, when vacation commuting decreased due to the increasing integration of guest workers, inadequate technical equipment became rarer due to the higher standard of living, and on the other hand, with the end of the Eastern Bloc from 1989, the communal expansion of the European long-distance road and rail connections within the framework of the European Union . The outbreak of the Yugoslav wars in 1991 brought the end of the classic guest worker route, when a large-scale alternative route was created via Vienna, Hungary and Romania or via Italy and by ferry to Greece. After the end of the Yugoslav wars and with the accession of Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria to the EU, the economic and social situation in Europe changed so fundamentally that the typical traffic problems on the guest worker route no longer occur.

Germany

The “eye of the needle” of the route was the through-town of Munich, where, as there was no motorway ring around the city, all traffic had to “torment” itself over the middle ring . This is where the traffic flows from Hamburg , Berlin and Frankfurt met with those from Karlsruhe and Stuttgart and thus the entire travel traffic from Germany , Northern France , the Benelux countries , England and Scandinavia . The result of this was often traffic jams that lasted for kilometers and hours. From here to the Inntal triangle in the direction of the Brenner Pass , the Southeastern Europe transit mixed with the simultaneous holiday traffic to Italy. The route to the Austrian border on the Walserberg was developed as a motorway ( A 8 ), but - in some parts to this day - only in the two-lane original expansion of the 1930s and without a hard shoulder . With the Irschenberg and the border control on the Walserberg, there were also problem areas here.

Current situation
Today, long-distance traffic is generously routed around Munich city center via the motorway ring. Overall, however, the Southeastern Europe transit has shifted more to the A 3 Fürth / Erlangen – Passau and then further via Wels and Graz.

Austria

In Austria, the guest worker route consisted almost exclusively of federal highways until the early 1980s . The Styrian section was seen as the most dangerous part of this route: on 330 km, an average of more than 5000 traffic accidents occurred per year. The Austrian Society for Roads found that “a third of all dangerous spots on Austrian roads were on the guest worker route”. The most accident-prone section was the Leoben bypass built in 1965 , where, for example, between 1965 and 1975, 62 dead and 178 seriously injured were recorded over a length of 12 km. The magazine Der Spiegel described the Leoben bypass in an article from 1975 as a “mass grave for motorists”.

Another section that was very dangerous to drive at the time was the Schoberpass federal road B 113 . This danger point was already highlighted in 1973 by the Board of Trustees for Road Safety in an expertise. The slight incline led to very long overtaking maneuvers for the mostly overloaded vehicles, which resulted in severe head-on collisions. On September 9, 1974, ten people died at this point in a single accident due to reckless overtaking. This was the 154th accident on the Schoberpass federal road - 108 of which were caused by foreign drivers in transit. The nearby accident hospital in Kalwang was busy with 70 beds due to the accidents on the guest worker route. A part of the cemetery in Kalwang was intended for the foreign victims of the B 113 accident, there are still a few graves of unfortunate guest workers there. In 1974 alone, 36 unfortunate Turkish guest workers were buried in this cemetery.

The route at that time contained countless local crossings in the Ennstal and from Leoben southwards . For the neighbors it was only possible to cross the street safely at peak times with the help of the gendarmerie , many pedestrians were victims of transit traffic. With a 70% share of foreigners in traffic on peak weekends, only a maximum of 54% of foreigners involved in accidents were registered.

For Austria, which was just beginning to establish itself as a tourist destination , transit traffic was an enormous economic problem. The fuel prices were higher than in Germany and much higher than in Yugoslavia. Those passing through were not very motivated to even make stopovers for food or even an overnight stay, so that Austria only incurred costs. Due to the not yet existing corresponding international agreements, traffic violations could hardly be punished, so that mobile express courts were used at times along the route . In 1975 a case caused a sensation in which a gendarme was hit and seriously injured; the driver involved in the accident had to deposit 700 marks (around € 350) in a fast-track process  . The law enforcement officer died a week later without the driver being able to be prosecuted. Also, the numerous unsafe vehicles could hardly be withdrawn from traffic, as otherwise even worse vehicles would have to be expected. Further transport or accommodation of the people by the authorities would also have overwhelmed any infrastructure.

Overtiredness and the lack of traffic discipline of the guest workers traveling through as well as their mostly technically inadequate vehicles led to the most serious head-on collisions almost every day. The Austrian Board of Trustees for Road Safety therefore started a traffic education campaign in 1972 under the title “Help us Kolaric!” In order to make guest workers more aware of traffic, because driver training was extremely inadequate in the countries of origin at the time. In addition, numerous risk areas such as inclines and curves, but also rest areas in rural Austria were signposted in Serbo-Croatian , Greek and Turkish and leaflets were distributed in nine languages ​​(up to Persian ), but this was without any particular success.

In addition, the guest workers left enormous amounts of rubbish and faeces on their way, a circumstance that increasingly turned the tolerant relationship of the years of progress on the part of the locals to the “ Tschuschen ” - also coming from Germany - into xenophobia .

In the 1960s and 1970s, Austria concentrated on expanding the routes to Italy, particularly the Brenner motorway , the Tauern motorway and the southern motorway , in order to respond to Italian tourism. The expansion of the southeast diagonal had long been classified as subordinate. Sit-in strikes with road blockades (1974 in Wildon and 1977 in Peggau ) were intended to accelerate the expansion of the planned bypass roads . The Pyhrn Autobahn A 9 was largely completed on the Styrian side by the late 1980s. However, since residents protests north of the Pyhrn Pass on the Upper Austrian side until the 1990s, the traffic flows of guest workers could not shift from the Salzach-Enns axis to the western motorway. The upper Ennstal between Flachau and Liezen, the Ennstal federal road B 320 , remained the bottleneck par excellence until the end of the guest worker route. Attempts to reroute over the Pötschenpass ( Salzkammergutstrasse B 145) or over the Pyhrnpassstrasse B 138 also brought them together again at Liezen at the latest.

The last problem point in Austria was the border crossing in Spielfeld: The clearance speed of the customs officers of the Eastern Bloc countries at that time was extremely low and, even with the Yugoslav authorities, averaged around 20 vehicles per minute and thus well below the traffic volume. Around Christmas 1974 there were 70 kilometers of traffic jams - from the border back to the Styrian capital Graz - with a waiting time of 30 hours.

Current situation
Today, transit to Southeast Europe no longer takes the Munich - Salzburg, Tauern and Ennstal autobahns, but primarily via Passau , A 8 Innkreis autobahn with "Welser Westspange" and the Pyhrn autobahn to Spielfeld. Thus, the route is completely developed as a motorway. One route variant leads via Vienna and the connections that are now well developed in Hungary (such as European routes 60 and 65 ). With the full expansion, this fateful chapter in Austrian transport history came to an end in the 1990s. Only Ennstal Straße is still considered to be accident prone and dangerous today. A political solution for the full expansion of this section has still not been reached.

The guest worker route is only partially passable in its original form. From Radstadt to St. Michael bei Leoben , most of the route can still be driven as it was at the time, colloquially known as the “death route”. Today it is about the dismantled local connections, some of which run parallel to the motorway. Remnants of infrastructure and signs can still be found along the route.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ B. Grabher: Mapping Memories of Mobilities. A counter-topographical analysis of the Southeast European "Gastarbeiterroute". In: Faculty of Humanities Theses. Universiteit Utrecht, 2015, accessed on March 30, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Sarah Levy: Legendary guest worker route: “Where are you going to Istanbul?” In: Spiegel online. July 27, 2012, accessed on March 31, 2018 : "At the end of the sixties, the road became notorious as a guest worker route."
  3. ↑ namely the valley passes Eben im Pongau / Mandlingpass (862 m) and Schoberpass (849 m).
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k E 5: Terror of tin and blood . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1975, pp. 92-101 ( Online - Aug. 25, 1975 ).
  5. ↑ Weblink Payer: Border crossing / Gastarbajteri .
  6. ↑ Traffic education . In: Auto-Touring. The Austrian motor vehicle newspaper. Official organ of the ÖAMTC . June / July, 1972 ( gastarbajteri.at [accessed on January 19, 2010] advertisement for ordering leaflets and posters).
  7. ↑ multilingual warning signs along the "guest worker route" . In: Weblink Gastarbajteri .
  8. ↑ In 2009 the A 8 had a higher volume of traffic for the first time than the A 1 in the Salzburg – Wels section.