Episode 6

Michael Portillo continues his journey through Germany, guided by his 1936 Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide.

At the birthplace of Germany’s first democracy, Weimar, Michael investigates the beginning of Bauhaus design and visits the movement’s first building, a family house encapsulating a vision of how people might live in the 20th century.

Travelling with author Julia Boyd to Nuremberg, Michael discovers that despite the First World War and the Third Reich, Britons and Americans loved Germany and German culture in the 1930s. Michael hears how one British tourist above all was welcomed by Hitler to Germany, the Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII.

In the medieval Bavarian city of Nuremberg, Michael visits the monumental buildings and parade grounds, which were the stage for vast Nazi rallies to publicise the regime around the world and arouse popular support at home. He finishes in Stuttgart, where an ambitious engineering project is underway that will integrate the city into a high-speed train route connecting Paris with Bratislava.

Michael bags a ride in a high performance Porsche to the manufacturer’s Stuttgart headquarters and discovers that, in the 1930s, the founder designed an affordable car for mass production – the Beetle.