Austria' Iconic Buildings - Großglockner High Alpine Road and Vienna Höhenstraße # 2025

Unemployment, political tensions, and young people's enthusiasm for automobiles. This mixture gave rise to two of Austria's most daring roads in the 1930s. The Vienna Höhenstraße winds its way through the Vienna Woods as the “balcony of the capital,” while the Großglockner High Alpine Road cuts across the Hohe Tauern mountains at an altitude of 2,504 meters. The new ORF III production shows how crisis policy and tourist vision came together, why Vienna's city government opted for “hands instead of excavators,” what risks four thousand workers took every day in the high mountains, and how both projects later became part of the Nazi road network.
After 1945, the economic miracle began. In Vienna, the cobblestone serpentines of the Höhenstraße were transformed into a Sunday promenade for convertible convoys, Vespa clubs, and the new 38A bus line. Traffic on the Grossglockner swelled rapidly in the 1950s, and on peak summer days, a seemingly endless line of cars snaked its way up to the Edelweissspitze, making the high alpine road a symbol of post-war tourism.
Today, both routes are places of longing and points of contention. Joggers, e-bikers, and vintage cars share the historic pavement. Monument protection, climate change, and overtourism collide. A journey along roads that promised freedom and left traces of hope, propaganda, economic boom, and forced labor.