The Mercedes, BMWs, and Audis scream up the outside lane of the autobahn, headlights glaring to clear more timid spirits from their turbo-charged path. The motorways are unique in Europe in having no speed limits, a regime that the German driver regards as an inalienable birthright.
The cheap charters of the leisured, affluent society combined with traditional Wanderlust put Germans at the top of the travellers' league in the age of mass tourism. And seven years of air-conditioned luxury aboard the new generation of high-speed trains have led to a rail revival as hours are shaved from travelling times between German cities.
But as the flags fluttered at halfmast yesterday in mourning for the victims of the Eschede Rail Disaster, the high-pressure, high-speed culture of modern Germany came shuddering to a gruesome, if temporary, halt on the wreckage-strewn northern heath.
For years, the German railway's 104 sleek Intercity Expresses have been carrying 65,000 people a day across the country at high speed in sound-proofed, pressurised carriages.
They are successful, popular and, until 11 o'clock on Wednesday morning, safe. The ICE trains are running faster and faster and pretty much on time. The current top speed of 175 m.p.h. will be increased next year when 43 upgraded trains, running 30 per cent faster and bending like motorcycles into the curves, are brought into operation. By early next century, the magnetically levitated Transrapid train will be hovering above the ground between Hamburg and Berlin and rocketing to the German capital at 280 m.p.h., cutting the current three-hour trip to a mere 55 minutes.
The pressure to go faster and faster is unremitting, driven by consumer demand, economic rivalry, the national railway's survival strategy, and the intense competitiveness of the air, car, and rail industries.
"In our modern societies and in our integrated Europe," said Mr Frank Weingarten of Traffic Forum, a Bonn lobby for the transport industries, "we want to get from one metropolis to another as quickly as possible. It's speed that matters. This is increasingly impossible by car because of traffic congestion."
But the torsoes and limbs being dragged from the Eschede rubble give many pause for thought, questioning the ever greater pace of modern mass travel and the freedoms and mobility it affords.
"We don't yet know the cause of this terrible accident," Mr Weingarten continued, "but whatever, it's an absolute catastrophe for the German railways. Much has been destroyed by this tragedy."
If speed is the drug, the junkies are hardly confined to modern Germany. "It was the French who started fast European rail travel with the TGV, the Germans followed and the British are now following, too, with the channel tunnel," said Mr Werner Kammer, manager of the Society for Rational Transport Policy.
With almost 9,000 people killed in more than two million road traffic accidents in Germany every year, the balance is overwhelmingly in favour of air and rail safety, by a factor of at least 20.
"There is a glaring contradiction in this society," says Mr Kammer. "We Germans like to see ourselves as Green, environment-friendly. But the fast car can't be braked even if it burns up so much energy. We are just not prepared to give up high speed. It's a taboo."