A tour of the best of German - Newsnight
How German cars beat British motors - and kept going.
The automotive industry in the UK was once one of the biggest competitors of Germany; now it has become one of its greatest assets, argues the author Dominic Sandbrook How to speed up Germany far.
It was forty years ago, most major automakers have been putting the finishing touches on a product from Germany that would change their image forever.
The Volkswagen Golf is one of the best-selling car of all time He debuted in 1974, the year West Germany won the home World Cup in Munich and the German group Kraftwerk released their revolutionary album Autobahn.
Since then, the Golf is a shortcut to success on the mass market Last year, VW sold over 430,000 Golfs throughout Europe - a staggering 125,000 ahead of his nearest rival.
This year, they brought a new, seventh incarnation And even if you do own a t you, it's definitely one in a drive near you.
It is of course a very familiar story made in Germany is one of the great successes of the small age surprising post-war, then, that the 21st century Germany orders probably more economic and political clout than any gross time in its history in peacetime.
If you want to know why Angela Merkel called the shots in Europe, the German automobile plants are a very good place to start.
However, the automotive industry in Britain is a shadow of itself, we still make almost a million and a half cars per year, which is good news for thousands of British engineers But these days, we do for other people.
The iconic Mini plant at Cowley, for example, is celebrating its centenary this year, it was founded in 1913 by entrepreneur William Morris as the home for its legendary Morris Oxford.
Today, it still makes thousands of cars - but it makes for BMW.
Without Major Ivan Hirst, it may have been Volkswagen as we know today, said Judy Booth, curator of the Museum Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers in Reading.
Ivan Hirst was a hero to his quiet unassuming manner; a man who not only saved a fledgling car company, but a man whose humanity has found a way through the problems left by the war.
It is a similar story in Crewe, the home of another great British icon, Bentley - which actually belongs to Volkswagen.
There are half a century, and even less when Morris was at its peak, it would have seemed unimaginable But the sad truth is that car companies in Britain are themselves to blame.
There are seventy years, at the end of World War II, Germany was on its knees after the fall of the empire of Hitler, its auto industry in ruins.
In August 1945, the British army sent a major Ivan Hirst called to take control of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg giant, which had been built under the Nazis to produce cars people to the German masses.
Ignoring his superiors skeptical Hirst could see the potential amid the debris of smashed Wolfsburg plant.
The reconstruction of Volkswagen, he thought, would be a step towards the rehabilitation of Germany as a prosperous, peaceful European ally And of course he was right.
In the coming years, production restarted Hirst a car we know today as the Beetle and from there, VW flying.
Legend of the image of a VW Beetle shells in factory in Germany in 1960.
Late 1950, with production and employment dynamics, West Germany took advantage of an economic miracle memories of Nazism were banned, and the Germans began to rebrand as forward-thinking, hard-working and Supreme modern industrial nation.
Even the Mini was a reflection of our industrial and imperial decline.
Meanwhile, Britain skirted the light of the affluent society for decades we had been one of the great nations making World Car And yet, slowly but surely, the wheels began to come off.
The men who ran our car companies - men like William Morris, who became president of the newly merged British Motor Corporation BMC at the age of 74 years - were elderly people and autocratic.
Instead of embracing new technologies and exploit the expanding European markets, they declined the continental competition and preferred to sell cheap cars in former British colonies.
Even the most famous British car of all - the Mini, launched in 1959 - is a reflection of our industrial and imperial decline.
With fuel prices soaring after disastrous offers Britain to recover the Suez Canal in Egypt in 1956, BMC designers were told to produce a car that was smaller and require less fuel.
And although the Mini was a huge success, there was a sting in the tail BMC actually lost 30 for every car it sold.
Far from being a cool Sixties symbol, therefore, the Mini was really a symbol of something rotten at the heart of the economy of Britain He was a metaphor designed brilliantly to an industry crippled by complacent leaders terrible salesmanship and self-fatal Culture satisfaction.
All the time, the German automotive industry has gone from strength to strength crucial, it enjoyed excellent working relationship - a stark contrast to the pitched battles in most auto plants troubled Britain.
In Germany, management and unions have worked closely in the interest of the common good is because by law all major German companies are required to set up works councils, where bosses and unions must work together in a spirit of mutual trust.
In Britain, by contrast, auto plants in the 1960s and 1970s have become battlegrounds every day, where union delegates complacent activists and leaders fought a war of open class.
A fact probably says everything about the difference between Great Britain and Germany in the years after the war in 1978, for every day that German manufacturers lost to industrial action, we lost ten.
Image Caption striking workers outside Vauxhall in the UK in 1967.
When Margaret Thatcher came to power a year later, the game was probably for the drivers of the car industry in Britain were already switching to foreign engines - not least of German models such as Mercedes, Porsche, Audi and especially BMW, who has mastered the art of high-end brand image.
Dominic Sandbrook is the author of several history books on Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, including White Heat, state of emergency and more recently, Seasons In The Sun.
It presents Das Auto Germans, their cars and us, which will be broadcast on BBC Two at 9:00 p.M. Sunday, August 4
In 1994, BMW bought the last vestige of the British car production mass, the Rover Group A year later, in the film Goldeneye, James Bond Pierce Brosnan was even equipped with a BMW Z3, supposedly equipped Stinger missiles.
At present, the cars had become the ultimate metaphor for extraordinary industrial renaissance in Germany - and the collapse of a large part of the manufacturing industry in the UK.
Today, the results are all around us thanks largely to the success of its manufacturers, Germany Angela Merkel is the largest economy in Europe and the fourth in the world and the second largest exporter .
It is little wonder, then, that if Britain published a huge budget deficit of 120 billion in 2012-13, the Germans managed to start a small surplus - as they have done so often in recent years .
And it is little wonder, either, that in the midst of the terrible turmoil in the capitals of the euro zone, the Germans ended up calling the shots.
From the standpoint of Britain, the tragedy is that we always had the skills, but we lack good management, good labor, priorities right, and, quite frankly, the work ethic and right the end, we paid a heavy price.
Image Caption Minis produced at the BMW plant in Cowley, Oxford, in 2006.
There are, of course, a good side we are still doing more than one million cars per year, creating jobs for thousands of British workers even during the crisis of the euro zone, the UK automotive production continued to grow, while German production actually declined last year.
But there is no escaping the fact that the Germans are still more than four times more cars than we do and what happens to the profits of all Minis Bentleys and we're so proud They end in Wolfsburg and Munich.
Once our car industry now, was one of the main German competitors, it has become one of its greatest assets.
There are half a century, they were kneeling Yet with grain and dedication, they worked their way now, their car showrooms with their national finances, the Germans are the envy of the world to be honest, I rather admire them for it.
Das Auto Germans, their cars and we will be broadcast on BBC Two at 9:00 p.M. Sunday, August 4 and will be available on the BBC iPlayer.
How German cars beat British motors and continued to go BBC News, German cars, beaten, UK.