The hitchhikers guide to post-war EuropeRe-enactments on paper Hitchhiking is “an Americas contribution to world civilization which has been largely unexamined by historians” (Schlebecker 1957, 305). Dependent on automobile transportation it originated in the U. S., increased during the great depression and spread throughout Europe after the second world war, possibly inspired by American soldiers. (ibid, 321). In the early 50s begging for rides in Europe became popular among people looking for adventure and freedom. “Students, idealists, ex-soldiers and boy-scouts” as Hassner put it (1953, 28), travelled along routes that were often defined by a network of affordable youth-hostel where the travelers could make new acquaintances and meet friends along the way. In 1951 my father, then 19 years old went out on the road for the first time. His meticulously written diary, photographs and stamps in his passport tells the story of a young man thumbing his way through Germany, still in ruins, to a small island near Cannes where a group of mostly young people had formed a kind of collective. It also tells us something about both drivers and hitchhikers, were they came from and their occupations and motifs.To better understand my father’s experiences, I decided to edit his archival material by combining maps of each days route with selected excerpts from diaries and photographs on a chronological timeline. What I soon found out was that the result of this treatment became rather uninteresting and did not convey neither the sense of adventure nor the interaction with hitchhikers, drivers and locals. By creating (drawn) characters and using excerpts from the diary where action, interaction or reflection took place as script for additional comics pages, another narrative layer was added to the timeline, hence resulting in a fuller, more communicative story. Except from Schlebeckers  article, published in 1958 (one year after Kerouac’s On the Road) to my knowledge, little is to be found on the history of hitchhiking, especially regarding these early years in Europe.The presentation focus on how the additional comics pages (the second layer of narration) which for the most part lacked photographic references, were made and how they might have helped to form a better understanding of this history.

Link to the comic: Cykelfärden som blev en lift 1951 (in Swedish): http://www.seriekonst.se/?page_id=1709