Andrea Hiott

Thinking Small

˚˚ The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle

Copyright © 2012 by Andrea Hiott All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life, in its height and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the drivers, the passengers, and the road.
—Franz Kafka

Introduction In 1949, a ship called the MS Westerdam departed from the coast of Europe, its hundreds of passengers headed toward U.S. shores. Nestled deep in the ship’s cargo compartment, a pair of headlights peeped out of a dark tarp; two wide, open circles leading to the soft curves of what would soon be known as the world’s most recognizable car. Protesters, rebels, dissidents, politicians, businessmen, the world’s corporate elite—all would eventually become entwined in its story. By the end of the 1960s, it would do what no other car had done before: transcend age, class, and country to become a symbol adopted by them all. Americans would call the car the Beetle. In other places it would become the Flea, the Turtle, the Vocho, the Foxi, the Buba, the Fusca, the Poncho, and the Mouse. Over the years, the car developed a cult following as well as a more public persona. It had fan club after fan club created on its behalf; it showed up in the films of Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick; Disney endearingly dubbed it “The Love Bug”; it was even driven—briefly—by James Bond. For decades, the car filled college towns and campuses, the choice of students and faculty alike. It appeared on the cover of Abbey Road. John Lennon had a white one in his driveway. Packs of them dotted the beaches of California, surfboards strapped to their roofs. A children’s game even spontaneously developed around the car as kids scanned the roads in search of it: Punch Bug red! No punch back! The car became so ubiquitous that pop artist Andy Warhol included it in his iconic series of silk screens, placing it in the company of personalities such as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.

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Today the original Volkswagen is still known as the longestrunning and best-selling single car design in history, and it is the only car to have been brought back by popular demand . . . twice. Sometimes referred to as the world’s most huggable car, perhaps no other automobile has ever been lavished with such attention and affection. But onboard the MS Westerdam on that cold winter day in 1949, none of that had yet come to pass. In those days, very few thought the car had potential. Reaching U.S. shores for the first time, the car had much more in common with the millions of immigrants coming over on similar ships, men and women who had been through dark times and were now seeking refuge or hoping to reinvent themselves, eager to find out if what they’d heard about the American dream was real. It had been a long road. In fact, after nearly two decades of work and planning, the Volkswagen had only barely made it into existence at all. During the Second World War, the car’s country and factory were all but destroyed. Caught in the ugliness of the Nazi machine, it became a symbol of the hated party. By 1949, one of the men responsible for it had committed suicide and another had been kidnapped and placed in prison, where he languished, imagining he’d failed to fulfill one of his lifelong dreams. Needless to say, when the car was unloaded on the docks of New York City that first time, it was not greeted warmly. Not only because of the dark stain of war that washed over with it, but also because of the undeniable fact that the round little car just didn’t fit in. America had been through a long Depression and a long war, but now unprecedented prosperity was finally leaking into the land and the country was on the verge of an automotive boom. The United States of the 1950s would be marked by wide elegant cars—the bigger the better—with flamboyant tail fins, extra comforts, and plenty of chrome. In contrast, the Volkswagen was oddly shaped and excruciatingly austere. People found it comical, awkward, and strange. And yet on those very same New York shores, in pockets

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throughout the city, there were men and women—people considered just as out of place as the car itself was in those days—who were feeling a new kind of energy, readying themselves to take the risk of dissenting, of going against the common way of doing things, of thinking strange. Likewise, back in Germany, a similar change was happening as the country struggled to come to terms with its dark history. On both shores, there was a desire to evolve from within, a need for individual freedom and economic responsibility, for less empty extravagance and for more meaning and truth. It would take a while to mature, but a revolution was rising, and the Beetle would be at the center of the wave. After so many years of obstacles and near misses, the car would finally be in just the right place at just the right time, merging with the larger flow of modernizing governments and evolving markets to revive a sense of joy and wonder in the world. Beetle owners have a saying: They don’t find their cars, their cars find them. To some degree, that’s how this book came to be. My first real encounter with the original Beetle happened only after I’d graduated from college and moved to Germany. Riding back to Berlin after an artist residency in the countryside, lulled and drowsy in the backseat of an SUV, I was shaken from my daze when we came upon one particular town. That evening, the landscape had been empty and dark until suddenly there was the bright illumination of towering glass structures and fiery smokestacks: I was overwhelmed at the way this alien-like city suddenly sprang up out of the somber, empty terrain. One of the German friends I was with saw the effect it had on me: That’s Wolfsburg, she said, Isn’t it strange? She went on to explain that this town was originally built by the Nazis; Adolf Hitler had built it for his car. What car? I asked. You don’t know it? she wondered aloud. I thought everyone in America knows the Bug. In German, “Volkswagen” means “People’s Car.” At first, it seemed impossible to me that the same car that was once a child of Nazi Germany could grow up to become a symbol of freedom,

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The Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg, 2011.

democracy, and love. But as I would soon discover in my research, the car had always been meant for the people, and it lived up to that dream in ways no one expected and no one could have planned. Through all the years of its development, the basic look and feel of the car did not change, but the world around it did. Like a still point through the storm, it survived the chaos of so much contradiction and turmoil, and—thanks to the persistence of the men who championed it—eventually proved that an idea created in darkness can indeed become a vessel for light.

Part One

Wobbly First Steps

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“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”
—Joseph Campbell

1 William Bernbach did not look like a revolutionary. His sober meticulous suits and conservative ties did not catch the eye or distinguish him from any of the other advertising men walking New York City’s bustling streets in the 1950s. Thin and compact, with short dark hair neatly combed to one side, Bill had a small physique that was almost childlike. True, he was the creative head of his own advertising agency—Doyle Dane Bernbach, soon to be familiarly known as DDB—but he didn’t come off as a typical executive of the time: his evenings were rarely full of expensive dinner parties or multiple martinis, he wasn’t embroiled in a string of heated affairs, he didn’t own a pristine country home, or live in a fancy penthouse uptown. Instead, for much of his life, Bill lived in an anonymous neighborhood in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, he took the subway into work each day, and he left on time every night to go home and have dinner with his kids and his wife. Bill may not have looked like the kind of man who could catch the world’s attention, but he was, and by the late 1950s, people were beginning to notice him. Unlike the rest of the cookie-cutter ad agencies on Madison Avenue, DDB had a fresh sense of purpose filling its rooms, drawing people in. Walking into their offices in those days, through the haze of cigarette smoke, past the ringing phones and the interactive rush of talented young men and women, one always found Bill Bernbach at the center of the buzz, his Brooklyn-tinged voice—simultaneously gentle and disarming—leaking out of his office and into the halls, his door always open. There was something alluring about his clear, blue-eyed gaze, and as the years passed, Bill rose to be known as

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the creative center of his agency, the person all the art directors and copywriters wanted to speak to about their work, the man who could get that work into print, or make it disappear without a trace. Bill was confident, and his confidence became DDB’s backbone. It’s what made so many want to be near him—his approval was a good luck charm of sorts—but it was also what made people hide from him at times, unsure or unready to face his clear and veracious eye. There were no rules with Bill; only vigilance.

Bill Bernbach, the unexpected revolutionary.

The crew at DDB was a motley and roughish bunch, in no way typical of most advertising agencies in New York. In certain younger circles, DDB was considered one of the only ad agencies where a person could work on something different, something exciting, something “meaningful,” if you dared to use that term. Whereas other successful agencies at the time were full of serious-faced men in expensive suits, DDB was more like an experimental powwow. Art and writing were respected as crafts within themselves rather than as the means to a financial end. DDB employees worked in teams; they communicated and sparred. Those who witnessed this process called it creative, in a way that the advertising world had never really seen before. DDB was different, and different was exciting. But that didn’t mean the agency was going to leave its mark. In the larger scheme

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of things, DDB was more likely to be beaten by the establishment than it was to change it. After all, in 1959, the majority of Americans had never encountered a DDB ad. When it came to the heavyweights of economics and industries, DDB was small: They didn’t have any of the accounts that mattered—no car company from Detroit, no major tobacco brand, no national retail chain. And there was something else, too. In business terms, DDB was often dismissed as a quirky place that did “ethnic” advertising, a crude way of saying that most people considered DDB a Jewish company that did “unabashedly, recognizably Jewish” ads. Most of their clients were Jewish. Bill Bernbach was Jewish. And many on the staff were Jewish as well. Thus DDB’s success was a local success: advertisements for El Al airlines or Ohrbach’s department store caught the eye but had a limited scope, catering strictly to Manhattan and its boroughs. Bernbach’s shop was no more a threat to the established giants than were the strange beatniks and folk singers who had started congregating downtown. Advertising was incredibly lucrative in those days though, and the big agencies were prospering. Their ads showed beautiful and successful people enjoying a product, and upon seeing such stimulation, customers were supposed to be stimulated too. This underlying equation of “consumption equals happiness” had proven appeal: America’s culture of materialism was thriving, fed on eye-popping advertisements for big houses, big cars, big smiles, and big words. It was the decade of dazzle, and yet as that decade entered its final year, some began to wonder if any of it had been real. The country’s foundations no longer seemed so solid. A recession eventually set in, and it wasn’t solely economic. The spirit of the country began to change; there was a sense of disquiet. As poet Allen Ginsberg wrote in the Village Voice in 1959: “No one in America knows what will happen. No one is in real control.” The country was begging for a shift in perspective, and that would mean taking risks and thinking strange. And DDB epitomized thinking strange. Take Bill’s newest

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choice of projects, for instance: a German car that, for more than one reason, looked like an impossible sale. Manhattan’s major agencies were making millions advertising the cars of Detroit: Buick, Lincoln, Chrysler, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Ford—these were the brand names Americans craved and bought. One such advertisement for Pontiac depicted a large crowd chanting, “We’re everybody . . . and we want a Big Car . . .” Even the sound of the door closing had to be big. As the general manager of Chevrolet boasted in 1957, “We’ve got the finest door slam this year we’ve ever had—a big car slam. . . .” The Volkswagen, a car Americans would later nickname the “The Beetle,” seemed to represent the opposite of such a desire. Though it had been trying to enter the market ever since that first transatlantic trip in 1949, its overall sales compared to the numbers coming out of Detroit were laughable, barely a blip on America’s automotive map. Some at DDB couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps Bill wasn’t wasting his time with Volkswagen’s little car. Foreign companies just weren’t a market that big advertising agencies in the United States were courting in those days, and, lack of monetary gain aside, a Jewish advertising agency representing a German car just wasn’t the most likely combination. Nevertheless, Bill wanted Volkswagen’s business: He had a thing or two he wanted to say about the concept of bigness he saw many American corporations and advertising firms touting, and he had no qualms about flying overseas to Wolfsburg and visiting a German car factory in order to have that chance. He soon found out, however, that few others at DDB felt the same way. More than ten years had passed since the end of the war, but some wounds had not healed and the anger it had fostered still simmered. Feelings had been held in, papered over. After all, this was the car that The New York Times had referred to as the “Baby Hitler” in 1938, and while it’s been said that no baby is ugly, this one certainly had a unique face. Trekking to a country that Americans had once hated about as much as anyone could hate a place, meeting with former enemies who had fought on the side of the Nazis during the Sec-

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ond World War, having to find the good points about a car that, when people were being generous, was described as “a motorized tortoise” or a “pregnant roller skate”—needless to say, it wasn’t the most attractive account that Bill could have offered his staff. Nevertheless, the men Bill eventually convinced to work on the account—a beatnik Jewish boy (Julian Koenig), a loudmouthed Greek who always seemed to be getting himself into hot water (George Lois), and a German American who had very unresolved feelings about his parents’ German past (Helmut Krone)—would come together and, in a moment of seemingly fated timing, set a fire under Madison Avenue, and the entire nation beyond.

2 Adolf Hitler’s eyes

were reportedly “bright blue—bordering on the violet.” In the psychological reports done on him in the 1940s by the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), there is mention of his “hypnotic glance” and the ability of his eyes to “bore through people.” One policeman describes Hitler’s gaze as “fatal,” with an “irresistible glare.” But by other accounts, his eyes are “dead” and “lacking in brilliance and the sparkle of genuine animation.” Perhaps all of these descriptions are true. When I look at his portrait today, however, I have to admit that I don’t see an incomprehensible monster: I see a man who sensed the power available to us all, and then violently abused it, brutalizing and destroying millions of lives, including his own. It’s hard to imagine living in a city that was founded by such a man, but every citizen in Wolfsburg lives with that legacy. Without Adolf Hitler, their town would never have been born. The town’s original name wasn’t even Wolfsburg. At the time of its official creation, the town was being made to house the factory for a car, and the entire project was being funded by a

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division of the Nazi German Labor Front (the DAF) called Strength through Joy. Thus, in May of 1938, Adolf Hitler christened Wolfsburg “The Town of the Strength through Joy Car,” the town of the Volkswagen. Volkswagen was a generic term being used in technical and automotive circles at the time to mean a car for the common man, something still thought impractical and impossible in Germany by most. The idea of a Volkswagen carried a lot of power: To speak of motorizing the population was to speak of giving people more control over their lives, an idea that evoked both awe and desire. As one German automotive writer named Wilfried Bade proclaimed in 1938: “Until now the automobile has conquered the world. Now begins the true possession of the automobile by the people.” The dream of the car, and the dream of the city being built for it, went hand in hand. Each spoke to the masses, each served as a symbol of unification, and each was directly linked to strengthening the nation through industry—all major aspects of the Nazi conception of power that was taking hold of the country then. Hitler’s Town of the Strength through Joy Car was originally created to be a “model German workers’ city,” an urban and residential center that incorporated the Third Reich’s emphasis on unified work. Just as the People’s Car was supposed to be a car that all Germans would drive, Hitler wanted its city to be a model on which all industrial towns could be built. It was to be a place of common purpose, where men and women worked together toward the realization of a singular goal, the ultimate point being the strengthening of Germany. Industry, alongside loyalty and labor, would structure the nation, make the Fatherland strong. The hope for a People’s Car had been rising in Europe for over twenty years. It was a kind of leitmotif, in fact, recurring regularly though never resolved; automobiles were driven only by the rich and elite. Hitler was the first person to come to power in Europe who saw the mass production of automobiles as an essential industrial and national aim. He envisioned a great motorized nation, a nation that could expand and expand and ex-

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pand. Germany needed more Lebensraum, more living space, he told the citizens. The motor car was a natural part of that plan. Hitler came to power in 1933 with cars on his mind and his agenda, but the process was full of twists and turns and it was only five years later, in the spring of 1938, that it began to look as if his goal might be achieved. The first steps toward Volksmotorisierung, motorizing the people, were being made, and the erection of the new auto city was proof. Land for the enormous car factory had been found, and Albert Speer, the Inspector General for Building in Berlin at that time, had approved the location. Plans had been drawn up, an engineer had been hard at work on prototypes of the car. It was time for the cornerstone of the factory to be laid, time to celebrate the coming wave of vehicles with pride, and on May 26, 1938, the Nazis planned an elaborate fête in The Town of the Strength through Joy Car. The German Labor Front sent invitations to over 50,000 people, though they were not invited so much as ordered to attend. Trumpets blared. Long bloodred banners were unfurled. Twentyeight special Town of the Strength through Joy Car–bound trains left from all parts of the country and carried the citizens to the grounds where they were promised the new industrial town was soon to rise. This place, the propaganda promised, would be better than any American city, and Germany’s new car factory would be better than anything yet built by America’s automotive hero Henry Ford. Members of the Hitler Youth and the SS marched. The workers were on show: Bricklayers were given pristine white outfits and black top hats to wear; carpenters were decked out in black velvet and corduroy. Everyone raised his arm as Hitler appeared, arriving in the front seat of one of the prototypes of his Strength through Joy Car. People pointed at the new automobile, and discussed it; perhaps they imagined owning one, too. For those who couldn’t make it to the opening ceremony, a radio show was broadcast, one of the first of its kind, detailing Hitler’s every move. It was supposed to be a day

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of triumph, but spectators who were there would later report there was a strange tension in the air, a kind of growing apprehension. Perhaps it was the chancellor’s aloofness that sent such an impression reverberating through the crowd. He certainly wasn’t himself that day. In previous automotive events, Hitler had al-

The ceremony to inaugurate the new factory in The Town of the Strength through Joy Car. Adolf Hitler prepares to speak.

ways been fervent, even joyful, as he talked passionately about this project’s potential. On the day of the ceremony, however, the car was no longer at the forefront, or even close to the forefront of Hitler’s mind: By the spring of 1938, a new reality was setting in and other parts of his grand scheme were now in motion as well. Hitler’s focus was not on the People’s Car that day because he was preoccupied with the war that he knew was imminent. His desired moment had arrived. Already Austria had been an-

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nexed, had come too willingly, some would say. And the pogrom of the Crystal Night (Kristallnacht) was only six months away— that horrific and incendiary evening in which hundreds of synagogues were set on fire, Jewish shops and homes were destroyed and plundered, the shattered glass of their windows littering the streets, and around 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps or killed. The political air in Germany was toxic, but few were aware of the noxious fumes that surrounded them. The celebration for the car was in many ways a perfect metaphor for the mood of the country: lush decoration slathered onto a deepening

The crowd gathered in The Town of Strength through Joy Car for the cornerstone-laying ceremony. Three prototypes of the People’s Car face them, guarded by the Nazi authorities.

sense of unrest. People looked at the spectacle and tried not to notice the anxiety swelling underneath. Watching the black-and-white footage from the ceremony, I notice Hitler is sitting up front with the driver when his car enters the grounds. It was well known that Hitler’s preferred place in any car was next to the driver. (On long trips, he liked to wear a leather driving cap and study the road atlas, planning the route.) But in the footage of him leaving the celebration that day, the führer is sitting in the backseat of the open-roofed car and

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looks much happier than he did while giving his speech. That old automotive joy flashes in his face again, perhaps because he is no longer alone: An older man in an oversized tweed coat, his belly a bit large, his face creased from age and perpetual squinting, has joined him. Hitler is obviously content to be in this man’s company. He is turned toward him, conversing in a casual sort of way as the crowds lining either side of the road wave and cheer when the little Volkswagen chugs past. It’s a striking moment, I realize, for in that brief instant the car is carrying both its fathers, two men whose legacies will follow it forever, for better and for worse. Cushioned in its backseat is Adolf Hitler, and in that same backseat is the Bug’s engineer and designer, Ferdinand Porsche.

“I am definitely the kind of person who very much appreciates the difficulty and value of looking at something everyone is familiar with in a fresh, new way. Candidly, at first I had very little interest in this book because I am so familiar with the VW/Porsche story. But to my delight, as I looked through it I found a fascinating new perspective on the events. Also many untold stories, such as the beginnings of Doyle Dane Bernbach, the greatest advertising agency of all time. My congratulations to Ms. Hiott for a marvelous piece of work.” —Jerry Seinfeld

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