Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle

by Andrea Hiott

  This whirlwind of change was not only attributable to an increase in travel and immigration, it was also a matter of the mixing and meeting of new ideas and new ways of life. This was especially true in the United States, as internally, the country began to move around and explore itself (thanks in large part to the cars of men like Ford). The more Model T’s were sold, the more roads were built, and the more people migrated and mingled. In fact, by 1920, after the expenditure of education, road construction was the country’s biggest public project and expense. As the country became more motorized, people explored new areas, they encountered more choices, and this affected their lifestyles. As the American John Keats wrote in The Insolent Chariots, “The automobile changed our dress, manners, social customs,4 vacation habits, the shape of our cities, consumer purchasing patterns, common tastes, and positions in intercourse.” All that change was just beginning to roar in the 1920s, and with it came resistance and fear. It was exactly this kind of fear, for example, that made Bill Bernbach’s Jewish family disown him for marrying an Italian girl.

  When American cars first started coming over to Europe in the mid-1920s, it caused a similar shock. It was as if space aliens had arrived on four wheels. In the past decade, the United States had advanced at rapid speed, but to see firsthand the proof of how far advanced the “people over the pond” were was astonishing and unnerving. Companies in Europe reacted immediately, trying to readjust their own automotive plans, but they were still far behind, especially Germany. In 1928, there was already one car for every 5 Americans. In England, there was a car for every 38; in France, Germany’s great rival across the Rhine, there was a car for every 43 people. And in Germany, the country that had once been the leader in technology and perhaps also the most powerful nation in the world, there was one car for every 134 citizens, a statistic that left them almost a decade in the past. By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, there would be only 489,270 automobiles registered in Germany, which meant about one percent of the population owned a car.

  There were both economic and social reasons for this. The First World War had debilitated industry, which meant it had also stymied the way modern machines were viewed. Many in Germany still rejected mass forms of production such as assembly lines because they were antithetical to the idea of German Quality Work, of artisanship that came with seeing one’s technical skills as something necessarily tied to one’s own inner life, rather than just something to pay the bills. Assembly lines and machines did not appeal to the German way of life, and yet industry and progress certainly did, and the two things were looking more and more inseparable. Voices could be heard on all ends of the spectrum: some felt Germany needed to embrace these new ideas and develop itself along these lines or else fear falling even further behind. Others felt no economic gain was worth reducing jobs to one repetitive mechanical gesture; humans were not cogs on a wheel.

  Through the twenties, the Weimar Republic debated and debated these things. Plans were drawn for a great highway system that would connect Germany and pave the way, literally, for a new way of thinking about the motor car. But none of those ideas or plans got anywhere close to being unanimously favored in the government, or in the public at large. German states kept taxes high on oil and gasoline, advocating the intricate railway network that had developed instead. Train fares were kept affordable, and many argued that it made little sense to invest in motorizing Germany when the railway was so efficient. At the same time, however, big German cities were selling out of the books about industrial American pioneers such as Henry Ford, and universities were beginning to teach new American models of business. This push and pull of fascination with progress and industry, and desire to remain true to past ideals, left the country at a standstill. The Germans wanted to go where the Americans had gone, but they did not want to take the same route.

  At university in the midst of all of this, Nordhoff could see that the future of German automobiles would be tied to the innovations already in use in America. He didn’t see how it could go any other way, but following the example of Henry Ford did not mean having to make the same decisions, or even the same kinds of cars. There were other American models coming to the forefront now too, new cars being tested and sold in a competitive market no longer dominated by the Model T. For those who could read English, as Heinrich did well (later, he would subscribe to the New Yorker and diligently read every page), it was possible to seek out these new methods and study them. He also wanted to study them firsthand, which is why he applied for a job at the Nash Motors Company in Detroit. It was a company that had been created by a former General Motors man, with a give the customer more than he’s paid for philosophy that Nordhoff found very appealing. Things looked good for Heinrich at first: The Nash Motors Company was interested in him and offered him a job. But by the time they’d started serious negotiations, it was 1929, and the United States was on the cusp of something Heinrich hadn’t bargained for: the stock market crash. After Black Friday, Nash wrote to Heinrich to tell him they were sorry but things had changed. Suddenly there were not even enough jobs for Americans; Heinrich would have to find something else.

  Luckily, there was another option for getting experience with the American production model. One big piece of news in Germany in the late 1920s was the interest that General Motors was showing for a car company in Germany called Adam Opel. GM was emerging as the largest automobile manufacturer in America at the time: In 1928, GM represented 40 percent of the American market with profits of over a quarter of a billion dollars. Alfred P. Sloan, charming but tough, with thick facial features and the rugged build of a Marlboro Man, toured the Adam Opel company, looking to expand into the European market.

  By the end of the 1920s, Fordism had been widely accepted for well over a decade, and now another business model was also coming into play, the GM model. Alfred P. Sloan believed that GM was initiating a new era in automobiles, and he described the change as a historical progression of sorts: Luxury cars had come first—Sloan called this “the class market”—then there had come Ford’s “mass market,” where the population had become motorized, and now, ushered in by GM and Sloan, there was “the mass-class market,” a time characterized primarily by choice, a time where money was no longer the problem but rather large amounts of consumers got to decide what they most desired from among an array of elegant options.

  People were also learning how to feel richer with less. General Motors invented installment buying, for example, allowing the population to enjoy a product while earning the money to pay for it. By the mid-1920s, one out of every three cars that General Motors sold was financed through an internal loan with the General Motors Acceptance Corporation. American car companies were also becoming more aware of the international market and the possibilities of what we today refer to as globalization. Because of innovations in communications and transportation, the foreign market was being seen as a viable, untapped consumer base, full of millions of people who would one day buy cars.

  The Ford Company had opened plants on its own in Germany, England, and France, selling cars under its own brand. But GM thought the best business move was to invest in the future of Europe from the inside, to be there when the inevitable auto industry boom did finally occur. GM was not interested in building a People’s Car or in motorizing the German population as Ford had done in America with the Model T. What they wanted to do was “acquire companies in individual countries and build upon their existing reputations.”5 Opel was the perfect company for that: not only did it have a solid, indestructibly German reputation, it was also the only company in Germany already equipped with an American-style factory. With over three million square feet of factory space, Opel was churning out nearly half of all German automobiles produced. Sloan was impressed with what he saw there. And with Germany’s recent entry into the League of Nations, it looked like a good time to invest. Thus, in 1929, General Motors of America bought 80 percent of the shares of Opel stock and Germany’s biggest family-o
wned company became a daughter of an automotive company from the United States. Thus, when working for Nash fell through, Heinrich Nordhoff naturally applied to Opel. New management was coming in to work with the German management already there, and Nordhoff soon found himself speaking English with an American man. On the day of the interview, he discovered his future boss suffering from a hangover and lying down on the couch in his office. They talked anyway, and Heinrich got the job. A German man accustomed to slow and methodical processes, Heinrich said he’d be happy to start in two months. His new American boss smiled: It would be better if Heinrich could start next week.

  At the Weintraub advertising agency in New York City, Bill Bernbach was like a kid in a candy store. He had a steady job again. His days had structure. And there was so much to learn. Aside from the one ad he’d written at Schenley, Bill had yet to prove himself a capable copywriter: A powerful man had decided to take a chance on him, choosing him over two big-agency men who had applied for the same copywriting job. Bill was hired without a portfolio of any kind; hired because of a letter he’d written, and because of the warm recommendation from his former boss at Schenley. It might seem like he was at a disadvantage, starting in such a way, but the novelty of it all gave him a fresh take and a powerful desire to prove himself. It provided all that energy humming in him a place to flow.

  In those years, the advertising agencies lining Madison Avenue structured themselves as service industries with isolated departments and well-defined parts: there were those who pursued the customers and made the deals (the accounts department), those who negotiated for top ad space in magazines (the sales department), those who wrote the ads (the copywriting department), and those who created the look and added the images (the art department). At Weintraub, Bill’s concern would be the written message of the ad. As any new employee, Bill was expected to learn the previously established structure and fit in to the machine. But one of his first encounters in the advertising business would alert Bill to a rather radical notion he’d already sensed in his readings of men like Einstein—the established way of doing things was not always the better route.

  Part of who we become often has a great deal to do with the people who inspire us, and at Weintraub, Bill met a man who inspired him immensely: Paul Rand1. Only twenty-seven, Rand’s manner was forward and jarring, but he had dimples and wore glasses as thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles, and the combination of it all somehow created a very real charm. By the time Bill met him, Rand was already a striking presence in the fledgling avant-garde media environment of New York, taking his cue from those in Europe who were using visual art within the commercial world. Rand was art directing for edgy magazines like Esquire and Apparel Arts, designing experimental covers for Direction magazine, and creating ads for Weintraub that were more like art posters than commercial pieces. It was unusual work in a time before “graphic design” had become its own vocation, a time when the covers of magazines or the images used to sell a product were considered commercial, a service rather than something to be noticed unto themselves: The image was usually the literal representation of what was being sold, more a sign than a statement, and meant to be more obligatory and information giving than creative or capable of standing on its own.

  Paul Rand chose another direction though: He made covers and ads that were the point of the entire piece, rarely showing the item that was to be sold. Words were often superfluous, or were present as implications within the visual work. He was one of the first in America to use ideas of art coming out of Russia (Constructivist) and Germany (the Bauhaus) in the 1920s and ’30s. Rand made the interaction between lines and circles and space into its own visual world, a place very different from the usual ad of the time. Ads in those days might cover the page with a giant car and write: Spectacularly powered! Attractively priced! In contrast, Rand’s ads were delicate and often hand-drawn, simple, using basic geometric figures and images to create a cohesive, gentle, powerful abstract whole; composition was a wakeful kind of work for him. He was not a commercial artist; he was something else: The ad business didn’t quite have a name for him yet.

  Rand was aware of artistic developments in Europe at a time when few others in America cared. Heinrich Nordhoff had been moved by the work of Franz Marc, and though Marc had been killed in the war, some of the artists who had been his friends, men like Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, had gone on to become part of another movement in Germany in the 1920s, the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus philosophy was a holistic one, and its visual characteristics were simple, colorful, and about as far away from “commercial” as one could get: their very simplicity exuded something more spiritual than physical, more ethereal than abstract. In that sense, looking at Rand’s work was more like standing in front of a work by Kandinsky or Klee than it was like reading an ad. Bill was lucky to have made his acquaintance, and even luckier that meeting Rand was one of his first true experiences in both advertising and art. Because of this particular baptism into the world of ad agencies, Bill’s notions of what made a great ad would remain less tied to commercial ideas and more to the ideas and inspirations associated with wakeful artistic work, images that offered not only information but communion as well.

  Rand was also happy to meet Bill, and not only because of the fresh way the upstart saw the world, or because he liked hearing Bernbach’s raspy voice, but also because the two shared another common interest: the world of books. Rand was as avid a reader as Bill, and the two were not afraid to talk of the work they were doing together at Weintraub in a larger context, one that touched on everything from philosophy to the latest novel to the newly translated work of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. Rand and Bernbach went for long lunches, walking the bustling streets of Manhattan together, sitting at the deli on 45th Street, talking and brainstorming about all kinds of new possibilities for the combination of image and word. It was a time of education for Bill, and the interaction thrilled him. Back in the confines of the agency, he could be seen sparkling with excitement, practically running the halls as he told his colleagues that he’d just made the greatest ad in the world! It was an energy and an innocence that was too authentic to be made fun of: Bill was inspired.

  Bernbach and Rand were in the midst of a new world. Advertising agencies had taken off after the First World War, thanks in large part to the new availability of products like aspirin and automobiles and thanks also to the new emphasis on mass appeal that the war had fostered. As Adam Hochschild writes in To End All Wars: “Just as warfare2 on an industrial scale required the mass production of new weapons like poison gas, so this new kind of conflict required the mass production of public support.” And the social, political, and commercial systems that produced that support carried on after the war. As corporations grew wealthy, they spent more and more money on ads. The rise of national magazines also had a lot to do with it. A survey done in 1950 would find that 62.5 million people in the United States read at least one issue of Life magazine every three months. That was more than half the population. To reach all these potential consumers, big companies now sought out specialized firms rather than trying to create the ads in-house. Ad agencies auditioned for the giants of the consumer world, trying to prove they were the best place for the accounts of companies like Procter & Gamble, Marlboro, and GM.

  It was a serious endeavor. America was becoming a consumer society. New forms of communication—national magazines, radios, films, and eventually television as well—were taking individual consumer tastes and interests and broadcasting them on a national scale, and the number of consumers was growing as a result. It was all tied to the rise of mass production and its role in that same free market economy described in the 1939 World’s Fair lightbulb ads, one that by the 1950s would be in full swing. Mass production and mass attraction went together: The more technological progression, the more people and places there were to reach. Companies wanted people to hear their messages, and as the audience size grew, so too did the prestige of the advertising agenc
ies who created those messages. Advertising was becoming a medium of communication between companies and customers, the mirror that reflected and created tastes. In 1926, President Calvin Coolidge told these burgeoning agencies that they were playing a part in the “redemption of mankind,” that they were tools of national education, and that industry was directly linked to the magazine advertisements and billboards then becoming so prominent in the average citizen’s life. Coolidge told the advertisers that a great power had been entrusted to their keeping “with the high responsibility3 of inspiring and ennobling the commercial world.”

  In both politics and business, understanding why someone chose to buy a product or to vote in a certain way had become a crucial concern. The pivotal factor was the attempt to understand the psychological motivations behind choice. New forms of psychology were thus developing in natural parallel to the new forms of communication: to reach people, one needed to understand what motivated them. The First World War had made a dramatic point in this sense: The war was a testament to what masses of people could do (both creatively and destructively) when mobilized. But the war had also shown how much violence and unnecessary death can arise when people act irrationally. More and more, people became concerned with how to control their irrational, emotional side. In the years after the war, many Americans began to study and read about psychology, especially the work of Sigmund Freud, the Viennese man who had just given birth to psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud’s main philosophy was that irrational desires and impulses guide people’s choices and that most of those impulses were subconscious.

  The mass, and the idea of the mass, was also a focus of psychological study at the time. Crowd mentality caused people to act and react differently than they would when alone, and crowds could spur individuals toward dramatic, even violent, behavior.