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

by Andrea Hiott

  “There is no one self4 always at work,” the esteemed political writer Walter Lippmann observed soon after the war, suggesting humans are each a variety of “selves” depending on surrounding environments. Men like Lippmann (sincerely) suggested that the masses were a “bewildered herd” that needed direction and strong leadership.

  Nations were composed of masses. Immigrants were masses. But consumers were masses too. The success of political slogans such as “making the world safe for democracy” in the First World War made it obvious that these various masses could be swayed by carefully sculpted messages, and not only in the political sphere, but in the economic sphere as well. The success of the wartime media campaigns had meant “high excitement in the booming field5 of peace-time propaganda” once the war had come to an end.

  One man behind those pro-democracy slogans during the war was an American named Edward Bernays. The Wilson administration had employed Bernays to promote American war aims in the national and international press. He was the son of Viennese immigrants, and he also happened to be the nephew of Freud. He read his uncle’s books and papers and applied them to his own war work. He saw propaganda as a rational, honest, beneficial enterprise. The point of propaganda, as Bernays understood it, was to marshal the irrationality of the masses toward positive ends.

  “When I came back from the war,”6 Bernays would later say, “I decided that if you could use propaganda for war, you could certainly use it for peace.” In that spirit, Bernays set up the first public relations firm in the 1920s, a way of expanding the ideas behind propaganda to the commercial world as well as the political one. Bernays continued advising the government (President Calvin Coolidge got an image makeover thanks to his idea to invite celebrities to the White House), but he turned to businesses as well: How could companies best give the masses what they desired? And how could companies create an attractive image?

  When cigarette companies in the 1920s wanted to open the market up to women, for example, Bernays advised that a group of young debutantes stage an event for the press where they pulled cigarettes out from under their skirts and called them “torches of freedom,” and then boldly lit up. It worked. Before the war, a woman who smoked was an outcast. After the war, smoking became a sign of female emancipation. These kinds of campaigns—that appealed to competitive instincts and sexual desires—became the primary drive behind ads, especially ads trying to sell cars out of Detroit. These ads tried to speak to people’s desire for a more exciting or fulfilling life; each product implicitly promised to fill a void: Women moaned when sitting in their new car for the first time, or gazed dreamily at the camera, big-eyed behind the wheel.

  Though such tactics may sound malicious in retrospect, that wasn’t the intent. At the time, spending money was equated with doing right by the country, and there was a rather unconscious no-holds-barred approach to consumerism. It was the first time that large groups of people were able to buy things for sheer pleasure rather than for functional reasons alone, and there was a sense of fun and freedom to it all. For a time, it seemed the market economy had only one direction it could go: up.

  Thus the stock market crash of 1929 came like a slap, knocking everyone into an unrecognizable new world. Money value simply fell, disappeared overnight. The Great Depression set in, and with it, a sobering shock. After all those years of speeding up and garnering ever-increasing potential, 1930 left many people feeling as if they’d just crashed into an invisible wall. Advertising came under heavy attack for the first time, as people felt they had been tricked, manipulated by propaganda and by the idea of capitalism that had been sold to them. The manic rush of opening banks and the stock market to the public sphere, only to have it all come crashing down on them, produced a feeling of distrust in Big Business. People felt lost. Things weren’t supposed to be like this. There had been a lot of “dreaming big” (a good thing) but unfortunately alongside those big dreams, people had forgotten that it was also equally essential that they think small. And those small details that had been pushed to the side in the desire for bigness would come back to haunt the market in a very dramatic way.

  In the 1930s, very suddenly the country entered an uncomfortable adolescent stage where skepticism seemed the only answer to hard questions. At the same time, people still desperately wanted and needed to believe that something in the world was meaningful and worth working for. A balance had to be found. People did not want to be hoodwinked, but they did want to feel connected and inspired. People did not want to be disappointed, yet they did want to have hope. In that sense, advertising was transforming into a tightrope between power and desire, truth and deceit. Advertising was, after all, the medium between corporations and the people, and there was a great deal of responsibility in that. How could there be fantasy without exploitation? How could one feel connected without feeling subverted into a mass and taken advantage of?

  The Depression pervaded all areas of an individual’s life, and that was reflected in the larger life of the country and, to some extent, of the world. Politics, mass communication, transportation, the market economy: These were inherently connected now, and like one wheel turning the next, all these things in one Western country inevitably had their effect on those same things in other Western countries. During and after the First World War, through media, transportation, and the market, the Western hemisphere of the world had become more economically and socially interlinked; 1930 brought that realization into sharp relief.

  Germany had many short-term loans from the United States, and when the Depression set in, all those loans were withdrawn. Germany defaulted on its bonds. The country no longer had credit anywhere; it was internationally bankrupt. Within the country, any signs of progress that had begun to emerge were quickly washed away, and the unemployment rate jumped to one-third of the workforce. Now the democratic Weimar Republic was held responsible not only for the First World War and its grueling aftermath in the 1920s but also for the economic tragedy beginning a whole new decade. For Hitler’s Nazi Party, this was very good news. The world was beginning to look a lot more like the one Hitler had painted, and he was back on the streets and in the halls with his electrifying and manipulative speech. The stock market crash was a failure of democracy, he said, and democracy was linked to capitalism, so it must be a failure of capitalism too. It was exactly what so many were worried over. And for the moment, the evidence seemed to be on Hitler’s side.

  There could not have been a better moment (in his eyes) for a man like him to rise: Hitler had become skilled at noticing and then speaking to people’s fears, and this was a time of immense fear. By stirring up hatred, he could use that energy for his own gain. Hitler was well aware of Edward Bernays and the propaganda campaigns of the First World War, and he knew that the irrational desires of the masses could be manipulated through image and speech. Thus, when the market crashed, Joseph Goebbels, the head of propaganda for the Nazi Party, went into overdrive. The goal was for Nazi events to get into the papers: It didn’t matter if the press was good or bad, he realized, just so long as people were learning the party’s name. In 1930, there were over 34,000 separate Nazi events. Most of these were beer hall speeches where people were whipped up into a feeling of communion with one another, united in their hatred and complaint, feeling part of a movement, a group: It gave them the illusion of control. In Berlin, Hitler began to draw crowds of up to 16,000 when he gave a speech.

  In 1930 Hitler’s party was able to garner 18.3 percent of the popular vote (6.5 million Germans voted for them), a political landslide that now made it the second largest party in the Reichstag. That was eight times as many votes than in 1928 when they had not even reached 3 percent of the popular vote. In 1932, the year Hitler was finally naturalized as a German citizen, the Nazi’s got 37.4 percent of the popular vote. In his Berlin newspaper called Angriff, Goebbels wrote: “We are going into the Reichstag7 … like the wolf into the sheepflock.” The Nazis were now the largest party in Germany and occupied 230
seats there. The Weimar Republic was fading out. One year later, Hitler would be appointed chancellor of Germany, arriving back to his apartment at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin with tears in his eyes. He no longer felt “at odds with himself”; he had been accepted, voted in. And while he didn’t have the amount of power he wanted quite yet, he was irrevocably in the door. But now that he was in, he was in until the end. He had no intention of ever relinquishing any of the power he had gained.

  Martin Scorsese once did a documentary on Bob Dylan called No Direction Home. In the documentary, Dylan is being interviewed by Scorsese. He’s talking about his early years in the 1950s when he first hitchhiked a ride to New York City and started singing in the bars and cafés of the West Village. There were so many others doing the same thing at that time, and Scorsese wonders what it was about Dylan that made a difference, that propelled him forward: Why was it Bob Dylan and not someone else who changed the world? Dylan shrugs it off as will and luck. He says: “I just snuck8 in the back door when they weren’t looking, and then they couldn’t get rid of me.” Dylan came into America’s consciousness through the back door, but soon his words reflected and helped to rearrange the entire house.

  It’s unusual to connect Dylan and Hitler, and this is not a comparison, it’s a contrast. It’s also a question: Both have captivated the world—why? These two names are so well known; each having become something distinct from the man himself, the symbol of an extreme or exceptional time—but the imprint they have left on the world, what they did once they were “in the door,” could not be more distinct. Dylan created something, gave it to the people, and then let them use it as they wished: His songs became the people’s songs. One is free to agree or disagree with the lyrics. The music moves you, or it doesn’t. The very medium itself is one that invites unlimited points of view. In contrast, Hitler promised to give many things to the people, but those gifts came with conditions: The gift was no longer a gift but a manipulation based on his idea that he knew what was best. He used violence and brutality to try to make “his view” the only view. And he failed. Humans are capable of great creation and great destruction. The power of life runs through us all, and the only real measure of how much power we have felt is what we give. In that sense, perhaps it’s wrong to think of people as powerful. Causing violence and brutality does not mean you are powerful. But neither does praise or fame.

  Heinrich Nordhoff was a gentleman, but his veneer of polished manners sometimes made him very difficult to read. Brought up in Prussian schools and the Catholic Church, by the time Nordhoff was in his late twenties, he had an austerity and severity—a physical and mental neatness and height—that garnered respect but also forced people to keep their distance. There was a gentleness to him as well, but it was a side he kept in careful check, much like the slight lisp that occasionally teased the listener’s ears when he spoke. His love of art and music and literature only deepened as he got older, but it was mainly his technical mind that others saw in those early years as he made his way up the ladder in Germany’s elite automotive world.

  Heinrich’s first job at Opel was writing service manuals. The job was not his top choice, but he made the most of it, digging into the idea of service and learning as much as he could. The job gave him a steady income and thus he was able to ask his childhood friend Charlotte to marry him: would she come with him to Rüsselsheim? Could they start a family there? She said yes right away, having always imagined they would go through life together.

  Distinguishing himself early on, Heinrich was promoted to manager of Opel’s customer service branch within a year. Nordhoff was determined and ambitious, often working seven days a week and using his vacation days to observe other parts of the factory and learn as much as he could of the American-style machines there. Seeing his interest, the Opel executives sent him on study tours to the United States where he soaked up the American plants in Detroit and met with the American men at GM. Perhaps Charlotte had a difficult time with his constant working, or perhaps she had expected it from him and understood. Certainly, they were both happy that he had a good job at the time. Many of their friends were struggling in the darkness of the Depression. In Germany, Opel was the exception to the rule. It was an exciting time to be there; a feeling of expansion and discovery gave Opel employees the sense that whatever automotive future Germany might have, they would be playing a part. Incomes at Opel had risen in the twenties, and the American takeover in 1929 gave them an extra boost, allowing a level of stability few other companies in Germany could know in those years.

  His time at Opel would set patterns that would follow Heinrich for the rest of his life. One early policy that would become ingrained in his way of thinking was Opel’s decision to establish an extensive network of service shops and dealerships. Opel was owned by General Motors, but the management there nevertheless still took many of its cues from the early work of Henry Ford, planning ahead for a time when cars would be more ubiquitous, and Ford had always made it clear that a primary factor in the people’s decision to buy a car was the knowledge that it could be taken care of if something went wrong. In that same sense, many at Opel knew the future would be in a People’s Car, but even the best minds there were unsure of what kind of car it would be, or when.

  Opel was among the first to test the waters and experiment in making a small mass-produced vehicle. As early as 1924, Opel manufactured a two-seat, four-cylinder, compact vehicle called the Opel 4 PS. This vehicle came to be known as the “Tree Frog”1 because it was small and only came in green. It could not be taken on a highway because it would have fallen apart. It was shaky, cheaply made, meant for short distances and low speeds, more like a go-cart. It was a big step in Germany at the time because it sold well, a sign that the common man did indeed want greater mobility, but the Tree Frog was not a People’s Car. The realization of a Volkswagen or Volksauto was still the great puzzle of the German automotive world.

  Too much innovation had happened in the past ten years for Ford’s Model T, the first People’s Car in the world, to serve as anything more than a metaphorical example. At the same time, making a small version of one of the more advanced cars like Hitler’s beloved Mercedes was an idea that proved both economically and technically flawed: The type of engine, the design, the materials, and especially the expense, simply did not allow for a car that was “the same, but smaller”; it was like trying to put a square peg in a round hole. The other proposed option—a three-wheeled vehicle based on the motorcycle, an idea pioneered by Karl Benz—now seemed just as inappropriate as a miniaturized luxury car. As one automotive writer named L. Betz stated in 1931 in Das Volksauto: “The one will be too heavy2 and too expensive to produce, the other ill suited in traffic and unusable for this purpose.” What was needed was “no hopping tree frog, but a car designed for the street, offering a maximum of comfort but a minimum of luxury.”

  Ferdinand Porsche had realized this too, and at the age of fifty-five and out of a job once again, he found himself having to make some drastic decisions. Instead of seeking the job as head engineer from another of the elite automotive companies (an option that was hardly an option anymore, it must be said), he decided to do something many would have considered impossible: He would rally a team of the best German-speaking engineers and designers he knew and start not a car company or a factory—he didn’t have the funds for that—but rather a consulting and design firm, one of the first of its kind. If he had his own company, he’d be in a better position to do things on his own terms. It was a risk. But Porsche3 was still considered a genius in the automotive world, and while there were many who did not want to work with him in their companies, Porsche was smart enough to realize that those same executives would still be glad to use him as a consultant on projects instead. They loved his innovations and designs; they just didn’t like the effort it took to try to direct him.

  Porsche was still living in Austria, but even so, the question of where to found his company and of where to live wa
s easy for him and his family: They still had their beloved villa in Stuttgart, a city that was fast becoming one of the centers of the burgeoning German automotive world. It was also where companies like Bosch and Hirth, essential for supplying automotive materials and parts, were located. And the high concentration of auto firms in Germany would mean more clients for the firm than if they were Austria-based.

  Deciding to open his own business and start over at age fifty-five was one thing, but even more remarkable was the fact that Porsche was able to convince twelve of the most talented designers and engineers in Europe to come with him to Stuttgart and work without a contract and with hardly any pay. The men Porsche collected were men who could have worked just about anyplace they’d liked, and nearly all of them would eventually be known throughout the world in their own right.

  As Porsche opened his first office on Kronenstrasse in the heart of Stuttgart, the room must have practically crackled with energy and ideas. At the head of Porsche’s team was the same young man Porsche had once so controversially promoted in his offices at Austro-Daimler, the kind, clear-eyed Karl Rabe. Rabe would become the secret weapon of any Porsche success, a man who truly made Porsche’s future accomplishments possible by serving as a rational and intelligent anchor to the more obsessive and impulsive Porsche.

  Porsche’s son, Ferry, wanted to work on his father’s team too. He was a young man now, and though he was the opposite of his father in many ways—introverted and shy—his own talents for design and engineering were undeniable. But Porsche was tough on Ferry and rarely complimented him or his skill. He was also adamant that Ferry not take the same route of his father and skip the all-important degrees that came with years of school. Porsche demanded that Ferry finish his education, and wanted that to be the priority before he came on board for full-time work. Porsche knew all too well how difficult it could be not to have the proper degrees, if not in terms of knowledge then in terms of the way he was perceived.