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

by Andrea Hiott

  The 1950s teens had been the first generation of kids to be wooed by companies and the media alike; the fifties represented the first time the young had real consumer power. This was the first generation in the United States to have the chance of owning a car as young adults and the first generation to drive those cars across the country to pursue their dreams—dreams of becoming a famous musician or poet, dreams of being the first in their family to go to college, or just dreams of starting over someplace new. The generation that came of age in the sixties was more physically mobile than any that had come before, and this newfound mobility and freedom automatically impacted their actions and decisions as well.

  The incredible creativity that we now associate with the sixties (but which actually began with the mobility of the fifties) was a direct result of this expansion and movement. New forms of thought emerged through new interactions between races, classes, and nationalities, and this meant new forms of activism and politics. The change was also an aesthetic one—noticeable in the art, media, music, and writing that arose. As more ideas and people met and mixed, the result was often a new sound, or a new form—like the Miles Davis record Kind of Blue, the poems and novels of “the Beats,” or, for that matter, the creative revolution in advertising. The specific change was hard to define cohesively, but whatever it was, it was all about asserting and exploring freedom, which no longer meant only physical freedom, but also freedom of the mind.

  The Volkswagen ads were a kind of “emancipated advertising” in that they freed Madison Avenue from the rut in which it had (unconsciously) been stuck. But even more important, those VW ads asked people to be present, to pay attention to the details, to Think Small. Those ads spoke to people clearly, and in a tone of equality: They didn’t “talk down,” they just talked. And people responded because they were tired of being manipulated; they just wanted to be treated like intelligent, important members of society.

  Thinking small—seeing clearly and perceiving differently—was liberating. But it was not always easy. In fact, it was often quite difficult. The sixties were a time of awakening, but those years were also full of protests, struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam War, unnecessary losses due to drugs, and heartache over the murders of some of America’s most important (and controversial) leaders. Yet the overall effect—though it certainly came with a price—was one of an acceptance of greater diversity in the country, and a desire to discuss and reevaluate old norms.

  Which is why, to some degree, the Volkswagen became even more of a “People’s Car” once it became the chosen car of the youth in the United States. Its very acceptance by them—the car’s journey from being a product of Nazi Germany to becoming an icon of the Summer of Love—showed that this new generation, confused as it certainly still was about many things, had at least figured out that transformation is possible and that there is worth in finding new ways to see. Tied to that search for a new perception was the ability to handle difference, to allow old definitions and categories to interact and connect. In that sense, the Beetle could be the car that your professor drove, the car that you drove, or the car driven by your mom and dad. It could also be a Disney character, or show up in a Kubrick film. Playboy could do an article on it advising “If you are Jewish2 and somebody should ask you what kind of car you drive say: ‘A VW, and I know, but it’s a helluva solid little piece of machinery.’ ”

  Psychologist and philosopher William James once wrote that true genius is the ability to see things in an unhabitual way. It’s the greatest gift one human being can give another—the very essence of freedom—because in seeing things differently and sharing that new view, one opens up more space for communion, for confidence, and for love. Thinking small intensifies possibility, which in turn intensifies the experience and quality of one’s life. The DDB ads for Volkswagen presented an unorthodox view both in the world of advertising, and in the world of the consumer. The habitual way of living in America at the time was to think big—to believe that more and bigger were the answers to life’s ills—and the ads turned that accepted “fact” on its head and thus ushered in a whole new era. Thinking big and thinking small are powerful, and need to work in harmony to be whole.

  The great German pianist Alfred Brendel3 has said something similar: He defines genius as the ability to combine things that have never been combined before. And what was the original Volkswagen if not a combination of things that had never been combined before? Both literally, in terms of Ferdinand Porsche’s technical design, and also metaphorically, in the way it combined ideologies and nationalities and ultimately transcended them all. In the words of Julian Koenig, “This was a distinct4 car which demanded attention if only you let people focus on it, found a way for them to be aware that it was there.” And while the campaign was indeed based on honesty and truth, it wasn’t an informative but rather a creative act that, in the end, was necessary to reveal that truth. What DDB understood was that information and truth do not convince alone—people can have access to all the facts in the world, but it’s only once they’ve connected with those facts on a human level, an emotional level, that the truth is finally obvious to them. Again, in Julian’s words, “With this car, there was no reason to resist the truth. All we had to do was reveal its magic in a style that would strike a chord.” In the same way that a musical note on key is obvious to the ear, so too is a warm expression of the truth: Such things can mysteriously open our hearts.

  Bringing the art of Franz Marc to Wolfsburg in 1952 might truly have been one of the highlights of Heinrich Nordhoff’s life. Marc’s Tower of Blue Horses1 had moved Nordhoff as a child, and as an adult, he was still moved by it, even though now, thanks to the Nazi campaign against modern art, that very painting was lost. For those who knew Heinrich well, it was hard to think of a moment when he had ever been so innocently joyful or proud as he was on the day of the Franz Marc opening. He spent many hours at the show among Marc’s paintings, and he invited everyone he knew to come.

  Nordhoff had been on the job for nearly five years when he brought Franz Marc to the town. It was also the very first art exhibition ever held in Wolfsburg. In his following seventeen years as director of Volkswagen, he put a great deal of time, energy, and money into bringing as much art to Wolfsburg as he could. During the Nazi reign, all modern art had been banned. But Nordhoff—thanks to the success of the Volkswagen factory—found himself in a position to be a patron. Among the artists with exhibitions in Wolfsburg in the 1950s and 1960s were Caspar David Friedrich, Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Juan Gris, Marc Chagall, and van Gogh. These shows briefly made Wolfsburg a kind of cultural center in Germany, bringing thousands of Germans to the town at a time, sometimes so many that there were often not enough hotel rooms to house them all. In 1961, for Wolfsburg’s sixth art show, a French Expressionist exhibition, Nordhoff wrote the introduction in the brochure.2 In it, he talks about how the town and the factory are an “indivisible unit” created by hardworking and attentive citizens:

  These people come from many different places, but none of them comes from Wolfsburg. Of course their first and foremost urgent task is to provide the necessities of life. However, it remains an incontrovertible fact that man cannot live by bread alone and that—though I hardly dare say so in such a town—work cannot satisfy all an active man’s longings. There is a special need for the things of the mind amidst noisy work and roaring machinery. By this I do not mean the seriousness and grandeur of great thought, but also first-class artistic and aesthetic treats of which this exhibition is a unique example, held as it is in a town that by its own wish is, and will remain, a workers’ town.3

  Heinrich Nordhoff adjusts a painting at his last art show, 1967. (photo credit 54.1)

  The Franz Marc show was clearly the one that meant the most to Nordhoff, but of all the art shows Heinrich Nordhoff brought to Wolfsburg,4 many in the town today feel that the grandest was the show of 1967. It was an exhibit of the art of Vincent van Gogh, and it was the first time
van Gogh’s work had been displayed outside of Amsterdam. For Wolfsburg, and for Germany, it was a momentous occasion. More than 100,000 people from all over Europe came to see the exhibit. At the opening, as if coming full circle somehow, Nordhoff reminisced about Wolfsburg’s first art show, the “unforgettable” exhibition of Franz Marc. Sadly, the van Gogh exhibit was the last exhibit that Heinrich would attend.

  By the time of the van Gogh exhibit, Volkswagen had become a multinational corporation selling close to 900,000 vehicles a year. In the past decade, the export ratio had climbed 57 percent, meaning that every second car exported by Germany was a Volkswagen. Wolfsburg had truly become the VW town and now had a population of 80,000. In fact, according to polls taken in the early sixties, more than 90 percent of car owners in the town drove a Beetle, and the primary worker in nearly three-fourths of the city’s households worked for the factory. It was still a place of immigrants and refugees to a large extent: in the 1960s, thousands of Italians moved to Wolfsburg, and Volkswagen erected an “Italian Village” for them. There were also Greeks, Spaniards, Dutch, Austrians, Yugoslavs, and Turks. There were tensions, to be sure, but the city, the factory, and the car together had become a testament to reinvention.

  Ironically, Wolfsburg sat just miles away from the East German border, a place that was the epicenter of the new divisions and tensions created by the Cold War. Because of the factory’s position, because many workers at the plant were Germans who fled the Soviet Zone, and because Nordhoff had always been partial to the ideas and business models of the United States, he was not afraid to speak up about the tensions between these two worldviews. More than once in his speeches in the United States, he talked of the responsibility of auto companies to communicate more directly with one another over borders, and to be more open to trade. He spoke about the necessity of keeping tariffs low and finding ways for Western countries to join in further economic agreements, and “economically unite the Free World.”5 The Marshall Plan, he reiterated, had been the first important step toward unification of Europe.

  But Heinrich Nordhoff’s views about unity were not always popular. Nor were his ideas about what was best for Volkswagen. For a decade he’d been one of the most trusted and sought-after voices in German business, but in the 1960s he found himself questioned and challenged, embroiled in conflicts about how much of the company should be owned by the government, how much should be owned by private stakeholders, and how much should go to the public in stocks. There was also heated debate about whether or not VW should expand its line, or buy other lines like Audi, for example. Nordhoff only wanted to continue making Beetles, even at a time when to many others it was obvious that Volkswagen needed more than just one kind of car. Up until that point, the Beetle and the VW Bus were their only two cars on the market, and as the sixties were coming to an end, many at Volkswagen felt they saw signs that the success of the original Beetle had reached a plateau. New technologies and new safety concerns had surfaced, and many of VW’s board worried that other companies would soon pull far ahead of VW if they did not modernize their brand.

  With the government, and with VW’s council and board, Nordhoff now found himself on the losing end of the arguments at times. Simultaneously, the German automobile industry, after an unprecedented boom in the 1950s, was tipping into its first recession since the end of the war; indeed, its first recession since the German people had been motorized. Nordhoff took all of these problems and fights very personally, and his health began to suffer as a result.

  Nordhoff firmly believed there was an “organic harmony” between the workers and the management, an idea he’d adapted from the writings of Franz Marc. Nordhoff put his workers on a pedestal just as surely as they put him on one: He gave them higher wages and dividends (for the course of Nordhoff’s years of management, wages would be at least 5 percent higher than those at any other German automotive plant), he made them partners in the company, and he told them again and again that they were an example of the best Prussian traditions of good quality work, discipline, selflessness, and modesty.

  But Nordhoff’s philosophy was at times eerily close to the NSDAP’s idea of “working toward the führer”: He felt that he knew what was best for the company, that it should be he who made the final decisions, and above all, he demanded loyalty. Anyone who left the company, for example, was not allowed to return, and he was firmly against any unions or workers retaining any authority that could conflict with his own. Because he had taken over the factory at a time when workplaces were undergoing the slow transition from the authoritatively installed sense of obedience to the new democratic one of individuality and choice, Nordhoff’s way worked through the 1950s and early 1960s. It also worked because he really did care about the workers and because he really did have their best interests at heart. But the balance in such matters can be precarious; by the late 1960s, many felt Nordhoff had too much power and that he was no longer using it to make the wisest decisions.

  After Nordhoff turned sixty-five—the age when most German executives retired—more and more people began to ask him to choose a successor and step down. Nordhoff delayed that decision for as long as he could. His ultimate plan was to retire in 1969, just as he turned seventy years old. But many wondered if he would ever be able to actually leave. Here was a man who had given ten hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a week of his life—for nearly twenty years—to the same company. Naturally it was hard for him to imagine leaving, or to separate his job from his own sense of self. Nevertheless, the role he played was just that: a role. And the role of manager of Volkswagen had to be filled by someone else, it had to go on without Nordhoff, and certainly he knew that. But nevertheless, he could not seem to let go.

  At the peak of his popularity, and as Wolfsburg becomes a “gold rush town,” Nordhoff stands for this iconic photo with the factory and its workers. (photo credit 54.2)

  In 1968, Nordhoff was finally pressured into agreeing to name a successor. At about just that time, his heart began to fail. He spent months in the hospital but eventually recovered enough to return to work (albeit cutting his time to forty hours a week). But when news came that the VW board of directors had voted to push his January 1969 retirement date up to March 21, 1968, it was one of the hardest blows of his life. He took it absolutely personally, and he did not know how to cope. In his desperate moment, in an act of avoidance and panic, he zoomed off to Baden-Baden—the very same spa town where Ferdinand Porsche had once been arrested by the French—and tried to conduct his business meetings there as if nothing were wrong. It was the Ides of March.

  On the flight back to Wolfsburg, however, he collapsed. He was given oxygen and taken to the hospital as soon as the plane landed. A few weeks later, on Good Friday of 1968, Heinrich Nordhoff lay in his hospital bed and asked Charlotte, his wife of thirty-eight years, his best friend for nearly fifty, if she wouldn’t mind having a glass of champagne with him. He was feeling better, and he wanted to celebrate. She rushed home and got his favorite bottle of champagne, and together with their daughter, Barbara, they sat in the hospital room in Wolfsburg and enjoyed a toast. Heinrich wrote out a few Easter cards and arranged to have gifts delivered to old friends. Then, late that afternoon, just before sunset, he died. Charlotte was there with him.

  A few days later, Nordhoff’s funeral was held in one of Volkswagen’s giant factory halls. The workers all came, standing in a line that stretched down the long straight road running parallel to the factory, waiting to say their goodbyes. When his body was transported to the gravesite (in a cut-off Volkswagen Bus), the citizens of Wolfsburg crowded the streets, honoring him as he passed, saying their own silent goodbyes. Today, more than forty years after his death, it’s doubtful there is a person in Wolfsburg who has not heard of Heinrich Nordhoff.

  On August 15, 1969, cars full of hundreds of thousands of young people jammed the New York State Thruway, causing the entire road to completely shut down for a time. The traffic was so heavy that people b
egan simply abandoning their cars and walking the final miles toward their destination: the large farm that would forever be known as Woodstock.

  A Beetle in the traffic jam on the way to Woodstock. (photo credit 55.1)

  Those three days of music and communal life still live on in the nation’s collective psyche, even for the many generations born long after Woodstock took place. Over the years, the festival has taken on a somewhat mythical aura; it has solidified in America’s collective memory as one of the most definitive statements of the American counterculture, the zenith of the hippie movement, that iconic place where Jimi Hendrix’s guitar half-sang and half-wept the national anthem, expressing the tumultuous experience of a country that was torn, having just experienced one of the worst years in American history,1 a year in which both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been shot.

  Today, attending large concerts or festivals is something many of us have done, but such events were not a common occurrence in 1969. And even by today’s standards, Woodstock remains an awesome mass event. Today, at capacity, Madison Square Garden in New York City can hold about 19,700 people. With around 500,000 attendees at its peak, Woodstock had approximately twenty times that amount of people coming together (and living together!) on the same plot of land for three days, one of the first times so many had come together to commune through music.2 At a time of great conflict and pain in America—alongside the murders of King and RFK, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated earlier in the decade, and the war in Vietnam raged and divided the American public to a degree that had not been seen since the Civil War—the youth came together in a spirit of celebration, love, and hope. And the country noticed: Woodstock was the moment when the people in America who had once been considered misfits began to transform into the very people whose voices would endure.