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

by Andrea Hiott

  The Zaha Hadid building, the Phaeno Science Center, in Wolfsburg. This building sits across the canal from the factory, and is one of the first sites seen upon arrival at the train station. (photo credit 57.1)

  The factory on one end of the city, the art museum on the other, both connected by one long, pedestrian walkway—it’s hard to imagine a better testament to the legacy of Heinrich Nordhoff.

  In addition to all these wonderful, unique structures, there is another attraction, one that draws around two million visitors to the city annually. Sitting to the north of the VW factory, this giant enclosed enclave of landscaped vistas and buildings wrapped up in luminescent glass and steel is called the Autostadt. At Wolfsburg’s inception, rather than using the lugubrious name of The Town of the Strength through Joy Car, as Hitler christened it, most people (when they were not in Hitler’s presence) called the city the Autostadt, the Auto City, and now this name refers to a cultural center and theme park. Today, if you arrive at the right moment in Wolfsburg, you’ll get caught in a herd of tourists and visitors heading to the Autostadt. You are led toward it as soon as you exit the train station; moving sidewalks go over the bridge and deposit you in its mouth. When I first saw the signs for it, I thought it might be the Auto Museum that I was looking for, but as I soon found out, the Autostadt and the Auto Museum are two very different things.

  The Autostadt is a miniature Epcot Center, or a modern, extended World’s Fair, stretching across twenty-five acres. It was designed in large part by Gunter Henn, one of Germany’s most famous architects, but hundreds of other architects have taken part in the conception of its structures and projects. Renowned international artists often “curate” the car pavilions and events. The result is that the entire place feels like an enclave of modern art and architectural development, and the strange ponds of water, mounds of earth, and vegetation between the various buildings and marquees creates an almost alien environment; everything is so carefully sculpted and unique. When I was there, I even found myself wondering if the ducks swimming in the Autostadt ponds were real (they are!) because they swim in such perfect fashion, as if designed to play their part.

  The Autostadt is a cultural hub as much as it is a tourist attraction: Classes and events are common occurrences—everything from sold-out rock concerts (Sting was there during one of my stays) and dance festivals to yoga lessons and self-help groups. There are numerous restaurants and bars. There’s a day care center. There are theaters that show 3-D films about mobility, a guided walk through the evolution of roads, and the longest printed line in the world. There are also all sorts of multimedia, interactive activities (some of which change regularly), everything from a program to calculate your carbon footprint, to areas where you can learn how to design a car. Visitors can also learn about various fuels and modes of engine propulsion, about the impact of automobiles on the environment, or about the stock market in relation to automotive business models. There’s an obstacle course for adults, little baby electric Beetles for the kids to drive, and a posh Ritz-Carlton where people can spend the night and swim in a heated pool that looks up at the giant brick Volkswagen factory.

  A picture from inside the Autostadt. (photo credit 57.2)

  There are also seven pavilions dedicated to car manufacturers at the Autostadt, one for Volkswagen itself, and one each for its “daughter” companies. Volkswagen is not only Volkswagen, after all: It also owns Audi, Bentley, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Seat, and Škoda—the VW parent company calls these brands its daughters, and each of these brands have their own building in the Autostadt.

  But the centerpiece of Henn’s Autostadt design is a huge glass-and-steel, five-floored building called the ZeitHaus (House of Time), where more than eighty vintage cars from various companies and designers are showcased. In the other pavilions of the Autostadt, you can see a Lamborghini, a Bugatti, and an Audi A2 circa 2001, but in the House of Time, you can see these brands aslongside classic Cadillacs and Jaguars, a 1922 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, one of Ford’s Model Ts, and a replica of one of the first gasoline-powered Benz automobiles. And of course there are also remade models of Porsche’s prototypes for the Bug, a replica of Porsche’s NSU car, a replica of one of the original V3, a Porsche 356, and that millionth rhinestone-studded “German tart” that Julian and George saw on their Wolfsburg trip.

  The large glass towers that hold the cars customers have purchased. A large robot picks the car up and brings it down to “greet” the customer in the Autostadt. (photo credit 57.3)

  The Autostadt opened in May 2000. By then, VW had spent about 430 million euros on the project. Now the place sees two million visitors a year and has been the template—much like Ford’s factory was the template for the VW factory all those years ago—for a host of new German museums that have sprung up in the past decade, all of them top tourist sites, and all of them worth the traveling time to see. The Autostadt is also the place where people from all over Germany (and the world) can come to pick up their new Volkswagens. They can order their cars from any local dealership in their hometown, specifying what features they’d like. Then the cars are made according to each purchaser’s requirements and delivered to the Autostadt where the customers come to meet them. Volkswagen gives each customer free tickets to the Autostadt, free lunch, and a tour of the factory. Then, they can watch as their personal car is delivered from two giant, 200-foot-tall glass towers that hold the new cars like Cabbage Patch Kids waiting for their homes. The magnificent towers are connected through a tunnel to the factory, and you can see the cars moving along the assembly line. Volkswagen staff then introduces each individual to their car, showing off all the car’s special details and parts. At the end of the day, customers can get into their new VW and drive away through giant doors.

  In some way, the Autostadt is one giant advertisement, a public relations stunt on par with anything ever done by the likes of Edward Bernays. In another way, it is a piece of modern art, a way of using the corporate world to advance the creative one. Perhaps the Autostadt is the perfect symbol of Wolfsburg because it is a microcosm of all the worlds that Wolfsburg has always teetered between: that balance between the organic and the ersatz, between persuasion and manipulation, between the profit-oriented and the gift. Being so technical and modern, and yet also being a place totally devoted to the love of cars, it’s certainly a place where emotion and reason are allowed to collide.

  The cars in the Autostadt are beautiful, and the Autostadt itself is an incredible place, but I can understand why so many Beetle lovers say that the Auto Museum is where they feel they are truly in the presence of the spirit of the Bug. The Auto Museum is not part of the Autostadt. The Auto Museum was built in the 1980s, and it doesn’t look as if it’s had any real renovations since that time. Architecturally and in terms of presentation, it’s the total opposite of the modern, slick, alien-egg-like Autostadt. And it is also less visible. Whereas the Autostadt is directly beside the factory and impossible to miss, the unassuming Auto Museum is out of the way, at the outskirts of the main strip of town, and a place you have to know about to find. It looks like an abandoned elementary school from the 1950s, and there are tiny, childlike pictures of Beetles stenciled on its pale concrete one-story walls. Inside, the place feels a bit like a garage, and even smells of rubber and oil. Admission is six euros, and the front desk will give you a little pin of the blue-and-white VW “eye” to wear, a miniature version of the logo that hangs on the car factory’s outer wall.

  At the Auto Museum, once you’ve walked down a long hall lined with the German versions of the DDB ads for the car, the museum opens out into a warehouse filled with a rainbow of Volkswagen Bugs. Natural light streams in from the high thin windows, mixing with the soft light of overhead lamps. Herbie the Love Bug is here, and so is a Beetle that is made entirely from Legos. There is a Beetle that swam the Straits of Messina, a Beetle made from wicker, and another carved entirely from wood. But it’s the real thing, the original cars made only to be cars, t
hat draw the most attention—Beetles from the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, on and on to that last original Beetle that was produced in Mexico in the hot summer of 2003. From afar, they all look exactly the same; only their colors set them apart, and yet somehow, they appear to have wholly distinct personalities, perched there with their round faces and sweet eyes.

  The first time I went, I felt as though I was at a petting zoo. There are signs everywhere begging customers not to touch the cars, and yet the Bugs are smudged with fingerprints. It’s like everyone turns into a kid as soon as they go through the door. And everyone stops to sign the guest book on their way out, thankful to have some way of expressing the happiness they feel. The book is splayed wide on a wooden table, and its pages are fat with exclamation marks and hearts and drawings of Beetles that visitors have done, most of them anthropomorphized (one entry shows the car wearing a New York Mets baseball cap). There are entries in Spanish, German, French, and Japanese. On my first trip, I saw an entry from a man from Wyoming that said: Hello again1 wonderful place. This is my 3rd visit. There’s nothing better than this! Then, a couple wrote: This is our favorite place in the world! (And they were from Hawaii!) A young man from the United Kingdom used an entire page to describe how he’d just celebrated his thirtieth birthday at Wolfsburg: That’s one lifetime ambition fulfilled, he wrote.

  One of the first original Volkswagen Beetles that I saw during my initial visit to the Auto Museum was a baby blue 1960 edition, the last car Heinrich Nordhoff drove before his death, one that was built based on the 1949 model that Ben Pon first took over to the United States. When I first saw this car and read Nordhoff’s name on the plaque beside it, I had yet to know who he was. Years later when I went back, after completing all my research, it was this car I wanted most to see. I liked knowing that I was in the presence of the same little blue car that Nordhoff had driven to work.

  Does it seem too sentimental that people talk this way about the car and its birthplace? I might have thought so at first. But not anymore. Now when I am in the Auto Museum I am just like all the other fans. It’s one of those places that allows you to remember when your parents handed you the keys to your first car, or the time you went on your first road trip, or that moment when you had your first kiss, or whatever other memories and emotions you might associate with a beloved car. No matter your age, it is one of those places that gives you permission to be young.

  George Lois, at the age of eighty, is still a wildfire of words and energy. This is the man who came up with the slogan “I want my MTV,” the man behind many infamous Esquire covers of the 1960s, the man who helped make Tommy Hilfiger a fashion star—and George will gladly tell you all about it himself. He’s got no qualms about announcing his accomplishments. Julian Koenig—the man behind the Timex watch slogan “it takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’,” the man who worked on RFK’s campaign (both JFK and RFK were impressed by “Think small”), and the man who named Earth Day (while working on Senator Gaylord Nelson’s 1969 committee that first established Earth Day, Julian came up with the name, which just so happens to rhyme with “birthday” and fall on his birthday!)—is also extraordinary in person. But at ninety years old, Julian is quieter, calmer, less glamorous, more contemplative and philosophical than George. Julian has plenty of witty stories and jokes, but he only offers them when asked, and he’s less concerned with listing his accomplishments than with being precise.

  When I first asked Julian about some of the anecdotes I’d heard from George about their time together in Wolfsburg, Julian simply looked at me and said: “Do you know anything about George?”1 After a pensive pause, he went on: “I read what George wrote about our trip to Wolfsburg, and it’s an inaccurate description. It stars George.” And that’s true: George has published books about the business of advertising, and the stories in them do undoubtedly tend to center around George. Even so, somehow he avoids coming off as an egomaniac; rather he appears as a man with maybe a bit too much energy, a man who finds it hard to stop. He exaggerates, but perhaps only because he is so caught up in the story that he wants it to have the same effect on others that it once had on him. Another thing about George: talking with him, one gets the sense he has always looked up to Julian Koenig.

  Julian has plenty of good things to say about George too. “We were buddies,” he says, talking about those early days at DDB. “He and I got on very well. We did good work together. And it was always very swift. That’s the thing with George. You get an ad instantly. With Helmut I can remember sitting there for two hours and he wouldn’t put my headline down. He would just sit there and hesitate and stare at his board … George is the best art director I’ve ever worked with, in the sense of satisfaction. He would do something instantly, and with enthusiasm. With Helmut it was always relentless.” But Helmut and Julian had a lot of genuine respect for each other too, and you can see it in Julian’s eyes when he remembers him. “We were close,” Julian says, “but it was never easy with Helmut, it was always uphill.”

  These days, however, with Helmut no longer around to take part, and regardless of the respect they obviously have for each other, it’s George and Julian who have the heady disagreements, disagreements that go back to the Volkswagen campaign. The VW campaign was a moment in history that has followed them their entire lives, not only because it was such a success, but because of everything that came after. George had nothing to do directly with Think Small or Lemon or any of the other DDB Beetle ads. He was in the environment, “consulting” in a very broad sense, but the truth is, he didn’t like Helmut’s layout for Think Small at first, and he had no influence on Julian’s copy at all. Over the years, however, George has sometimes been mistakenly credited for those ads, and he hasn’t gone out of his way to speak up for Julian, or to set the record straight. Likewise, when reading George’s books (the first of which was written over forty years ago) and interviews, as time passes some of the “good stories” that are attributed to Julian (and others) in the earlier accounts do indeed become attributed to George in the later stories, though it doesn’t seem malicious so much as a trick of age and memory and ego.

  DDB and VW tied George and Julian together, but that was just the beginning of a long partnership and the first of many famous advertising campaigns. Not long after those first VW ads began sending their shock waves through the country, George and Julian were approached by another friend in the business named Fred Papert. Papert made a radical proposition: George and Julian should leave DDB and start their own creative agency.

  The founders of the second creative agency in the world: Fred Papert, Julian Koenig, and George Lois, 1962. (photo credit 58.1)

  “I knew there couldn’t be only one2 creative agency,” George later said. Papert’s proposal struck a chord. It was 1960. The time seemed right. And there was the desire to see if they had the talent to succeed without Bill. In any case, they were not leaving because they had any problems with Bill. If anything, they were leaving because they wanted to be more like him. The three men even styled their name after Doyle Dane Bernbach: “Papert Koenig Lois,” no commas. George insisted on being the third position in the title because he wanted his name to be in the same position that Bill’s name was at DDB.

  But even once they had put their plans into motion, they put off telling Bill the news. It wasn’t until late December 1960 that they made their way to his office. They both wore dress coats, an unusual sight at Doyle Dane Bernbach. They met at the elevator at an appointed hour. The first time they had tried to go to Bill’s office to break the news, Julian had instead taken the elevator down to the lobby and gone home. But by the second attempt, they managed to make it through Bill’s open door. As soon as he saw the two in their dress coats, he must have known something was up. “We go into the room and we don’t have anything in our hands,” George says. “No ads or anything to show him like usual, so Bill was cautious. He goes and sits behind the desk in the corner of the room—I’d never in my life seen Bill sit behind
a desk before.”

  “I told him we were leaving,” Julian recalls.

  “Julian said we were leaving,” George says. “But he said it just like that, ‘Bill, we’re leaving,’ and so I had to jump in and try and smooth it out. I told him we were very excited about starting the second creative agency, thinking he’d be proud of that.”

  But Bill was hurt, not proud. “There can only be one creative agency in the world,” he told them. It felt like a punch in the stomach to Julian and George. They stammered out something about how it could work “just so long as we model ourselves after you.” That softened Bill a bit. “I don’t want to lose ya,” he said. “This is just something we feel in our gut, Bill,” George replied. “It’s just something we have to do.” And what could Bill say? He had once done the same thing himself, hadn’t he? “It’s not about the money,” George said. “We’re not taking a single one of your accounts.” That itself was quite an unusual move, a sign of how much Julian and George respected Bill. After all, when Bill had left Grey all those years before, he’d taken the Ohrbach’s account with him. He probably wouldn’t have been able to leave had he not. As Julian and George left his office for the last time, Bill gave them both long hugs. “Just know you’ve always got a home here,” he said. And they knew he meant it.