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

Home > Nonfiction > Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle > Page 48
Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle Page 48

by Andrea Hiott


  49.11. “You know what he just”: from GL interviews and GL’s books.

  Chapter 50

  50.1. “That brought up certain feelings”: Julian Koenig interviews, Hiott, NYC, 2009. All Julian quotes from author interviews, unless otherwise stated.

  50.2. DDB, because of the unique ethnic mix of the partners (Doyle, Dare, and Bernbach), was often referred to as “two Jews and an Irishman” (Della Femina). Now George, who was Greek and had been picked on by the Irish kids in his neighborhood, was working for two Jews and an Irishman on a German campaign for a car that still had Nazi connotations.

  50.3. “secret, hidden basement”: Version of George Lois’s story as recounted here comes from author interviews with Lois. He has also recounted similar versions of this story in his own books and interviews over the years.

  50.4. “This is just a prelude”: Time magazine. “AUTOS: The New Generation” Monday, 5 October 1959.

  Chapter 51

  51.1. In The Magic of Thinking Big, Schwartz actually encourages people to scrutinize their thoughts and overcome self-doubt and worry: In essence, it’s not the material objects or the accumulation of material objects that is the problem here. And Schwartz’s book was not the problem: It was popular because people were so caught up in trying to keep up with the rat race that they were very unhappy and thus needed books to help them, as Schwartz’s book did, to refocus on what was meaningful. It seems like a paradox, but thinking big and thinking small can be exactly the same thing. The title caught people’s minds because of the consumer culture, but what they were looking for was a cure to that kind of Bigness and an entry into real Bigness: meaning, connection, confidence, love.

  51.2. “The illustration in this Volkswagen ad”: Advertising Age, 5 October 1959.

  51.3. ——— “This copy is so … believable” The first ad would appear in the Journal of Commerce, which is now apparently owned by The Economist.

  51.4. “We had conspicuous”: Julian Koenig interview, 2009.

  51.5. “Ten years ago”: Koenig’s first Think Small copy in Life, 22 February 1960.

  51.6. How did the VW become known as the Beetle? The earliest time the car was referred to as a beetle is in a New York Times article from June 1938. Hitler, too, apparently said it should “look like a beetle,” and at the time of the car’s creation, it was a popular idea to look to insects for ideas of streamlining. Here, Julian uses the word too. He’d thought it looked very beetle-like when he saw it in Wolfsburg. It would eventually become the way Americans saw it, though the original VW was not officially named the Beetle for decades.

  51.7. “I suppose that means you want me to make the image small”: Lorin, 15.

  51.8. “That’s the header!”: Story of Schmidt comes from Julian Koenig.

  Chapter 52

  52.1. “This little car missed the boat”: copy from Lemon ad in Life, 11 April 1960.

  52.2. “In the beginning”: Della Femina, p. 28.

  52.3. Bud became Helmut: pointed out in Helmut Krone. The book by Clive Challis.

  52.4. “a writer of short sentences”: Julian Koenig on This American Life.

  52.5. “modern version of the Model T” because it “helped to open car ownership to people who might not have been able to afford a new car otherwise” Brinkley, 587.

  52.6. “What I try to do with a creative person”: Bill interview, DDB News.

  Chapter 53

  53.1. “While the levels of logic”: Muir, 3.

  53.2. “If you are Jewish”: Playboy, “Snobs Guide to Cars,” July 1964.

  53.3. Quote from Alfred Brendel documentary Man and Mask.

  53.4. “This was a distinct”: Julian Koenig interview, Hiott.

  Chapter 54

  54.1. Franz Marc’s “Tower of Blue Horses,” created in 1913 and formerly owned by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, was seized in 1937 and shown at the Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition. The Nazis removed it from this exhibition when German officers from WWI, the same war in which Marc had fought in and died on the side of Germany, protested that the Nazis were defaming a fallen hero. In 1940, Herman Göring confiscated the painting for his private collection. Since the end of WWII, numerous rumors have been told about its possible whereabouts, but it has not been found.

  54.2. Carl Hahn later told me that it was actually DDB that did the brochures for each of these exhibitions: Hahn, alongside Helmut Schmitz, and his partnership with DDB would ultimately bring the Creative Revolution in advertising to Germany too. Years later, on VW’s fiftieth birthday, Carl Hahn was given a book by DDB about the VW ads. Think Small was the first ad in the book. And in that book, the creative credits read: Art: Helmut Krone. Text: Julian Koenig/Helmut Schmitz. Hahn’s office is actually located inside the Wolfsburg Art Museum building, next door to the main exhibition space.

  54.3. “These people come from many different”: Nordhoff, brochure.

  54.4. Eighty thousand people living in Wolfsburg: New York Times, 1963.

  54.5. “economically unite the free world”: Nordhoff’s Reden und Aufsaetze.

  Chapter 55

  55.1. one of the worst years in American history: Among other things, 1968 had seen the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the TET offensive, and the disastrous riots and beatings at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

  55.2. The first stadium concert was in 1965. It was in Shea Stadium, and the band was the Beatles.

  Chapter 56

  56.1. “An observation that has”: Franz Marc, Sunday, 28 March 1915, 36.

  56.2. “understand the sixties”: Frank, 1.

  56.3. “by 1993 sales were so far in the toilet”: Kiley, AOL, 2011.

  Chapter 57

  57.1. Hello again. All these entries I copied from the guestbook into my notebook, then I mixed the geographies and a few words because there’s no way for me to get anyone’s permission to use their words, and I didn’t want to invade their privacy.

  Chapter 58

  58.1. “Do you know anything”: Julian Koenig, Hiott.

  58.2. “I knew there couldn’t be only one”: George Lois, Hiott.

  58.3. The story of Helmut calling out “cuckoo” comes from author interview with George Lois.

  58.4. “It is quite possible that the effect of DDB is”: Advertising Age, Baker, 1 November 1965.

  58.5. “… we disagreed sometimes about how an ad should be done”: Challis, 218.

  58.6. “I’ll be back on Monday”: Levenson, 3.

  58.7. ——— “What a different life it would have been”: Challis, 217.

  58.8. More on Bernbach: One of Bill’s biggest sources of creativity was always reading and the arts. He became a chairman of the Municipal Arts Society. He was on the board of the Salk Institute. He was on the National Book Committee. He taught at NYU. He was vice chairman of Lincoln Center’s film committee for a time. Julian would later work with Bobby Kennedy. Later, he worked with Bill Moyers on the Johnson campaign. He had the chance to have worked for Goldwater but he said though Goldwater had good ideas, he was an angry man and “anger begets anger and triggers conflict.” DDB did one of the most memorable political TV ad campaigns of all time about the atomic bomb: the little girl picking the petals of a flower as a man counts down.

  58.9. “like pigeons from a sleeve”: Lois, George Be Careful.

  Chapter 59

  59.1. “For some years now our economic policy has”: Original: Unsere oekonomische Politik ist schon seit Jahren zugleich Aussenpolitik gewesen.”: Hartrich, 5.

  59.2. “The assets of”: Hawranek, Der Spiegel, 2009.

  59.3. “Character … is formed primarily by a man’s work.” Schumacher, 59.

  59.4. ——— “We always need both freedom and order:” Schumacher, 69.

  … And Going …

  bm1.1. diese Wagen läuft und läuft und läuft … VW commercial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljPB0DanK74

  bm1.2. “The U.S. is the most important market for the Bee
tle”: Kiley, AOL, 2011.

  bm1.3. Volkswagen opened the Westmoreland Assembly Plant in Pennsylvania in 1978. It was not profitable and closed in 1988.

  bm1.4. In Tennessee there is another big work in progress.

  bm1.5. Quotes from designers are in Objectified, 2009.

  bm1.6. “While consumers do appreciate knowing”: Adamson, Forbes, 2011.

  bm1.7. Little Gidding: “Four Quartets” by T. S. Eliot: We shall not cease from exploration /And the end of all our exploring /Will be to arrive where we started /And know the place for the first time.

  About the Author

  ANDREA HIOTT was born in South Carolina and graduated with a degree in philosophy from the University of Georgia in Athens. She then went to Berlin to study German and neuroscience, and ended up staying and working as a freelance journalist. In 2005, alongside a group of international artists and writers, she co-founded an interdisciplinary journal called Pulse, now created in partnership with the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy. She serves as editor in chief.

 

 

 


‹ Prev