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

by Andrea Hiott

  Adolf Hitler, a man that history will forever link to Germany, was not a German citizen by birth. Like Ferdinand Porsche, he was born in a small village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the eldest son of a well-respected Austrian customs official. By the time he arrived in the world, born in Braunau am Inn in 1889, fourteen years after Ferdinand Porsche’s birth, the industrial-age Eiffel Tower was being built and industrialization was slightly less alien to most Europeans than it had been a decade before; the automobile was slowly gaining ground. The first official auto race would occur when Hitler was five years old, and though his family would have been familiar with the idea of automobiles, they would nevertheless have been a very unlikely sight in their town.

  From early on, Adolf was a troubled boy. When he was still a child, his younger brother and playmate Edmund died, causing a noticeable change in the family and further heartbreak for his mother Klara, who had already lost three children. Adolf, now her only son, wasn’t a “mother’s boy” in the traditional sense, but by all reports the two were sincerely close. “I never witnessed a closer attachment,”1 the family doctor, a Jewish man named Eduard Bloch, would later write.

  As Adolf grew, he would seem at first to be a meek boy, yelled at and beaten often by his father, coddled by his mother, neither popular nor unpopular at school. Once the family moved to Linz, considered by some to be the most German city in the empire, Hitler was attracted to the popularized Pan-German ideas, ideas that discriminated against Czechs and others who did not speak German as their first tongue. He also identified with the Schönerer lifestyle, a movement that advised boys to restrain from sexual relations until at least the age of twenty-five, and warned them away from drinking alcohol, smoking, or eating red meat. In these same years, Adolf became rather obsessed with the Native American tales of the German author Karl May. Likewise, he was entranced by stories his history teacher told him of a mythologized German past, and men such as Frederick the Great. The stories impacted him deeply; he would talk of May and of Frederick the Great for the rest of his life. As he grew into an adolescent, this fantasy life would only expand. By the time he reached his teenage years, he had decided that he was destined to become a great artist and would consider doing nothing else. He and his father quarreled violently over this, and in rebellion, Adolf no longer tried hard at his studies and his grades suffered. This only caused more beatings from his father. His mother demurred and did not stand in her husband’s way.

  As Hitler struggled through his adolescence, Ferdinand Porsche was in Jacob Lohner’s workshop designing his first car. Around Hitler’s eleventh birthday, Ferdinand Porsche presented his creation at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. It would be Ferdinand’s inaugural visit to the French capital, his first time mingling with people from all over Europe. The event drew in millions, one of the first large-scale shows about technology ever held. Engineers and scientists were ecstatic about it, coming from many European countries to attend, showing off not only cars but also inventions such as escalators and talking films. Excitement was in the air, and so was controversy. The Eiffel Tower seemed the perfect metaphor for the age of industry breaking upon the world: While some loved the structure, others protested that it was an ugly monument to all that was wrong with industrialization. And yet technical progress was a fever that could not be cooled; its seductiveness was evident in the way even the most anti-industry of voices could not help but be awed when standing outside the Paris Exhibition at night: It was the first of its kind to be electrically lit.

  At Lohner & Co., the past few years had been exciting but difficult. Ferdinand Porsche’s trial-and-error method had cost Jacob quite a lot of money: Each time one idea of Porsche’s failed, he was quick to adjust and come up with a new idea that he just had to test. Lohner somehow found a way to grit his teeth and stick with the young man, and by the time of the Paris Exhibition, his patience was indeed paying off. The Lohner-Porsche car was the automotive star of the show; European newspapers wrote that it was the most outstanding innovation there.

  It’s easy to see why people made such a fuss. The car really is beautiful—primitive-looking by contemporary standards, with its big wooden wheels, its uncovered seating, and its tall, thin steering wheel—but the design is elegant and neat, streamlined with a little wave of steel at its front. The car was perfectly balanced and poised, exactly the kind of thing to be taken to the theater by an emperor or a queen: It was quiet because it had no transmission or layshafts, working instead with little electrical engines that were connected directly to the wheels. And it could travel 50 miles at 9 mph before its batteries needed to be recharged. Even today, such a construction would seem a unique and splendid thing. It was awarded a grand prize for its design. Ferdinand had been only twenty-three years old at the time he’d created the car’s design. “He is very young,”2 Jacob Lohner told the crowd in Paris, “but he’s a man with quite a career ahead of him. You’ll certainly hear of him again.” And indeed, that was just the beginning. Over the next two years, Porsche3 would build the world’s first hybrid as well as a car called “Mixt,” which used a mix of electric and internal-combustion engines. Both these cars were extraordinary and unprecedented. In the following years, Porsche would also design the first front-wheel- and the first four-wheel-drive automobile. In 1902, Porsche won the most prestigious medal in Austrian engineering, the Pöttinger, for his work. He had truly left the Austrian countryside and was now moving toward fame. In contrast, Hitler’s move to Vienna did not go nearly so well.

  An advertisement showing the award-winning electric Lohner-Porsche car that Ferdinand designed when he was twenty-three years old. This car was powered by the hub-mounted motors on the front wheels. (photo credit 6.1)

  Ferdinand Porsche at the wheel of the world’s first functional hybrid automobile, the Semper Vivus. The front of this car represents one of the first attempts at an aerodynamic design. (photo credit 6.2)

  In 1903, when Hitler was fourteen years old, his father died suddenly. Hitler showed little remorse over his father’s death, but his health temporarily declined and he used his persistent flu-like sickness, alongside his new position as the only male in the house, to convince his mother that he should drop out of high school. For the following two years, he stayed home, doted on by his mother, sister, and aunt, spending his days reading and drawing. In the evenings, he attended Wagner operas with his friend August Kubizek, fantasizing and pontificating about architecture and music and art. Eventually, Hitler set off to Vienna with the expectation that he would study at the prestigious art academy there, and convinced Kubizek to follow him. But Hitler did not have the help of any well-connected friends. Nor did he have the “sixth sense” or the talent for his subject that Porsche had. While Hitler’s drawings were better than average, they were not extraordinary or even skilled; he was not good at drawing the human figure, and there was nothing particularly unique or eye-catching about his buildings or landscapes. But Hitler was not aware of such things. He was convinced he was a genius, buoyed by his thoughts of fame. He didn’t try to find a job, living instead off some money his aunt had given him. He looked into everything, but casually, usually skimming the surface rather than going too deep. He liked to read only the first and last chapters of books, for instance, thinking he could grasp their entire meaning that way. But Vienna impressed him with its architecture and music and voluminous museums, and he spent his days surrounding himself with the city’s music and art.

  There was another passion that began in earnest during these years for Hitler though: his love for automobiles. It was the first time that he had been exposed to cars to any real extent, and the first time he could attend an auto race. In Vienna, Adolf began reading motoring publications and keeping up with the latest races and news. It was the beginning of a lifelong self-education in automobiles. In later years, he would spend hours and hours personally interviewing potential drivers for his own car, asking them detailed, technical questions that astonished and sometimes even up
ended the most experienced of them. This was one subject in which Hitler apparently did not skim.

  In different ways, both Adolph Hitler and Ferdinand Porsche had been infected by the spirit of their times, a moment when progress was the name of the game, and when an individual was believed to have some great upward rise connected with fate. Since the eighteenth century, with the onset of the Enlightenment, thought and the power of using one’s thinking to solve great social and individual problems had become increasingly paramount, and in turn, both the cult of the individual and the strength of “the masses” were rising. Whereas industry had started in England and come fully of age and power only recently in the German-speaking world, the idea of progress and of using one’s reason to achieve such progress was already well installed in big cities like Vienna. Tied up in that idea was mankind’s “war” against space and time; identification with a group was one way of fighting this war (because it made a person feel part of something larger and “timeless”) and, so it seemed, was celebrity or fame (because it gave one the sense of having a lasting presence in the world, of immortality). This desire for dominance can be traced back in history, to conquerors such as Alexander the Great and Napoleon, but in the 1900s it was becoming characteristic not only of the political world but of the commercial world as well. There was a new emphasis on buying and selling, on mass appeal: New forms of media connected more people, increasing audience size and proximity, thus intensifying a product’s, or a person’s, ability to be known and also raising the social desire “to belong.” The automobile was a natural part of this wave: It was for the individual, but it was a way of showing off one’s individuality in a crowd; it was an engine of both economic and social expansion, a way to simultaneously “stand apart,” and belong to a particular class. Motion itself was a sign of power. As early as 1906, one European newspaper talked of the automobile as the tool that would finally “grant humans their conquest over time and space.”4

  Hitler came to Vienna with big plans, boasting of all the great things he would do at school. Unfortunately, real life was beginning to fall short of his expectations. As the months passed, his money ran thin, as did his prospects of becoming an artist. His application to the Academy of Fine Arts was rejected. When he later tried applying a second time, he was not even allowed to sit for the exam. He tried the architecture school too, but was told he didn’t have the proper credentials because he had not finished high school. The success that had come naturally to Porsche was what Hitler now strove to patch together after skimming everything he encountered or found. And whereas Porsche never cared much for fame, and certainly had never gone in search of it, it was the attention itself, the very quality of being known, for which Hitler longed. He would later write in his autobiography that Vienna was the first time in his life that he felt “at odds with himself.”5 He no longer felt he was in control.

  Adolf lied to his mother about getting into art school. He told her the city was embracing him with open arms, that he’d been accepted into the prestigious university and all was well. It’s hard to imagine she believed him. Perhaps, as mothers often do, she was able to see through his ruse. These were difficult years for her too; the loss of her husband and the absence of her son weighed heavily on her. Adolf had known his mother was sick before he’d left for Vienna, but he’d gone ahead with his plans. When word came that Klara’s condition had dramatically deteriorated, however, Adolf went back to Linz to take care of her, showing more care and responsibility than he ever had in his life, and perhaps ever would again. When his mother died, he sobbed uncontrollably, “prostrate with grief”6 as Klara’s doctor would later attest. Hitler was eighteen at the time. He grieved for weeks before resolving himself and leaving for the anonymous big city again. Back in Vienna, he was alone in a new way. He had little money, no job and no motivation to find one. After his second rejection from art school, he cut off contact with his childhood friend Kubizek, failing to return to the apartment they shared. Aside from his sister, whom he sometimes went to for financial help, Hitler no longer had any ties to his former life.

  Meanwhile, Ferdinand Porsche had grown used to the big city of Vienna and his new status there. He had fallen in love with a girl named Aloisia Kaes7; electricity sparked between them, but of a whole different kind. The daughter of Bohemian artisans, Aloisia was independent and smart; a bookkeeper in the shop where Porsche worked, she was a workingwoman at a time when many women would not consider such a thing. She was also tough, a fortunate characteristic for someone who would share life with a man as obsessed (and sometimes, simply selfish) as Ferdinand Porsche, and she too enjoyed cars. Later, Aloisia would unabashedly ride with Ferdinand during the Prince Henry trials, a famous motor race where it was certainly an unusual sight to see a woman in one of the competing cars! She also liked taking his vehicles into the country with him to visit his family, all of whom were still living in Maffersdorf. The first such trip they took was right after Ferdinand’s success at the Paris Exhibition; they drove his winning car home to his village. When Aloisia met his mother and father, Ferdinand introduced her as his fiancée. The two were married in 1903, and a year later, they welcomed their first child, a daughter they named Louise, a little girl who wouldn’t take long to get behind the wheel; in childhood, she was sometimes seen sitting at the wheel on their way to school!

  As a young man in Vienna, Ferdinand Porsche fell in love with Aloisia Kaes. (photo credit 6.3)

  In the same year Ferdinand Porsche and Aloisia were married, a Viennese paper did an article about Ferdinand, who was now becoming simply known as “Porsche,” calling him “a tireless creator and worker.” “To dream and to act,” the journalist said, “that is the essence of people like Porsche.” He was not even thirty, and already he had changed the automotive landscape of his country. It all seemed to arrive at once—marriage, family, and then, in 1906, a job as chief designer at Austria-Hungary’s primary car company, Austro-Daimler. Porsche was an elite automotive man now, his name well known. Versions of “the Porsche system” were being used all over the city: Even the Vienna fire brigade decided to become motorized by using hub-mounted electric motors he had designed.

  Ferdinand Porsche had just the kind of talent that the future would need. In these early years of the 1900s—a time when Germany and Austria were still empires, and when Europe and America had no concept of what it would be like to fight a world war—all the main car companies we know of today were taking their first steps. Thanks to new inventions such as the telephone, ideas were spreading more quickly, and that meant the race to advance technologically was speeding up too. Automakers were constantly observing one another, and a sense of competition had set in. Individual, motorized mobility was getting closer. But there was still so far to go.

  Around the same time Porsche was starting his new job and his new family, Henry Ford, with the help of two Hungarian immigrant designers, was beginning to design a car called the Model T. This vehicle would later be known as the world’s first car for the masses. But the gap of time between the invention of that car and the motorization of the United States was a matter of decades. Horses and carriages still felt inevitable, and most people still died in the very same towns where they’d been born, rarely traveling farther than a radius of twelve miles. The primary reason was an economic one: In the early 1900s, the average American made about five hundred dollars a year. That meant automobiles, which ranged in price from $650 to $6,000, were beyond most people’s budget. (Later, car companies would invent credit systems, and the sales of cars would soar.) While in retrospect we can talk about 1908 as the birth of Ford’s Model T, the time when “the people” got a car, in fact, all Ford had that year was “a wonderful car—one, single, wonderful car.”8 As author and historian Douglas Brinkley points out: “At the time, Ford himself wondered aloud whether his company would ever build even a tenth Model T.”9

  In 1909, the same year that the United States laid down its first mile of paved road, Porsche an
d his wife welcomed their second child into the world, a boy they named Ferdinand, after his father, but who would come to be known simply as Ferry. Now working for Austro-Daimler, a place that made cars for the elite as well as top-of-the-line racing cars, Porsche was at the Semmering hill climb racing one of his new designs on the nineteenth of September when word came that his son had been born. It is a potent image—to imagine Porsche at the racetrack at the very moment his son enters the world—and not only because Porsche’s main connection to his children would always be tied up with the automobile, but also because his son’s birth occurred on the verge of a dramatic new decade of technological progress.

  Between the years 1910 and 1920, the United States and Europe would experience a breathtaking degree of change. Change in transportation, economics, and political systems would go hand in hand. Technology was now, more than ever, beginning to be seen as a tool, indeed an engine, of political and economic influence, and Porsche himself was an example of how intimately these paths were being intertwined. Porsche was never interested in politics, and yet because he worked in the field of transportation, which was becoming an integral part of political and social development, politics would always be a part of his life. At times, this was because government subsidies were a means of getting money for his cars, but there was also a more simple reason: cars were for the elite, and who was more elite than royalty? Before 1914, Europe was still a place of empires, of kings and queens and archdukes—and they were among the first to buy cars. Jacob Lohner & Co., Porsche’s first employer, had built cars for royalty, and Porsche had eventually been asked to build a car for Archduke Franz Ferdinand. When serving mandatory military service in 1904, Porsche was called on to drive the archduke on various occasions as well.