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

by Andrea Hiott

  And so the dramatic turn of events that occurred in 1914 hit Porsche and his family close to home. That year, all that speed and dynamic change being generated by the Western world produced a loud and violent crash: the First World War. As a result, the structures of government and country that Porsche had known would soon be dismantled and rearranged. It would be the world’s first mechanized war—replete with machine guns, airplanes, and tanks—and so it seems fitting that its opening shot involved one of the world’s first car bombs: Archduke Franz Ferdinand himself was the target, and though he survived the explosion, he and his wife were shot and killed later that same night while riding in their open-roofed automobile. With their murders, the First World War began. By the end of it, two empires would fall and a new balance would descend upon the political and economic world. The war would be ugly, as all wars are, and yet somehow, out of all the pain and chaos, a new symbiosis would develop between the United States and Europe, paving the way for the automobile to become the twentieth century’s most intoxicating adventure.

  Young Bill Bernbach1 got a job working at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The past decade had not been easy for him, and now well into his twenties, he was still unsure exactly what he wanted to do with his life. Bill had graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Commercial Science in 1933, just as the Depression was in full swing and jobs were hard to find, especially for a slight and shy young man, whose brilliant blue eyes were nearly always glued to a book.

  Through family connections, he’d found his first job in the mailroom of Schenley Distributors, working for sixteen dollars a week, stuffing envelopes with promotional brochures. Working in an idyllic brownstone in midtown New York City, Bill read fiction and philosophy in the lulls between his mailroom responsibilities. Though he loved literature, he was not someone who thought of himself as a writer or an artist, or someone who had any conscious inspirations toward the creative life. He had studied business in school, but he had a contemplative streak that made it difficult for him to fit in with typical corporate manners and moods. Aside from his close relationship to his large family, he was a bit of a loner in those years. Lucky for him, there was another person working in the mailroom who also liked books. Her name was Evelyn Carbone, the daughter of Italian immigrants, fluent in French, with a recent degree from Hunter College and plans to go back. She liked to watch Bill drift away into the paperbacks he smuggled into work, and she liked the intelligent way he could talk about what he read. The feelings Bill had for Evelyn were nearly bursting to be voiced by the time Evelyn took the initiative and invited him to one of her family’s elaborate Sunday lunches. On the day she asked, Bill said “yes” even before she could get the question out.

  But Catholic girls were not supposed to ask Jewish boys to meals at their home, or so certain members of Bill’s family thought. When he told his mother about the invitation, she literally threw herself on the floor and wailed. Bill’s parents had experienced persecution in their home countries and had come to America looking for a new life: It was their faith and their religion they credited with having saved and strengthened them, and they clung to it passionately, or at least his mother Rebecca did. She was very strict about the Jewish orthodoxies she’d practiced all her life, and she demanded her family respect them as well. She told Bill, her beloved youngest son, that it would kill her if he married a non-Jewish girl. It’s just a Sunday lunch, Bill said.

  At that point, Bill was still shy about forcibly stating his own wants and opinions, even to his family. Thanks to some unexpected relationships, however, that was beginning to change. Bill was always drawing attention and protection from powerful strangers, though it was hard to say exactly why. Even though his father was a clothing designer who dressed with flair, Bill inherited none of that love for ornamentation. He wore simple clothing and in those early years at least was not afraid to repeat the same few outfits every week. He was five foot seven, and thin to the point of looking a bit malnourished. But there was something else about him, a kinetic curiosity, an energy and presence that imbued all his gestures with a charismatic appeal. Bill’s own initial innocence about this charisma is perhaps what made others want to take him under their wing. One of the first men to do so was one of the most powerful men in New York City at the time: Grover Whalen, who, in 1935, was elected to preside over the coming World’s Fair.

  Whalen was a former commissioner of the New York Police Department, a gregarious and experienced man of business who was the chairman of Schenley’s for most of the 1930s. He was also the “official greeter” of New York City, which meant he met and schmoozed with all the big personalities who came in and out of town. Whalen noticed something about Bill, the boy in the mailroom, and brought him up to work as his personal assistant. The job was not glamorous—Bill ran errands and did clerical tasks—but the atmosphere often was: Whalen once took Bill with him on a business trip to Washington, D.C., for instance, just so the young man could experience his first plane ride. Bill would remember Whalen giving him five one-dollar bills when they walked into the Carlton Hotel, telling him, “Now Bill, what you do is get quarters for these, because we’re going to need quarters for tips.”2 It was a whole new environment for Bill. “I didn’t have that kind of experience,” he would later admit. “I learned the ways.” Whalen liked Bill’s innocence, and would often invite Bill and Evelyn to attend star-studded events with him around New York. Bill confided in Whalen about the troubles he was experiencing at home thanks to his controversial relationship with Evelyn, which, in the parlance of the day, would be a “mixed marriage,” if they decided to take that step. Whalen’s only piece of advice was this: Follow your heart.

  Once the World’s Fair got closer and required more time and energy, Whalen brought Bill on board to help. At Schenley, Bill surprised everyone by writing an ad for one of their products, American Cream Whiskey, and sending it in to their ad agency, Lord & Thomas.3 A version of Bill’s concept was printed in The New York Times soon after (or so Bill thought). He showed the ad to those around him and told them it had been his idea. Bill was becoming more and more eager to impress and move up the corporate ladder, and that only endeared him all the more to his boss at Schenley, and to Whalen. Here was a kid who was hungry to learn. The perfect audience for someone who is hungry to teach.

  Bill started taking the train all the way out to Flushing Meadows nearly every day. Soon, there would be millions doing the same. At the World’s Fair offices, Whalen put him to work writing short speeches and press statements. Bill was fascinated by the futuristic exhibits at the Fair, and by one of its main speakers in particular, Albert Einstein. He would soon memorize many of Einstein’s quotes, and his own speeches would later be littered with them. “A problem cannot be solved on the same level on which it was created,” Einstein once said.

  What Bill picked up from Einstein was the realization that a release from categorical thinking could lead one to new levels of creativity. Reading men like Einstein and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, Bill came to understand science in a new way. He realized that the epiphanies of the writers he admired, and the epiphanies of the men and women who were creating the technological and scientific structures of the world, had been possible due to the same combination of social freedom and individual discipline. He saw that scientific work could also be creative work, that the two were not as distinct as they seemed. In fact, traces of both could even be found in the time capsule of the Fair, which included, among other things, a new invention called the wristwatch, a fountain pen, a sampling of alloys, various pieces of industrial machinery, articles on philosophy and economics, and the books of Thomas Mann.

  During the evenings at the Fair in 1939, there were often fireworks exploding into the sultry night sky. Perhaps Bill stayed around after work to watch them sometimes, or to gaze at the glowing fountains of water that were also a popular attraction. And maybe Evelyn, who was now his wife, joined him there some nights. Bill had followed his heart
and asked Evelyn to marry him, and she’d said yes. They found the pull between them too strong to deny, but getting married had not been an easy decision. Relations with Bill’s family had been very tense. They’d hoped the situation would sort itself out with time. It didn’t. In fact, it got worse. Upon hearing of Bill’s marriage, his mother exercised her immense sway over Bill’s father and demanded the ultimate: Her husband had to follow the traditional Orthodox rules and declare their youngest son dead.

  It was the beginning of some hard years for Bill. Leaving his job at the distiller’s to work with Whalen, Bill probably imagined great things would soon follow, but nothing materialized. Once Whalen’s work at the World’s Fair was over, Bill found himself thirty years old, disowned by his parents, newly married, and without a job. Evelyn was still working at Schenley and hers would be their only income for nearly a year. Watching months and months pass, in his desperation (and naïveté) Bill finally took a job with a mobster organization that was not very safe. When his boss at Schenley heard about this from Evelyn, he realized how strapped Bill must have been. He told Evelyn that the two of them should have spoken up about their situation. Shortly after, he arranged for Bill to go and talk with a man named William H. Weintraub. Mr. Weintraub was in the advertising business. And soon, so was Bill.

  Hitler: Our last hope.1 That’s the message of one earnest German poster from 1932, its drawings purposely dim, chalk-rendered, sorrowful: Half a dozen faces, the People, stare out in desperation, their skin and bodies yellow, smudged, thin. How did so many Germans come to think of Adolf Hitler as their last hope? And how did Adolf Hitler get so many people to believe in him?

  Julius Caesar was apparently the first person to refer to the area of Europe beyond the Danube and the Rhine as Germania. Today the word Germania can have a distinctively Nazi flair—having been the name of Albert Speer’s architectural model of the projected “World Capital” of Berlin, as well as of an SS regiment during the Second World War—but in 1900, it was a reference to a time when indigenous German-speaking people lived in small communities and had a strong connection to the land, an era that would become mythologized as the pure-blooded foundation of the German nation, though no “pure-blooded” foundation actually exists.

  In large part, this idea had grown out of the writings of the Roman orator Tacitus: His work, Germania, was the first study of the natives of what is now Germany, and while it was brief and often used rather exalted terms to describe the characteristics of the native population, its overall conclusions would be passed down through the generations, still prevalent many hundreds of years later when German-speaking kingdoms finally did indeed become a legal nation in 1871. In that year, the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, in a power move that blatantly excluded Austria, employed his “blood and iron” philosophy of politics and market unification to bring the formerly separate kingdoms, duchies, principalities, and free cities (freie städte) together, establishing the German Empire under Emperor Wilhelm II. It was a time when many nations, or countries, as we now know them, were just struggling to form. In response to Bismarck’s unification of so many German-speaking areas, for example, the dualism of “Austria-Hungary” was formed, a troubled vestige of the original Habsburg monarchy and an empire mixed with diverse peoples and languages that would themselves eventually form separate nation-states. Bismarck’s unification of Germany ushered in the creation of new national models, and that meant new models of trade and commerce. Soon after unification, the German industrial revolution began in full.

  All of this was coming to pass around the time Ferdinand Porsche and Adolf Hitler were born, and in the years of their childhood, years moving up to the turn of the century, the German Empire became a place that garnered envy and respect. It was, in fact, second only to the United States in its economy and industry, even though the Empire’s entire area could have fit easily into just a few American states. It was during these crucial years that Germans began to emerge as exceptionally innovative engineers with a deep concern for quality and precision. In fact, “German Quality Work,” Deutsche Qualitätsarbeit,2 is a term and a principle rooted deep in the German idea of labor, stemming from the times of the farmer and the artisan, the days of the tinsmiths, blacksmiths, tanners, weavers, and others who worked directly with their hands.3

  Even though Bismarck had excluded them from the German Empire, it was not uncommon for German-speaking people born in Austria-Hungary to think of themselves as German. Thus Hitler, from a young age, rebelling against his father who was an Austrian civil servant, felt it was only the German side of his heritage he wished to adopt; it was a spirit easily accelerated by the Pan-German influences in his childhood town of Linz. And though it was the myths of Wagner’s operas and romanticized ideas of Germanic heroes like Frederick the Great that quickened Hitler’s pulse, tied up in that was the widespread desire to be part of a continuous story, a nation. It was something many in Austria-Hungary were searching for at the time, and it was an easy intoxication for some German-speaking young men.

  Whatever the reasons for Adolf Hitler’s identification with Germany, however, in the years leading up to the First World War, he was still alone, destitute, and wandering Vienna’s streets, with no easy way of getting to Germany. For money he offered to carry people’s bags for them at the train station, or drew and painted postcards and sold them wherever he could. Once his funds for rent ran out, he found himself sleeping in the streets. Eventually, with lice in his hair and his clothes tattered, he got himself into a homeless shelter and off the streets. He would eventually step up to staying in a Men’s Home, something along the lines of a modern European youth hostel, a place where he had his own bed and locker and was in the company of men down on their luck or passing through town instead of the drug addicts and tramps of previous shelters. The Men’s Home had a library and a room where “the intellectuals” often met. It was here Hitler spent most of the day, reading books, drawing his postcards, and giving impromptu speeches about his hatred for Vienna and the city’s liberal tendencies.

  Vienna was a city rife with anti-Semitism in those years. Hitler had a friend who was Jewish at the time, and in selling his postcards he often did business with Jewish men, but somewhere inside his animosity was beginning to grow, even if his rants at the time were not against Jewish people but against Bolsheviks,4 capitalists, and trade unions—words that were jumbled together and misused in both the city and his head. He began to hate all things associated with the fin de siècle artistic vibe of men like Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt (whose art he would later try to destroy), and he told the men in the home that he planned to go to Germany soon and study real art.

  When Hitler turned twenty-four on April 20, 1913, the money that had been left for him in his father’s will finally became available and he was able to buy a train ticket to Munich, where he found a dingy apartment and continued making and selling postcards to pay the bills. Then, the unexpected happened. The archduke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, was shot, and the continent began to whip itself up into the violent frenzy of war.

  Hitler snuck into the German army in the chaos, no one questioning his citizenship in the rush of recruitment then taking place. The First World War was a kind of miracle for Hitler. Not only did he get to serve for his “real country,” but he also got to experience all the qualities he associated with that place. Suddenly he had a uniform; he had orders; he had a purpose, a place for all his manic energy to flow. Now there were rules, and a clear goal. He had never been very patient or able to study or concentrate for long, and the immediate action of war, the lack of choice in circumstances, and the regimented lifestyle taught him how to control himself, even as it further romanticized Germany and Hitler’s idea of the classical German hero. Hitler gave his all during the war, working as a messenger, a dangerous job that meant he was often making his way to the front line. He was wounded and given a medal for his deeds. The men in his division said what others had also said: He was a st
range fellow with odd ideas and unexpected determination, a manic sense of loyalty, clearly intoxicated by war’s rush; he never got letters and rarely took leave; he often sat in a corner alone. But he was exceedingly loyal to his regiment, even deferring possible promotions just so he could stay with this new group he’d found. Stories would later be told of his close calls with death—stepping out of a command post a moment before it was blown to pieces, or moving from a trench just before it was attacked—and true or not, these stories would stir and exemplify his sincere and eventually horrific belief that he had been selected by Providence to fulfill a great task on Germany’s behalf.

  Those years of fighting were among the best he’d known. But then the very thing that Hitler feared most came to pass: Germany lost, and the war came to an end. All his grand ideas of Germania were defeated. Hitler was shocked. Germany’s defeat infuriated him and made him, literally, very sick. He later wrote that he had not cried since his mother’s death, but he cried when he heard the war had been lost. Lying in a hospital bed, temporarily blind and recovering from wounds he’d suffered, he thought of killing himself as he absorbed the news.5

  Hitler was not the only person shocked by the defeat. At the time of surrender, German industry was still pumping along normally. The entire country was untouched; there was not a single occupying foreign force in its midst. Having not witnessed the fighting from the lines, it is understandable that some German people came out of the war feeling shocked and betrayed, not knowing how many Germans had been killed in the past few months, having no experience of how weakened the German forces actually were. Because the defeat was not obvious to ordinary Germans, it was easy for conspiracy theories to spread: it was the fault of the Communists, it was the fault of those who wanted democracy, it was the fault of the Jews. These feelings were only strengthened during the summit held to decide how to punish Germany at the end of the war. Precisely because Germany was so rich in industry, the Allies now wanted to cut that potency down. There were grumblings that it had been German hubris that had started the war in the first place, and this perception only added to the punitive mood in 1919 as the Allies came together in Paris to work out the Treaty of Versailles.