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

by Andrea Hiott

  Throughout the war, the rallying call of the United States under President Woodrow Wilson had been the mission to “make the world safe for democracy.” It was the main reason given to the American people for the eventual U.S. involvement in the war, and it was the cause that many young Americans had enlisted, fought, and died for. In that spirit, Wilson had proposed the Fourteen Points Program for the Peace of the World, and the Allies had eventually embraced his plan.

  Millions in Europe saw Wilson as a man who had come to save them with his plan for unification under the League of Nations. But while he sincerely believed in his ideals, they would prove hard to live up to once the war ended; at that point, the Allies were no longer united under one goal, and each leader had to look to the well-being of his own country. The United States was still young and unsure, and all that energy that had gone into “making the world safe for democracy” suddenly felt less urgent when the war finished, especially to the American people, who were removed from the reality of Europe, and who did not truly understand what was at stake. Wilson was left in a difficult gray area where he had promises to keep but lacked the people’s support, and was all but abandoned by much of the U.S. Congress.

  In the negotiations in Paris, Wilson found himself compromising much more than the people of Europe had expected he would, giving in to the demands of more determined men like France’s Clemenceau. By the end, penalty upon penalty had been heaped upon Germany; they were charged 269 billion gold marks (about $32 billion), an impossible sum at the time for them to pay. Land was taken away. Poland became a nation of its own. France got the German colonies in Africa; Japan got the ones in the South Pacific. And in addition to claiming full moral and emotional responsibility for the war, the Germans were ordered to cut their army down to 100,000, give up their entire air force, and destroy all their tanks. In effect, Germany was psychologically and economically debilitated. But the Allies were not trying to be cruel; the war had been horrendous, violence on a scale unknown before, and every European country was now in dire need of money and resources, scrambling and lost in a sense of lack and fear.

  As economist John Maynard Keynes later said of the postwar conference, “Paris was a nightmare, and everyone there was morbid.”6 No one seemed able to think clearly. No one seemed ready to accept responsibility for what had taken place. And no one seemed to know how to marshal the ideals and slogans of democracy into a workable plan. In response, the German delegation claimed their burgeoning postwar democracy was being annihilated “by the very persons who7 throughout the war never tired of maintaining that they sought to bring democracy to us.” But that too was unfair. The Germans had no alternative to offer, and no rationale for the trouble they’d caused. Nevertheless, Keynes would warn the Allies that their economies were “deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds,”8 saying that the only way to avoid a worse situation in the future was to take the path of magnanimity now, for “the perils of the future lay not in frontiers or sovereignties but in food, coal, and transport.”9 Keynes might have been right, but it was hard to get anyone to listen to such words at the time: In the heat of the moment, most nations felt desperate to take as much as they could for themselves, unable to see that by hurting one another they might also be hurting themselves. Still, whatever mistakes may or may not have been made both economically and politically, the aftermath of the First World War was a turning point: The old economic, social, and political world order had been deeply disrupted. It could not return to its prewar state; something new had to be developed now.

  The First World War was a turning point for Ferdinand Porsche as well. Though he was the foremost automotive designer of Austria-Hungary, it was the war that brought him to the attention of the international community on a larger scale. In Austria, Porsche had been inundated with medals and awards. The University of Vienna, for instance, had given him an honorary doctorate, of which he was very proud, happy to finally have the weighty initials attached to his name, letters that gave him equal footing with other engineers in his field. During the war, his designs for tanks were among the best any country produced, and he contributed solutions to problems such as how to make the first practical, four-wheel-drive vehicle. At the close of the war, one of the top English technical journals concluded that the aircraft motors that Porsche was designing at Austro-Daimler were heads above anything else coming from the central European powers at that time.

  Because the configurations of Europe itself also changed after the war, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was broken into pieces, and Porsche found that he was now a citizen of Czechoslovakia. He was given his choice of nationality, and for both practical and professional reasons, he decided to take the nationality of his hometown: “I do not change my nationality like my shirt,”10 he said, expressing a deep loyalty to his parents and siblings still living there. Aside from work, family and personal relationships were the center of Porsche’s life. Aloisia grounded and nurtured him. His daughter, Louise, an excellent driver in her own right, was developing an interest in art, but when it came to her father’s business and automotive concerns, she was proving to be as tough and shrewd as he. Ferry, his son, had become Ferdinand’s constant companion, tagging along with his father nearly every chance he got, exploring the automotive factories where his father worked, and unbeknownst to his father, even driving the cars.

  Ferry and Louise sitting in one of their father’s cars. Automobiles were a part of life in the Porsche home from day one. (photo credit 8.1)

  For Christmas in 1919, the war having finally come to an end, ten-year-old Ferry was given his very own handmade Porsche car to drive. It was small but solid, with an old trolley engine powering it from behind. Ferdinand, excited to finally have the chance to teach his young son how to drive, was shocked when Ferry jumped into the car, shifted its gears, and pressed just the right pedals without any instruction or help. Demanding to know who had taught the boy such things, Ferdinand forced his son to admit that he’d taught himself when no one was watching. His father was upset, but secretly perhaps he was also proud. After all, Ferry’s sister had started driving early too.

  Family was obviously important to Porsche, but by this time in his life, he now knew what was important to him on a professional level as well. One was his desire to build the ultimate race car. Another was his dream to build a small and affordable car that could be mass produced. As Europe entered the 1920s, it was clear to him that the current state of the European automobile was far away from what the future would demand, and this excited him: There was a whole new kind of car yet to be built. He wanted to discover the design for that car; like a sculptor who has been given a block of marble, he could already sense what was there. He just had to cut the excess stone away so the inherent shape could be revealed.

  The idea of building a small car had been on Porsche’s mind since he worked for Jacob Lohner and had created a vehicle called the Voiturette, and it had continued at Austro-Daimler in an early attempt called the Maja. But the concept of a car that was not simply small, but could also do everything a larger car could do, only really began to form in his mind in 1921 when he started work on a car called the Sascha at Austro-Daimler. The executives at Austro-Daimler had not loved the idea of a Volkswagen—what “common man” can afford a car in these times, they asked—but Porsche was relentless, and eventually a compromise was found. Porsche could try out his new small car design ideas, such as an 1,100-cc engine, but he’d have to do it on a race car, not a car for civilian use. The result was the Sascha.

  There was little about its design, other than its size, that showed signs of the Bug that was to come. When the Sascha debuted in 1922, people were skeptical—it was much smaller and more compact than any car to have ever entered the track—but when it won the entire race for its class, that doubt turned to respect. London’s Autocar magazine wrote that the Sascha was a “very positive attraction indeed,”11 and the Viennese Motoring Paper said if th
ere was ever to be a design for a “car of the little man” one day, then surely it would come from something like this. Not only was the car striking to look at—like the body of a butterfly or a dragonfly with invisible wings—but it also was a spectacular achievement of design: It combined the capacity for high speeds with the durability of a four-cylinder engine that amazingly had the smallest cubic capacity of any race car of the time. Porsche had made the car smaller by also making the engine smaller, and he’d done so without losing power or thrust, using the swept volume of the engine to its absolute capacity and enlarging the valves. In a sense, such use of the four-cylinder engine was a precursor to the more fuel-efficient cars of today.

  The Sascha, a small, 4-cylinder racing car designed by Porsche. Porsche is standing to the right of the car, the little boy at his side is Ferry. To the left of the car stands its patron, and the man after whom Porsche gave the car its name. (photo credit 8.2)

  The Sascha was also the first car on which Porsche experimented with materials for the body that were of lighter weight but of higher quality than those found on other cars. These things alongside more technical shifts and changes with carburetion and ignition allowed him to get the tiny car up to nearly 50 bhp (brake horsepower). Even though he’d promised not to make a version of the car to be mass-produced, Porsche did make a version of the Sascha called “a touring car” that could have been produced and sold to the public if Austro-Daimler had chosen to do so. But they didn’t. No one was interested. As Porsche’s dream to build the People’s Car became ever more important to him, he began to realize that following through on it was going to require a fight. He welcomed that struggle, though at the time he could never have imagined just how tough it was going to be for him, or how political.

  Hitler decided not to kill himself.1 Instead, he channeled all that despair and anger into blaming the Weimar Republic, the new liberal democracy of Germany, a parliamentary republic established to replace the imperial government that had fallen at the end of the war. Unfortunately, with all the reparations and punishment inflicted upon the country by the Treaty of Versailles, the Weimar Republic had little chance of making the country happy or of winning its full trust. With more than thirty parties fighting among themselves, the new democracy was an astounding burst of improbability, diversity, creativity, and intelligence; certainly, it appeared extremely chaotic at times. With so many parties, it sometimes felt impossible that any decision could be made. All of this fed perfectly into Hitler’s new way of seeing the world: He decided that Germany was being diluted by too many kinds of people and too many liberal ideas, and the new government was just another force weakening Germany. In Vienna, he’d seen pamphlets saying something similar about racial dilution—a popular topic in both Europe and the United States at the time—and he now adopted an extreme version of this idea as his own, blending it into his political ideology.

  Hitler was not the only one getting caught up in such ideas at the time. Democracy had been so built up during the time of the First World War, but when reality set in afterward, it did not live up to expectations, and many felt it was not going to last. As historian Richard Overy has pointed out, during the 1920s and ’30s, a significant number of people in Britain, the country that had been the pinnacle of democracy in Europe up till then, felt that there was a crisis of civilization at hand and that they would soon experience the end of capitalism, and perhaps the end of democracy as well. “The obituaries were, as it turned out, written in indecent haste,”2 Overy writes, “but at the time a great deal of British opinion, across the class divides, believed on the basis of the evidence all around them that capitalism’s days were numbered.” At the time, there was also a surging interest in issues such as eugenics—a biological argument that set levels of desirability on particular genetic traits. Hitler’s promotion of this perceived importance of blood and race would be an extreme manifestation of such concerns, but many respected and distinguished people considered themselves eugenicists in those days, including the economist J. M. Keynes and the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. One eugenicist in Britain named Marie Stopes, for example, cut off all contact with her son simply because he’d married a woman who had to wear eyeglasses: She said her son had “willfully ruined a fine genetic inheritance.”3 As Overy writes, “the power of the popular biological argument was evident in its most extreme form in Hitler’s Germany, but the phenomenon was international.”4

  Hitler went a step further, however, combining the biological argument with a political and economic one. He was against capitalism, which made him antidemocratic, and being against democracy eventually became the same (in his mind) as being against the Jews, and being against the Jews was the same as being against the Communists (because, again, in his mind all Communists were also Jews). Somehow, with this warped logic, he believed that the same people who were behind finance capital were also the ones trying to destroy the country with Marxist doctrines forecasting the end of capitalism. Everything he hated merged together into one.

  Diversity was the main culprit in Hitler’s eyes; he felt there was too much debate and compromise because there were too many diverse voices being heard, and it was this repulsive diversity that democracy and capitalism represented. He wanted a pristine, pure state. And so, even though Hitler was still not a German citizen, and even though he did not have blond hair, he decided that blond-haired German citizens were destined to become the master race. It’s hard to say exactly what kinds of insecurities had gone into such thinking, but whatever might have been going on inside his head, on the surface he was finding his poise and control, schooling himself in the art of rhetoric and propaganda at every turn. He now sought and accepted offers to speak with relish, sometimes giving as many as ten speeches a day, speeches with titles like “Social and Economic Catchwords” and “Emigration,” which were well-attended and which helped him begin to make a name for himself with the higher-ups in nationalistic circles. When it came to speaking to crowds of people, he discovered he had a great deal of skill.

  Hitler was only the fifty-fifth member of the German Workers Party, later renamed the National Socialist Party, or NSDAP, the Nazis. When he joined, the party was small, an amalgam of other organizations that had drifted into one. Hitler became its leader and christened himself “the Führer” in 1921, and he brought with him the fire of propaganda that he had been patching together over the years. A symbol of good fortune and fecundity in many ancient cultures, the swastika had been adopted by German nationalists at the beginning of the 19th century. Now Hitler adopted and adapted the swastika to become the symbol of the NSDAP. He also began to think of colors in connection to the emotions they inspired, using red as the background to the black swastika in a white circle. And he took the Roman salute used by Benito Mussolini and copied the gesture, creating the Nazi salute that so many in the world now associate with the word “heil.” None of the characteristics of the Nazi party were original ideas of Hitler: His one devasting act was to combine all these things into one.

  As head of the NSDAP5, Hitler traveled by car as much as he could through Germany, meeting and speaking to people about his party’s goals. He studied the German people and asked himself what it was they wanted to hear, what would give them that spark of power he knew they wanted to feel. He was careful in how he timed and planned his words, gestures, and speech. “The art of propaganda6 lies in understanding the emotional ideas of the great masses,” he would write in Mein Kampf, “and finding, through a psychologically correct form, the way to the intention of the broad masses, and thus also to their heart.” These years of speeches were like prolonged practices before a big game. He nearly always had pictures taken of himself from all angles and sides as he spoke, then afterward he would sit and study these pictures and tally them with the responses of the crowd. He listened to his own voice. He studied his own gestures. He practiced his facial expressions. He came to know his movements very well. He did this for years, noticing and watching the r
eactions, learning how to control himself, learning what worked.

  Even so, in 1923 Adolf Hitler still did not look like much of a threat. He was an extremely busy, almost manic, man who was cobbling together an ideology, but there was a very large gap between the reality of his life and the fantasy he had of it. Certainly he had come a long way. He was the leader of a small but dedicated party; he had some attention, he had colleagues, he had support. But in the wider picture, he was not well-respected or feared. His newfound confidence was rather shaky too. When he pulled off his big “Beer Hall Putsch,” for instance—the extreme event that he imagined would change the country overnight—he was met with a disturbing wake-up call. Even with war hero General Ludendorff by his side, the whole thing resulted in a disaster and he came off looking naïve and weak.