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

by Andrea Hiott

  Heinrich Nordhoff, however, was much less excited about the way things were going in his country, and even less enthusiastic by Ferdinand Porsche’s fat little car. He’d set foot in one of them only one time—a friend of his from the RDA had once picked him up from the train station in the little car—but he had not been impressed. The whole idea of the car and its factory and town seemed ridiculous to him. In fact, there were a lot of things in Germany that were beginning to feel ridiculous to him. And he wasn’t the only one thinking in such a way. In 1939, not long after the redbrick factory in Wolfsburg had begun to rise, Nordhoff took what would be his last visit to the United States for Opel, though he would never have suspected such a thing at the time. Still, he did feel trouble was coming. Walking through the General Motors plant in Detroit, another colleague would later remember how Heinrich took a long and pensive look at the humming machines and lines of metal and steel, and then wondered aloud if all those machines might soon be working against Germany in a war.

  Porsche, Ley, and Hitler all admire the model of the Strength through Joy Car (the KdF Wagen). (photo credit 19.3)

  By that time, Nordhoff was the father of two little girls, Barbara and Elisabeth, and perhaps he was also thinking of them as he looked at the machines and considered the possibility of war. After all, he’d been standing in just that same town when he’d received the call telling him that his second daughter, Barbara, had been born. Even for Nordhoff, it was hard to believe that only twenty years after the First World War—a war he’d fought in as a boy—the world was already gearing up for a second one. Few in Germany thought it was coming, and even fewer thought it would last long if it did arrive. Certainly, it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as the last. But Nordhoff could feel the darkness closing in. When he boarded the ship back to his country, there were only a few dozen passengers on the entire ship. No one wanted to go to Germany; it was about to become the enemy again.

  It was a celebration of the first incandescent lightbulb. It was also a tribute to the life of America’s father of electric light, eighty-two-year-old Thomas Edison. All the big men of business were there: philanthropist and Standard Oil heir John D. Rockefeller Jr.; one of the brothers who had experienced the first successful flight, Orville Wright; the first leader to explicitly champion capitalism as an essential part of democracy, President Hoover;1 banker, industrialist, and current treasury secretary Andrew Mellon; and the man who had changed the economic and geographic face of America by building the world’s first People’s Car, Henry Ford. The event was held in Ford’s hometown—the Edison Institute was being opened there under Ford’s watch—and a very big deal was made about the meeting of these two men, the work of whom had changed the nation in rapid and extraordinary ways. Reporters of the most prominent newspapers in the country were also invited, as were a slew of photographers. The main man behind the event was Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and the personality who had made public relations into a new field. In 1929, Bernays was hired by Westinghouse and General Electric to coordinate a nationwide event to mark the lightbulb’s fiftieth anniversary. Bernays called it Light’s Golden Jubilee.

  During the 1920s, electric light had experienced a rise similar to the automotive boom in customers and profits, and while state regulation had played a part in that success, Light’s Golden Jubilee was sculpted as a tribute to the innovation of the individual and the private sector. Stories about Thomas Edison were sent out to the managing editors of newspapers in cities all over the country. Reading about the upcoming national event, citizens began planning local light celebrations in their own towns. A commemorative stamp was issued. On the day newly elected President Hoover dedicated the Edison Institute in Dearborn, Michigan, there was a “moment of silence” as utility companies all shut off their power at the same time in Edison’s honor. The event set a new bar for public relations, showing that mass communication could be joined with the interests of big business and used to unite the country in a feeling of celebration, joy, and respect. It was a crowning moment for the power of the free market and for all the important businessmen gathered there, but in the midst of the celebration, news began trickling in from Wall Street that something was wrong. Light’s Golden Jubilee ended on October 21, 1929. Just a little over a week later, on October 29, the stock market crashed. Men like Ford and Edison had created a new industrial wave in the United States and the social and economic wake from it would be rough.

  The big dreams and big contributions to the American economy that were represented by men like Edison and Ford had improved the American quality of life. At the same time, however, that same wave had led to certain excesses and unhealthy actions, and those would become obvious in the 1930s. These excesses, and the country’s failure to dream big and simultaneously remain awake and aware of the consequences of their actions (to think small), would devastate the country from the inside out—both economically and environmentally. It would take everyone in America—from the Edisons and the Fords to the farmers and the young men working for the Civilian Conservation Corps—to get the country back to a state of health. And those deep changes would not come without a great amount of frustrating debate.

  Economics in America had always been a balance between government intervention and the laissez-faire practice of leaving private enterprise alone. The debate over this balance extended as far back as the country’s foundation, to arguments represented by Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson. There were groups lobbying for more government aid on one side, and groups wanting less government intervention on the other. Over the years, the friction between regulation and deregulation had produced the lasting (though always controversial) mainstays of America: the modern banking system, “natural monopolies” in transportation (providing necessities like train tracks and roads, public works and utility services), and a boom in private enterprise that had made businesses like General Electric, General Motors, and Ford into national stars. The prosperity of the twenties in the United States made it clear that the government needed private corporations. The 1930s would make it clear that the private corporations needed the government as well. It was a relationship of “can’t live with them, can’t live without them” in every sense.

  Laissez-faire has always been the underlying philosophy of the American market. (At least in theory, most everyone agrees there should be no permanent centralization or control). And yet, neither the citizen-staffed government nor the citizen-staffed corporations have ever been able to truly leave things alone. The paradox, as many began to discover (or rediscover) in the thirties and forties, is that leaving something alone often requires regulation: Over the years, it’s come to light that a lot of discipline is necessary for the market to “naturally flow.” Consumption in economic concerns is related to private consumption: It can feel so good to indulge, but too much indulgence can make a system sick, just as too much indulgence in food or drink can make a body sick. In the early 1930s, America was sick, and the symptoms were environmental and economic.

  Still, corporations and bankers and the free market had indeed brought a lot of good things to America. And for that reason, government had stepped back, so much so that when the market crashed, President Hoover refused to have the government directly intervene in the domestic market, trusting that it would correct itself. And while Hoover was actually a believer in the beneficent hand (he believed that by being on the side of big business, the government could help the American economy, and thus the American people themselves), those American people (the consumers) soon began to mistrust big business, understandably confused about where big business ended and Wall Street began. This new consumer mood, and the desperate situation of the Depression, meant that Herbert Hoover did not win a second term. Instead, Franklin Roosevelt came to office, a man who was not afraid to let the government directly intervene in the country’s economics: He set up the New Deal. With its philosophy of relief, recovery, and reform, millions of dollars were poured into government project
s such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), to stimulate the economy, making men like Wendell Wilkie, the president of Commonwealth and Southern, furious about the government’s interference (one of the primary goals of the TVA was to provide poor, rural areas of the country with electricity).

  But Roosevelt was aware that it was not only money that would help; it was a change in mood. “After all,”2 he said in his fireside chat of March 12, 1933, “there is an element in the readjustment of our financial system more important than currency, more important than gold, and that is the confidence of the people. Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan. You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.” The real problem was one of thought and meaning, of how to connect one’s work and pay back to something inspiring again. The jolt of the Depression came from many changes, but perhaps the most significant was that the powering of the United States was no longer agricultural but rather industrially-based. And the country’s overall mind-set—reflected in everything from factory conditional to farms to the rules of Wall Street—now had to evolve to adjust to that change.

  Roosevelt’s election and the New Deal signaled a political realignment away from the corporations and toward their employees: Workers’ rights and civil rights would now become the object of focus in the papers and the press. The United Auto Workers Union would be formed. Because the New Deal was a giant project with its hands everywhere in the market, many corporations resisted Roosevelt’s administration, and that included men like Wendell Wilkie, Alfred P. Sloan and Henry Ford. Throughout the 1930s, American government and American corporations began a domestic battle to “win” American citizens; public relations and advertising would be the battleground. The people, Congress, big business, and the administration of the president—all would make mistakes, but those mistakes would not go unnoticed: A healthy rivalry (healthy only because it existed within a system of checks and balances) would ensure that a delicate balance was maintained.

  The struggle between big business and government was a paradoxical fight in some ways—even Edward Bernays would say that “Politics was the first big business3 in America”—but it would prove to be an important one, essential to America’s health in the long-term. In Hitler’s Germany, for example, there would be no such debate allowed, and Germany would feel the consequences of having a government with total control. Still, in those dramatic years of the 1930s, this long zoom view was by no means obvious. To some, it seemed the American model was too messy, too volatile, and might indeed collapse. Democracy and capitalism did not look strong. In fact, in the limited view of that decade, there was the sense that Germany’s model was the one gaining speed and power.

  After all, in the 1930s, such centralization of both the economy and the power of the government worked in Germany. Rearmament gave the country a giant economic and psychological boost, as did the road construction project. But even more important, there had been a dearth of motivation, and now people were motivated again. And yet the foundations for all that growth were corrupt and unsustainable: while on the surface it looked like industry was flourishing, underneath it all, the German economy was broken and in dire need of a war. By 1939, economists knew that the growth was a mere façade: the director of the Reichsbank, for example, sent Hitler a note demanding restraint in finances and predicting an imminent and dangerous inflation. Hitler sacked the Reichsbank man and called his words “mutiny,” but he must have known they were true. The country’s demands for raw materials and food, alongside its need for even more workers, meant it had to conquer new areas in order to get its hands on both. Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland would be the first areas that would feel Germany’s push.

  The truth always comes out eventually, and by the end of the 1930s, it was rearing its head. German people began to feel the weight of both price controls and rationing. But the inertia that had been garnered made it difficult to change economic paths or build a resistance. Hitler’s reign had started with the vote, but by 1939, the NSDAP had accumulated six years of authoritarian power. It was no longer necessary for them to hide their intentions. Domestically and internationally, the German government became openly totalitarian.4 People were brought into the NSDAP without such niceties as asking for their consent. It was in 1939, for instance, that all forms of police and protection became part of Heinrich Himmler’s SS: Whereas state and local police forces had been allowed to remain separate, in 1939, they all became part of Hitler’s machine. The picture Germany had painted for the international community was crumbling as well. Hitler’s peace speeches proved a ruse as he took Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia. Next came Poland, leaving France and Britain no choice but to respond in defense. In the autumn of 1939, just as Ferdinand Porsche was setting up his little hut in The Town of the Strength through Joy Car and preparing to finally build the automobile he’d spent more than twenty years of his life discovering and inventing, Europe entered an open and official state of war. Once again, Porsche and his little car had met a seemingly insurmountable wall.

  Heinrich Nordhoff was walking the same Berlin streets he’d once explored as a child, taking his daughters to the same museums he’d visited all those years before. As a young man, Berlin had offered the culture, music, and art that Nordhoff needed in his life, things he soaked in hungrily every chance he got. And his desire for such things had only grown. He was always reading and learning and looking for the connections between disparate things. Perhaps for this reason, his young daughters thought their father knew everything. Sometimes they would try to find the hardest questions they could—even searching their schoolbooks for subjects about which they could quiz him—but their father always seemed to know the answer to whatever question they posed. Still, there were some things he could not explain at the time, had he been asked. He didn’t know how to explain what was happening in his country or how to judge his own complicity in it, and he didn’t understand why they were going to war, though he and his family were soon to be deeply affected by it.

  Just as Hitler was beginning to invade Czechoslovakia, Opel had transferred Heinrich to their executive offices in Berlin. But it was no longer the town of his youth. The mood he found there was very different from the one he’d known in the 1920s. Long gone were the artists and writers and musicians who had once packed Berlin’s streets. Now the capital had been rearranged to fit a Nazi fantasy—bloodred flags with swastikas hung from windows, parades of Nazi officials marched down the streets, and Germans of the “wrong race” were fleeing, hiding, or being rooted out and killed. Much of the modern art that Heinrich had so loved as a teenager was gone—masterpieces labeled as “degenerate” by the Nazi Party, including Nordhoff’s favorite painting from his youth, the Tower of Blue Horses by Franz Marc. Schlesinger, Nordhoff’s favorite professor, had been forced out by then, too, and many of the city’s brightest minds had fled long ago. Anxiety hung thick in the air, unspoken but ever present. But Heinrich was given a nice executive job in Berlin, and the surrounding unrest was not enough to make him pack up his family and move. He stayed.

  In retrospect, one can’t help but wonder how Germans who were not part of the Nazi Party were able to stay during this time, but in those days, things were not so clear, which is why even those most in danger often refused to leave. After the Reichstag fire in 1934 and the Night of the Long Knives, Jewish people were warned and encouraged to emigrate, but many refused. Even at the end of 1938, when the Kristallnacht occurred, many Jewish families continued to stay. But of course leaving was a much harder task by then, impossible for some. In his autobiography, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a prominent literary critic in Germany and a Jewish man who survived the Holocaust, talks of these days in Berlin. He was among those who
had stayed, and would ultimately be sent to a concentration camp. He writes that two conflicting attitudes emerged among his Jewish family and friends in the mid-1930s:

  One stated:1 After what has happened there is no longer any place for us in this country; we should not indulge in any illusions but emigrate as soon as possible. The other held: Let us not lose our heads, but rather let us wait and see; nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked.

  He goes on to say that many Jews felt the hatred of the Nazi regime was directed toward Jewish immigrants rather than those who were native-born. And what about the Jewish men who had served Germany in the First World War? Ranicki says that these people felt invincible: After what they had sacrificed, how could Germany not treat them well? Jewish and German friends tried to mutually assure one another:

  … surely an inhuman regime such as the Nazis was unthinkable in Germany in the long run. After two, or at most three, years the party would be overthrown. So it made no sense to dispose of one’s possessions and abandon one’s home.

  But if the Jewish people knew how other Jews were being treated, how could they bear to stay? To ask that question in hindsight is to have no right to ask it at all. Home is a word so close to the heart that it can transcend reason. Sometimes propelling yourself into a frightening and foreign landscape—especially when there is no clear place to go—and leaving all you’ve ever known, looks worse than suffering the possibilities of what might come by staying. One cannot underestimate the connection humanity feels between individual identity and a particular geographical place. As Ranicki continues:

  From today’s perspective, it is astonishing, to say the least, that the number of Jews leaving Germany did not increase despite their systematic persecution … What kept the overwhelming majority of Jews from emigrating for so long is easily explained—it was their faith in Germany.