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

by Andrea Hiott

  On May 26, 1946, the military governor General Clay sent a memo to the Pentagon trying to explain the German situation. The Allies, especially the French and the Russians, were not cooperating with American ideas, he wrote. Neither Russia nor France wanted to see a united Germany again, and this view directly opposed that of America and Britain. There was also a degree of desperation and a lack of resources in France and Britain that the Americans did not always understand, and this exacerbated the lack of cooperation. These disagreements, as Clay claims in his report, meant that communication had shut down among the four zones to the point that there was “almost no free exchange of commodities, persons and ideas.”1 In Clay’s view, the only hope for the situation was if there was some way for all the countries to unite their zones economically. Knowing that France and Russia would probably reject the idea, Clay went on to suggest that at the very least, Britain and the United States should join forces. Having one united zone would be better than having none.

  The authorities in Washington were listening, and by the following July, at the Foreign Ministers Conference in Paris, Clay was able to convince Secretary of State Byrnes, as well as two important members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tom Connally and Arthur Vandenberg, that the British and the American zones must be fused: Economically, the more agricultural areas that were in American control would be joined with the industrial Ruhr areas of the British Zone. Alongside this change, there would be a change in America’s position on Germany: They would begin trying to help rebuild German industry, rather than trying to control it and take it apart. Together, they agreed that Byrnes would make a public statement about this on his visit to Stuttgart a few months later. Byrnes would eventually title his speech the “Restatement of Policy on Germany.”

  This change in America’s posture toward Germany happened just in the nick of time. Conditions in much of Europe were deplorable. Germany was bad, but people in both France and Britain were struggling to find food and shelter too, and all this was happening while Britain and France were meant to be using their own resources to maintain their occupied zones in Germany. As Secretary Clark Clifford, who was counsel to President Truman in 1947, later said: “Here was a situation that was not ever going to2 get better by itself. There was no way for the Western countries to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. There weren’t any boots, there weren’t any straps.” Or, in the words of Ambassador Hervé Alphand, who was the French foreign minister at the time, “We needed everything.3 We needed raw materials. We needed food. We needed machinery. And we needed credits and foreign currency to pay for it.”

  Truman realized that in considering what was to be done for Europe, it was imperative that he listen to the advice of men who had seen the destruction firsthand: He was especially interested in talking with General George Marshall and General Lucius Clay, and both generals felt that it made little sense to keep German factories and workers from producing the items that the entire continent was desperate to get. In addition, by keeping Germany’s factories from working, they were keeping Germany from making money, meaning it would only become more dependent on the Allies. If Germany would be able to pay the Allies back all this money spent in the occupation, they needed their industry. On top of all this, there was the new threat rising from the Soviets, which was beginning to look a lot like the threat that had just been faced with Hitler. Winston Churchill, in his letters to President Truman, had already started to speak of the “iron curtain.”

  In other words, as 1946 eased into 1947, Germany began to look less like the enemy and a lot more like a possible ally in a new war—the Cold War, as it was already being called. Having Germans think of Americans as “dictators of democracy”4 (a term Hartrich heard being used at the time) did not bode well for such a war, nor did it make sense to continue with a policy of turning Germany into a “farming state.” Other influential Americans were coming to this conclusion too. When former U.S. president Herbert Hoover toured Germany in 1947 at the behest of Truman, he was horrified by what he saw: thousands of homeless children, millions of refugees, and a quickly deteriorating condition of life. There was no way to convert Germany to an agricultural state, Hoover said, “unless we exterminate or move twenty-five million people out of it.”5

  The event announcing America’s policy change toward Germany took place in Stuttgart on September 6, 1946, and it was one that would have made PR man Edward Bernays proud. It was held just miles away from where Porsche had once worked, and all of Stuttgart was swarming with press from the Allied countries. Members of the United States Senate were there, as was General Clay. In many places, the event would make the cover of the papers. In his speech, Secretary of State Byrnes said that America was dedicated to staying in Germany for as long as it might take to help them recover. But he also said that it was time for the German people to begin to experience their own sense of freedom again, and to find ways of creating their own systems of government and industry. Byrnes stated that by merging the British and the American zones—making their industrial, political, and economic policies into one—the Allies were taking one step further toward unifying Germany itself. In the end, Byrnes said: “The American people want to help6 the German people win their way back to an honorable place among the free and peace-loving nations of the world.” His speech was translated live and broadcast across German radio. It became known as the Rede der Hoffourg (speech of Hope) because it was the first time the German public was given the chance to believe they would indeed be allowed to control their own destinies again.

  Morally and emotionally, it was a stirring speech for many. But as usual, it was only one side of the coin. There were also those in Germany who said that if they were to be occupied, the occupation ought to be complete: In other words, it wasn’t a matter of Germans becoming more responsible and developing their own self-government, but rather it was a matter of the Allies handling the full burden of getting Germany back on its feet again.

  Nevertheless, this new attitude toward Germany addressed the dissonance that many Germans felt between the American philosophy of democracy—one that promoted freedom in politics and economics—and the actual policy decisions that had been made thus far (guided by the Morgenthau Plan). Hartrich writes that America’s democratic ideology initially “did not coincide with what the German encountered in his daily existence under Allied military-government rule.7 He enjoyed no basic civil rights. His residence could be searched without a warrant. He could be arrested and held indefinitely without habeas corpus or a chance to confer with a lawyer.… Phones were tapped; mail was opened and subjected to arbitrary censorship.… There was an abstract, out-of-this-world quality about the democracy that the Americans pushed …” Nevertheless, it should be noted that after the horrors the Nazis had inflicted upon the world, it was equally understandable that the Americans were cautious and that it took time for their policies to shift toward giving control back to Germany.

  The American policy changes were important for another reason as well; by 1947, Germany was becoming a stage for the battle between democracy and communism. And, in the reality of the postwar world, separating politics from economics was no longer possible, if it had ever been. Thus the battle was also one of communism versus capitalism. General Clay often said that “democracy will only be acceptable to the Germans when their economic and political affairs are in good order,”8 arguing that “job security and decent living, buttressed by a stable economy must come first.” And crucial to whatever new economic system would rise in Germany was the question of international exchange: What did Germany have to sell in the marketplace, and how open would it be to trade?

  Even before the war’s end, there had been plans like those heard in 1944 at Bretton Woods, which sought to open up industry through international trade. In 1944, the idea of more international monetary cooperation—of less international tariffs and more trade—felt fresh. At that time, high tariffs (adding a tax to the price of an imported good in order th
at it cannot be acquired more cheaply from a different country) had been long debated. With the increase of mass production, the world felt like it was getting smaller. High tariffs and fears over international trade were getting in the way of a healthy, open market. In fact, some believed that such restrictions played a large part in starting both the First and the Second World Wars. Men like Cordell Hull, who had been Roosevelt’s secretary of state during Bretton Woods, were confident that by not allowing free trade to occur naturally, countries were setting themselves up to fight. Trading with one another with less restriction, Hull reasoned, not only increased one country’s desire for other countries to be free and democratic, it also provided a natural kind of competition that exhausted certain violent instincts. At Bretton Woods in 1944, the Allies thus agreed that after this war, they would further open up international trade and decrease tariffs. They also vowed to extend free trade to the Axis powers. In the heat of the Morgenthau Plan, some of those ideas and energies seemed to have dissipated or gotten lost, but by 1947, they were coming back again.

  British soldiers standing proudly beside their Volkswagens with the bomb-damaged Volkswagen factory behind them. Ivan Hirst stands second from the front. (photo credit 28.1)

  Germany was slowly beginning to look like proof of those Bretton Woods theories: When one European country suffered economically, the others suffered too. Getting Germany back on solid economic feet was necessary to everyone’s recovery now. They needed Germany to contribute to the pool of money and resources again. Even those strident voices pushing for punishment and extreme denazification shared the same overall intention as those who understood the deeper nuance of how difficult it would be to punish Germans excessively without also punishing themselves.

  At the Volkswagen factory, these issues were paramount too: the British were engaging in “constructive pragmatism,” a policy that was passed down to them from the occupying British military government itself. The British had studied the German situation in depth, publishing a long article about it in their official military journal, the British Zone Review. That article spoke of how the Germans would have to go through a long process of reeducation and that it would not come from an outside force trying to impose their idea of democracy on them, especially at a time when the people had to work every hour of the day just to find enough food to eat. If the Americans went too far in their optimism about democratic ideology, then it could be said that the British went too far in their pessimism, speaking of how they expected a resistance movement to form in response to the intense denazification, and writing in the British Zone Review that:

  Napoleon sought to impose democracy on Germany and the German people; but instead merely intensified their nationalism. In the days of the Weimar Republic democracy came again, after a lost war, as an imposed blessing, and was rejected. Today, for the third time, the victor nations bring the opportunity of democracy to the German people, but synchronized with its arrival come hunger and distress.9

  But then again, maybe it was not that the British went too far in their pessimism or that the Americans went too far in their idealistic quest to cleanse the country of Nazism. Perhaps these two views were exactly right, but right only because they were existing together in one space, and so had to butt up against each another and fight it out. In some strange way, certainly not obvious to anyone at the time, the Allies (and that even includes the Soviets up until around 1947 or so) were engaged in a very democratic push and pull about democracy as they tried to find the best way to step ahead.

  By the time American troops started returning from the Second World War, Bill Bernbach had become the father of two little boys, John Lincoln and Paul. He had also left Weintraub and become the chief copywriter of another ad agency called Grey. Perhaps it was something about fatherhood, or perhaps it was the war, the bombs, the rapid change of the past few years, or even the fact that Bill was in his late thirties now—but whatever the reason, Bill had found a new confidence and clarity. He was less of a follower and more of a leader now, and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.

  The war had been a wake-up call in more ways than one. Before it, anti-Semitism, racism, and discrimination toward women all had been accepted behavior in many parts of the United States; few had felt compelled to take a public stand against such inequality or bias. Hitler made people aware of the existence of such attitudes in their own backyards, and finally many were beginning to voice their concerns about them. But at the same time, many people—especially the older generation—felt that this kind of questioning, and the uncertainty it brought, was the last thing the country needed. They were exhausted from the Depression and the war. They didn’t want to turn inward and ruminate, but they did want to feel peaceful: They wanted to feel free, but also safe. They wanted order, but also release. How were all these things supposed to fit together now? The country was richer than it had ever been, and it was also being forced to reevaluate its ideals. It was not easy to see how to deal with so much change.

  What was obvious was that the war had damaged the psyche of the American people, especially those who had witnessed it firsthand. The effect was so profound that President Truman passed the National Mental Health Act, clearly recognizing that the country was experiencing a particularly high level of mental strain and psychological disorder.1 It was a consequence of increased self-awareness, and it was occurring not only on an individual level, but also on a national one. It was a search for balance. People were trying to understand their emotions, and yet remain reasonable, civilized, under control. Hitler’s legacy was one of hysteria, of the masses getting carried away; thus falling prey to too much emotion was equated with a dangerous lack of self-control. In truth, however, the emotion Americans were feeling was more potent than ever, as would be evident in the paradoxical explosion of buying and selling that would soon commence: one that professed to bring satisfaction but could never quite deliver, one that praised reason but appealed to emotion instead.

  Economically, Germany struggled after the war, but the United States experienced a lift. There seemed to be a lot more money to spend, but that came with a new kind of stress. If the 1920s had been a time of decadence and letting go, the 1950s would be a time of consuming excessively while pretending to be calm and in control. The country’s media would reflect these developments as they occurred. By the late 1940s, public relations had become a full-fledged field, and its boundaries blurred with those of the advertising world. Experts were everywhere, people judging and measuring the public’s wants and needs, trying to determine what would sell and how to sell it. What had started with Bernays and Gallup was now a thriving industry with branches in all directions. And one overwhelming conclusion at the time was that what people wanted was more. The 1950s would be one long push toward bigger. Big cars and big houses were considered visible markers of progress and success.

  Working at Grey Advertising at the end of the 1940s, Bill’s own world was getting bigger as he rose through the ranks, pitching and winning important accounts, channeling his restlessness into moving up the ladder, eventually becoming the vice president of the copy department. But Bill sensed that the spirit he’d once shared with Paul Rand was getting lost in all the constant desire for more, to look the same as everyone else, to fit in. Trying to impress, Bill thought, could too easily leave one feeling vacuous. It wasn’t that big cars and houses were wrong, but did people really think these possessions were all they needed, the answer to their ills?

  For the next few weeks, as he took the train back and forth from his home in Brooklyn to his office on 42nd Street, Bill wondered about the role of advertising in the world. He tried to put those feelings into words, and on May 15, 1947, he sent a memo to everyone in his office at Grey. He chose his statements carefully, and what he said was direct and from his heart. “Our agency is getting big,”2 he wrote. “That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too …” There was danger in embracing “big” blindly, he said: �
�I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance; that we’re going to follow history instead of making it … There are a lot of great technicians in advertising … They know all the rules … They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally about persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”

  For 1947, these were radical words: Bill was trying to connect people to a sense of risk again, and he was trying to wake them from the very consumer slumber that seemed to be protecting them from their pain. In his short memo, Bill used the word “creative” three times. He spoke of “art” three times as well. “I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists,” he wrote. “I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.…” In other words, dreaming big was one thing, but actually being creative and inspiring—achieving big things—would also require a lot of hard work, focus, and mindfulness: It would require thinking small, and thinking strange.