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

by Andrea Hiott

  Between 1948 and 1954, every single part of the People’s Car was inspected and improved. The old gearbox was forgone for one with synchromesh shifting, meaning manual clutching was no longer needed for the second, third, and fourth gears, and the wheel diameter was reduced from 16 to 15 inches, the rim width increasing from 3 inches to 4. Because Volkswagen was one of the first companies to weld its cars, all the welding work was still being done by hand when Nordhoff arrived (he called it “tinsmithing” and an “alchemist’s kitichen”). It was a time-consuming, labor-intensive process and one that Nordhoff eventually decided to change, opening an automatic welding shop in 1953, thus nearly doubling the gross number of cars that could be made per person per day.

  Nordhoff was especially displeased with the brakes on the car, the ones Hitler had refused to have upgraded because the better version was British-made. According to Nordhoff, the Volkswagen’s brake power was only at about 10 percent of the power an Opel Olympia got at this time. He’d soon switched to Teves hydraulic brakes, so the Beetle could match the GM cars in braking action. According to the Volkswagen company archives, other “really burning issues”1 for Nordhoff in those days were the exhaust valves and the rear axle; the valves kept falling off, and the axle wasn’t tight enough. There was also the problem of “the juddering clutch” and clutch discs that were of poor quality, alongside the fact that the front axle and the suspension system caused road-handling, steering, and balance concerns, and the bumper seemed a little crooked, a little off. The heater also didn’t work well (and as all original Volkswagen Beetle owners of future days can attest, that was one area that never quite got fixed).

  In the midst of all this improvement, the car was also fitted with better tires and would eventually lose the tiny pretzel window of the rear, getting a bigger, modern window instead, a change that increased rear visibility by almost 25 percent. The dashboard was redesigned to be easier on the eye: The speedometer was relocated to where the driver could actually see it without any strain, and the engine was enlarged from 1,131 to 1,192 cubic centimeters. Peak power went up from 26 to 36 hp. Larger valves, redesigned cylinder heads, and a higher compression ratio were all introduced as ways of improving the car’s drivability. Fender-mounted lamps replaced the semaphore turn-signal arms. The fuel tank was reshaped in a way that gave the car more trunk space. The team also tried to give the car a new horn, one more elegant and “up to date,” less “sweet.” Complaints poured in, however: Don’t mess with the horn! There were certain things about the car, Nordhoff was learning, that its drivers were very attached to and did not want changed. And that was especially true when it came to the overall look: Porsche’s original design was kept in place even as nearly every inch of the inner car was improved. It was a healing process that, at least metaphorically, mirrored the one that VW workers and the German population were undergoing: changing the inside rather than the outside.

  It was also a microcosm of what was happening in West Germany. The Trizone Allies had put great time and effort into working with Germans like Erhard to designate and form new German states, and then to set up a committee toward the creation of a new constitution to unite those states. From August 10 until August 23, 1948, meetings were held at a convention on a Bavarian lake to discuss what would constitute this new “Basic Law.” Other than the technical details concerning how the new German states would be governed under the new national government, the law dealt with social and psychological concerns: One of its main principles, for example, was the rejection of any belief in a “master race.” On May 23, the Allies gave their official approval of the document and it came into effect as law. West Germany was no longer a “legal nonentity,” but rather its own self-governed country again, the Federal Republic of Germany. In response to West Germany’s actions, the Soviets came up with a constitution for East Germany, officially establishing the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The two Germanys had now been legally recognized.

  Consequences from this shift of power between Germany and the Allies rained down on the still ambiguously owned VW plant. Volkswagen’s strange history meant that it was not a private enterprise like most other automobile firms of the time. And with business picking up, everyone wanted a piece of the VW pie; the question was, who should get to own it, now that the Nazis were gone? The labor unions that had been dissolved, and whose money had been taken by the Nazis’ German Labor Front, claimed it was their funds that had built the plant in part. The men and women who had signed up for Robert Ley’s Volkswagen Savings Book Plan claimed they should get a part, since they’d paid for cars that had never been delivered (interestingly, all that money was found untouched in the Nazi VW bank account in Berlin—it really had been intended for the production of cars—but it was confiscated by the Soviets when they took over the capital). At the same time, the German state of Lower Saxony tried to claim the plant because it was physically in their region. And Erhard, now West Germany’s minister of economic affairs, thought it would be best if the VW factory went to the federal government, to be doled out for privatization once it had matured. But the VW plant was technically in the hands of the British, so it was the British alone who would have to make the call. They wavered and wobbled, so earnest in trying to be fair that they ended up being completely unclear. In what Ian Turner called a “master of equivocation,”2 the British said the plant was “under the terms of ordinance of Lower Saxony” but “on behalf of and under the Federal Government.” So … who owned it exactly? The state government or the national one? In any case, the plant was officially given back to Germany on October 13, 1949.

  This was a disturbing change for British men like Colonel Radclyffe and Ivan Hirst, who had devoted themselves to the factory for the past three years. They found it very difficult when they were told it was time for them to leave. Nordhoff wrote a warm letter to Colonel Radclyffe.3 In his letter, Nordhoff thanked Radclyffe for laying the foundation that saved the plant, and for the energy and spirit he had shared with Germany. He wrote the letter in English, and signed it “I am, dear Colonel, sincerely yours.” The elder Radclyffe died just months after returning to England. It’s been said that the change broke his heart.

  On the other hand, Ivan Hirst was still very young, but he suddenly felt directionless. Those early years of urgency and perpetual emergency were giving way to a more peaceful, ordered time. Before Nordhoff came, before all the new laws and reforms, Hirst had felt like he was sailing in a violent storm. Suddenly, the waters were calm, and he was at a loss. The British assigned him a new position in Hamburg, assisting with the zone’s transition from British to German hands. The factory workers wanted to make a special VW for Hirst, as both a thank-you and goodbye, but he would not allow it. So they gave him a handmade miniature Beetle instead, a little model he would keep with him for the rest of his life.

  Oddly, Nordhoff was quite cool in his farewell to Hirst (and would grow all the cooler in the following years, as Hirst tried to stay in touch with the VW plant). He’d written to Radclyffe in English, but with Hirst, Nordhoff wrote in German and the tone of the letter was formal and austere. Perhaps the reason is obvious, if ugly: Hirst had been a threat to Nordhoff’s power, a young and able man whom the workers liked. He’d been a constant presence at the plant over the past year, while Radclyffe, operating in the executive offices many miles away, had not. Perhaps it was evidence that no matter how neutral Nordhoff tried to be, and no matter how good he had been to the workers, he certainly was not above insecurity and jealousy. After all, it was to Ivan Hirst that the factory owed much of the success it was now experiencing. But it was probably exactly that which Nordhoff found so hard to accept.

  “In Manhattan last week, newspapers ran double-truck ads with the word ‘Go’ in fifteen-inch-high type,”1 Time magazine reported in September 1954, printing an entire story to commemorate the day Ohrbach’s department store left its “at-the-heels quarters” on 14th Street and slid twenty blocks north to join the big fish uptown. Go
—that was all the ad said, and yet everyone knew what it meant even before they took time to read the small print. DDB’s language was a language New York City was starting to understand.

  Ohrbach’s was prospering, competing with Macy’s head-to-head. Its growing popularity was, at least in part, thanks to the ads coming from DDB: Its campaign had the whole city thinking Ohrbach’s was the best-kept secret in town. The day Ohrbach’s opened its new store, it made half a million dollars in profits. That was the same amount of money DDB had brought in for its entire first year! But DDB was growing in both profits and popularity. Though they were not in the same league as agencies like J. Walter Thompson, which could bill $130 million in a year, DDB was holding steady at just under half that amount, but it was alive and on the move.

  Nathan Ohrbach was still their primary customer. And they were doing well by him. DDB’s elegant and intelligent ads made shoppers feel they could “bargain-buy” with their heads held high, seeing through the façade of shopping at an overpriced store. “I found out about Joan,” one such ad read, going on to relate how the high society Joan had been spotted coming out of Ohrbach’s: Oh! So that’s how she affords to look so good! Today the idea of bargain shopping is pretty standard, but back then it was the first time such an idea had been raised. DDB catered perfectly to the 1950s obsession with shopping, all the while cutting through the usual lies and somehow getting to the heart of the matter. Everyone wants to look like they are wearing the best clothes, but it didn’t matter how much the clothes actually cost. DDB was not only calling out the game of keeping up with the Joneses, it was also (rather than asking them to give up the game) giving shoppers a way to do so intelligently. The ads generated an immediate sense of community, making customers feel like they were simply getting some good advice from a benevolent friend.

  That same style and element of communality would carry over to other ads at DDB. Take Levy’s Jewish Rye, for example, an early client of theirs that would mature into one of their most celebrated accounts. The Levy ads took the fact that it was a Jewish product—something that could have seemed limiting in terms of the “focus group”—and spoke clearly and directly about just that “limitation,” transforming it into the product’s greatest strength. Getting on the subway, commuters looked up and saw Asian or Native American faces munching happily on Levy’s, and underneath the pictures were the words “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.” It just made sense, but it was also witty and fun and unpretentious—all qualities that people could instantly relate to. “Say something meaningful2—and say it in a fresh, provocative way.” That was how a later VP of copywriting summarized DDB’s overall approach, an approach that applied as much to the art as it did to the copy. It applied to the style and the copywriting, but it was also a new and risky way of thinking about the art. In the Levy’s ad, for example, there is a great deal of white space, and only one image (the person munching the bread) is present to catch the reader’s eye, and the overall effect is certainly one of humor, but not in a sneering or unintelligent way: The ad invites empathy, it doesn’t “make fun.” It’s neither cruel nor sentimental; it’s real.

  Such ads stood out like sore thumbs in the 1950s, and they caught the attention of many young writers and art directors in New York. DDB started getting résumés by the hundreds, and it was Phyllis Robinson, hair cropped short, wearing trendy, thick black-rimmed glasses, who mainly took on the job of hiring them. She knew what kind of people Bill wanted. It wasn’t a matter of big credentials or fancy degrees. Take Helmut Krone.3 Before he came to DDB, he wasn’t exactly a rising star. In his own words, once Phyllis and Bill hired him, he more or less copied Robert Gage and his work until he could find a voice of his own. Helmut was never a very confident man, especially not in his early years. He took everything personally. He could be extremely hard on himself, and excessively scrupulous. As Gage would later say of Helmut; “He had the capacity for infinite pain.”4 Nearly everything about him—from the language he used in daily conversation, to the style of the art he did—was geared toward precision, toward stripping things away, getting to the most essential. And rarely did he feel good about the result. At times it was as though he wanted to erase himself from the face of the earth.

  Born in a German enclave of Manhattan called Yorkville in the summer of 1925, as a boy, Helmut Krone was surrounded by a community of people reluctant to integrate. They spoke German. They talked of the Fatherland. And when Hitler came to power, many of them rejoiced. Helmut would later admit that his mother had been “very right wing,” and somewhat “sympathetic with the Nazi Party.” Helmut was sent to a Wagnerian camp in Long Island—Camp Siegfried—that was German-run and bore a close resemblance to the youth camps the Nazis were setting up for children in the Third Reich. Helmut would tell Julian Koenig that he’d been brought up as “a little Nazi,” but that wasn’t quite true. Helmut had always had a mind of his own. He distressed his mother, for instance, when he decided that Camp Siegfried simply was not for him; he had himself discharged and boarded the train back home on his own, just like that.

  Amazingly enough, Helmut’s parents were born in Germany very close to where Wolfsburg is today. They left Germany in the late twenties and his mother, Emilie, was pregnant at the time: Helmut was born just one month after they’d arrived on American shores. As Helmut grew, his parents told him many stories of Germany and their Lower Saxon village. But Helmut, as he would later say, always felt there was something about those stories that made the whole country seem unreal.

  Helmut had a complex relationship with his mother. His classmates would remember how much he’d loved her, but she was not always easy on him. In fact, on more than one occasion, Helmut’s mother told him he was worthless. Of course, in the very next sentence, she’d be telling him about all the great things she expected him to grow up and do. Around relatives and family friends, she would praise her son to the heavens—clearly smitten and proud—and yet Helmut always felt a heavy pressure or stress when he considered his mother’s big dreams for him. In adult years, when talking about his childhood, Krone would often say “A German son is always wrong till he’s proved himself to be right.”5

  Helmut’s father was the one who doted on the boy, at least when Helmut was a child. As he grew up, however, the two grew distant: Otto watched his son sitting inside on sunny days and drawing and he criticized him for being too solitary: Why don’t you go out and play with the other kids your age? His father thought he needed to toughen his son up, make a man out of him. But when the Depression hit, Helmut’s father found himself out of work and out of motivation, his health slowly deteriorated, and in 1939, just before the World’s Fair in fact, Helmut’s father died in his son’s arms. Emilie had gone out to get pain medication for Otto when it happened. Helmut was the only one home with his father for those last moments of his life. Helmut was twelve, and suddenly he was the man of the house.

  At school, acting on the advice of one of his teachers, Helmut began calling himself Bud; his own name felt far too German and sinister. As he matured into his teens, he styled himself a bit like a character from an Oscar Wilde play, wearing full suits to school, sometimes even accenting them with elegant leather gloves and a porkpie brimmed hat. All those days of drawing had also paid off and he was accepted into the elite High School for Industrial Art. His classmates there thought he was arrogant, but those closest to him realized it was only his deep and earnest struggle to be clear that made him appear as such. Even back then, he was always struggling to get to the meaning of things, frustrating himself with his inability to put things in the most crystal clear of terms. Arnold Burchess, one of “Bud’s” teachers who saw this inner struggle, recommended that Bud have a look at the work of the artists who had comprised the Bauhaus school in Germany.6

  His teacher was right: Helmut was intoxicated by the art of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and of the German Bauhaus as soon as he saw it, and that inspiration would lead him to study design
and attend lectures at the “Design Laboratory” of Alexey Brodovitch’s New School classes in Manhattan. But once there, Helmut could never quite seem to own the inspiration he felt. He spent time in the East Village, just wandering pensively. During World War II he was drafted into the navy and served time in the Pacific. Upon returning, he tried an ad job at Sudler & Hennessey and eventually got fired. His work was good, but it was only when he made it to DDB that something extraordinary began to flower in him. Robert Gage and Bill Bern-bach were men he felt comfortable with, men he looked up to and respected. Bill’s openness freed him, Gage’s seriousness and deep appreciation of the Bauhaus resonated with him. And there was of course that one essential link: Before being hired, in his interview with Phyllis Robinson, when Helmut was asked to name three people who’d had the most influence on his work, his answer was: “Paul Rand, Paul Rand, Paul Rand.”

  The first time Charlotte Nordhoff saw her new home in Wolfsburg, she burst into tears. She and the girls had been shuffled around so many times by then that she no longer expected their lives to proceed any differently. She hardly remembered what it was like to have a real home, and it’s easy to understand why. When Heinrich finally felt ready to have his family join him, after nearly a year of separation, Charlotte did not go with high hopes. She’d not heard good things about Wolfsburg. She knew it was still little more than a factory surrounded by a rough construction site.

  The neighborhood of Steimker Berg in Wolfsburg, late 1940s or early 1950s. This is how it would have looked when Charlotte first arrived. (photo credit 44.1)

  But in the midst of so much hastily built worker housing, the residential neighborhood known as the Steimker Berg presented quite a contrast. It had been Wolfsburg’s first (and only) residential neighborhood completed by the Nazis, and only used by the party’s elite, and then later by the British soldiers who occupied the town. Even today, the Steimker Berg is an idyllic neighborhood, by any country’s terms: The houses are simple and elegant and they blend in naturally with the trees and the earth, giving one the feeling of being outside the city, but safe and protected. The houses are all off-white with green shutters and clay-shingled roofs. Some would say they look more like ideal country cottages, a place where people sit by the fire and read a good book, or take a walk and breathe in the fresh air, or work in the garden, surrounded by large, flourishing fir trees. The design of the neighborhood came from Hitler’s nostalgia for Germania, from the Nazi Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil) ideology about the power of the past: The houses are Heimatschutzstil or “conserved heritage.” Aesthetically, they are modeled on a feeling for the past, but from the very beginning, the interiors were designed to be very modern. Each house came equipped with the latest appliances and central heating, a very big deal at the time since most people were still using coal ovens for heat and cooking.