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

by Andrea Hiott

  Riding in the car with her mother that day, Nordhoff’s daughter later admitted that she’d thought: Perhaps we will live in a house like this one day. When the driver pulled into the driveway of one of the beautiful homes, no one in the car dared to move. It was only when Heinrich opened the front door, and Charlotte saw her husband, that they broke down.

  The little cabin that Ferdinand Porsche had once built with such high hopes was just a few miles away from the new home where the Nordhoffs were restarting their lives. It sat alone in the midst of trees and a cleared field that offered a perfect view of the rest of Wolfsburg and of the Volkswagen factory. The cabin was closed in by a handmade wooden fence with a little gate. Resin-colored fir trees give the place a fairylike feel. By 1949, when Charlotte felt like her dreams were finally coming true, the dreams Porsche had once had of building his car for the people were being realized too, in that very same town, and Porsche himself could see it with his own eyes now—for the first time since the end of the war, he’d just been granted permission to enter Germany again.

  Once the entire Porsche family was allowed to return to Germany in 1949, they moved their offices back to Stuttgart. Ferry would always remember the tears that came to his father’s eyes the first time they drove down German streets and happened to see a Volkswagen pass by, the moment Porsche finally saw a People’s Car being driven by one of the people. The elder Porsche even took to counting Volkswagens as he saw them “in the wild.” One day Porsche told Ghislaine excitedly that out of the twenty cars he’d seen pass by that day, eighteen of them had been Volkswagens. (Ghislaine recorded that in his diary; nearly everything he wrote in his diary had something to do with his uncle Ferdinand.)

  The car was obviously still extremely close to Porsche’s heart. Thus, in the summer of 1950, he asked Ferry to drive him out to the Wolfsburg factory. It would be Ferdinand’s first time returning there since the war had come to an end, and would be a very different city from the one Porsche had known. In an issue of Autocar from around that time, an article titled “Production Is Their Wealth” relates the following about Wolfsburg: “… some 9,0001 Volkswagen employees live [there] with their families, making a total population of 25,000. Heating and light are supplied from the Volkswagen works, and their own bus service connects villages within a radius of 20 miles, providing transport for those employees who cannot be housed at present at the Volkswagenstadt … There is no one who can stop the German people from working hard; a people who have become fully aware … that production has become their wealth. The example of America is being followed by a European nation.”

  There were many reasons for the shift in the public’s perception of the factory, but one part of it was certainly due to Heinrich Nordhoff’s expert use of the media and the press. In 1948 when he’d arrived, the papers were still calling the VW plant “Hitler’s pet” or “an Allied factory,” but Nordhoff, with the expert help of his pressman Frank Novotny, courted those same reporters, sending out press releases and inviting them to meetings and events, opening up the factory for them to tour and inspect. Journalists liked Nordhoff. They often referred to him not as “Heinrich” but as “Heinz.” He was friendly and articulate, always ready to answer their questions. And the Volkswagen was a sort of German Cinderella story that the papers were (eventually) happy to report on. A former Nazi town, saved by the British, redefining itself by using an American model, with Italian and German workers side by side on the assembly lines creating and exporting cars to all the European countries that had once been enemies—it was an inspirational tale for postwar Europe, for those who noticed. In 1950, the same year Ferdinand Porsche visited the factory again, the Volkswagen workers made their 100,000th car and many of Germany’s top papers were there to cover the event. The photos taken as the car rolled off the line are a stark contrast to the ones taken during Hirst’s days in 1946 when the 10,000th car had been produced. The photos of 1950 show healthier workers, men who look proud of their work and happy to be there.

  Under Nordhoff and Novotny, Volkswagen made deliberate efforts to reach out to the German people as a consumer base, to try to cultivate a specific, warm feeling for the car. It wasn’t really necessary for Volkswagen to advertise in Germany at the time, as they were by far the leader in their market; by the end of 1949, growing lists and orders constantly flooded in. One survey done in 1949 by the Bielefeld market research institute2 (TNS Emnid) asked customers “Which personal vehicle being built again today do you consider, independent of its size category, to be the best of its type?” The Volkswagen got 40 percent of the votes, while Mercedes got about 24 percent and Opel about 22 percent. Ford got close to 8 percent and BMW came in last, with about 5 percent of the popular vote. For some reason, people found it was easy to like the Volkswagen.

  But Nordhoff and Novotny were thinking in terms of the future. It was a matter of providing customers with the feeling that their cars were simple enough to be understood—because really, they were—and thus the advertising was more of an informational service (indeed, this division of the factory was called “Volkswagen Information Service”). The “ads” lent a feeling of accessibility and warmth to the purchase of an automobile, and this was important in a psychological sense: Because these were the first cars working-class Germans (the burgeoning middle class) were buying, the way they felt about the car and the company would forever impact how they thought of automobiles. As the country moved forward, Nordhoff and Novotny understood that the car was writing its own postwar story. The men who had championed this car had come to think of it in personal terms, and the advertising and promotion reflected that same feeling.

  One such effort, for example, was a series of films Nordhoff commissioned. (Nordhoff was a bit of an amateur filmmaker and films were a big interest of his.) One of the first was Kleiner Wagen, Grosse Liebe, or Little Car, Big Love, which was screened 150 times in venues across Germany and was a big hit; as the dealers would later attest, customers referenced that film when they came in to buy their cars. To use the word “love” speaking of the car, and to have that word accepted by the people, was telling. “Love” is not a word that Germans use lightly.

  It was easy to link Germany’s Economic Miracle to the miracle occurring at the Volkswagen plant. The car factory provided a concrete example of the Social Market Economy and the new direction that West Germany had chosen. In an important sense, Germany’s social and spiritual renewal in the 1950s is perhaps best understood through the country’s relationship with the automobile. For the first time ever, everyday Germans were becoming motorized. The car was a symbol of ideas such as freedom and release as well as one of progress and stability; just as the car was reinventing itself, so too was Germany.

  In that sense, when Ferdinand Porsche and Ferry entered Wolfsburg that day, it really was like entering a new world. Porsche was clearly shaken upon seeing the long brick factory again. It must have risen out of the Lower Saxon countryside like a ghost, bringing with it a strange mix of pain, guilt, and celebration. He told Ferry that it was strange how much easier it had been to build brand-new race cars than to build a People’s Car. And yet, perhaps for that very reason—for all those memories of the years of testing it, of building it by hand in his garage with his close associates, of trying to get it mass-produced, of the dark regime that funded it, and of the dramatic way Porsche had lost control of the project and been placed in jail over it … it was the Volkswagen that held the most intimate threads of his past.

  The elder Porsche hesitated for a moment when he and Ferry got out of the car. He didn’t want to go directly into the factory, so they went up to Nordhoff’s office instead. Porsche and Ferry were received reverently and warmly. Heinrich would later admit that this meeting with Porsche on the factory grounds in Wolfsburg had been unexpectedly difficult and moving for him. Nordhoff seemed to sense that it was the last time the two would meet. It was clear, he said, that Porsche was a man who was looking back over his life. It was as though Porsche
had made this trip for closure, in order to say goodbye. He sat with Nordhoff for quite a while that day, but he declined the invitation to tour the factory halls, only peeping in for a moment to greet the workers as they built and worked on the car he had spent decades of his life trying to design. Before leaving, Porsche said something that Heinrich would recall for the rest of his life: “Only now do I have the feeling,”3 he remarked, “that I have done something right.”

  Ferdinand Porsche in the year after he was released from prison. (photo credit 44.2)

  It is fitting, in a way, that after all the movement in Ferdinand Porsche’s seventy-five years, it was this trip to Wolfsburg that would be his last. Not long after returning, he had a stroke from which he never recovered. Porsche died on January 30, 1951. He was buried near his home at Zell am See.

  In my research, one thing that has always struck me about Porsche is how, in nearly every picture of him, his face is quite serious and determined. It’s rare to see him smiling. But in the few photos taken after his time in prison, he has a smile in nearly every one. There is a gentleness and warmth in his expression. Maybe it’s just the grace of old age, or maybe Ferdinand had suffered so much in jail and spent so many days alone that by the end of it, he’d found a new level of peace. In any case, Ferdinand Porsche would not be easily forgotten, nor would his little bug-shaped car.

  A picture taken less than a year before Porsche’s death. (photo credit 44.3)

  When feisty young George Lois came on board at DDB in the 1950s, Helmut Krone was not thrilled. Here was a young man who was Helmut’s opposite in nearly every way. George was a Greek boy who had grown up in the Bronx. He spoke loudly and forcefully; he was rowdy and extroverted, and supremely confident about his work. In the film American Graffiti, George would have been one of the tough guys in a white shirt, sleeves rolled up and a motorcycle between his scuffed leather boots. Helmut didn’t like him. “What’s wrong with that kid?”1 he asked.

  George didn’t like Helmut much either: “He’s nasty to everybody,”2 George would say, “except Bernbach. He kisses Bernbach’s ass.” George had a dirty mouth. He grew up in a rough neighborhood, a place “racist to the point of vulgarity,” where on the night of a big boxing match, there’d be “500 radios screaming into the night.” In those days, according to George, Irish guys in the Bronx didn’t have much tolerance for tough-guy Greeks. He had his nose broken more than once, and everything about him said he was a fighter—his voice, his swagger, his uninhibited use of the word f*ck—screamed troublemaker. And yet, he was also a Son of Pericles and a loyal son, happy to work long hours in his father’s florist shop after school. George also had a love of art; even as a boy, he used to get up in the middle of the night to draw: “It was the only time I had to do it,” he said. Those same nights, he pored over Paul Rand’s work published for the first time in magazines like Esquire, Direction, and Apparel Art: “It was the first time I realized you could be part of that glamorous fast-moving media world but still be doing art.”

  His parents didn’t quite get their son’s obsession, but Mrs. Engle, one of his teachers at school, certainly did. It was her prodding that convinced him to apply to the prestigious High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. She even gave him the dime for the round-trip subway fare, sending him off to apply in 1945, just as the war was coming to an end. George took the school’s entrance exam and passed.

  In school, his art teachers were both frustrated and awed. Once, during an end-of-the-year exam, the students were given a white sheet of paper and told to make something “using a rectangle as their form.” George thought for a moment, then put his pencil down on the desk without drawing so much as a single mark. He just sat there quietly, an amused look in his eye, while the rest of the class scribbled furiously. Their teacher scowled at George, seeing the boy’s calm as an attempt to provoke him. Just before the bell rang, as the teacher reached for George’s empty sheet of white paper, George stopped him. Hold on a minute, he said; picking up his paper, he signed his name in the lower right corner, as though it were a work of art. And in many ways, it was. The paper was a simple white rectangle after all, about as Bauhaus or Constructivist and precise as one could get, and the teacher soon couldn’t help but smile at what George had done. “In that moment, I began to understand that everything you do has to be a surprise,” George later said. “Everything I do should be seemingly outrageous, I thought. It should have that feeling of ‘hey, you can’t do that!’ but in the next moment the realization of ‘hey, that’s really great.’ ” George was looking to give people something that would resonate, that would make them think.

  Clearly George had a rollicking ride ahead of him, and a few years later, he broke the news to his dad: He wouldn’t be working with him in the florist shop anymore; he was going to college. He’d been accepted into art school at the prestigious Pratt Institute. A little bit later, he had some shocking news to break to his mother too: He’d gotten married on the sly, and the girl wasn’t Greek. His mom gave him a hug. Times change, she said. And indeed they did. Not too long after, George’s artistic career was interrupted by the Korean War and he was sent overseas and wounded by a piece of flying shrapnel. He’d be fine though, recovering well enough to remain a major headache for the officers who had him under their command.

  When he returned to the States, he had less patience than ever for the slow road. He had ideas, energy, and a surplus of ego to spend. He saw what was happening with Ohrbach’s and Levy’s, saw the other ads flowing out of DDB, and he knew that’s where he wanted to be. He told his father that Bernbach was “the maestro” and that once he was ready, DDB would be the place for him. In the meantime, George flew around town at lightning speed, working with some of the biggest names in media: Herb Lubalin at Sudler & Hennessey, William Golden at CBS. He also managed to turn a few desks over in a rage when he didn’t get his way. People loved George. His energy was undeniable. But he was a challenge, containing a plethora of ideas that could explode from him at any angle, any time; he shot ads out like darts.

  Needless to say, the prickly and prim Helmut Krone3 simply didn’t know what to make of such an aggressive young man. Helmut had come on board at DDB in 1954 when he was twenty-nine years old. Now he was nearly thirty-five and his apprenticeship to Robert Gage was ending. In campaigns such as Polaroid, as an art director, he was beginning to come into his own, and the younger George looked like competition. Lois walked DDB’s halls like a bully ruling a high school, and he was indefatigable: By the time Helmut arrived at work in the morning, George would have already been there for hours, working furiously, ads covering his office floor. Helmut would take the long way around just to avoid George’s door. George liked to work on six or seven ads at once; Helmut, according to George, “would do an account every two years.” That was an exaggeration, but no one would have argued with George if he said Helmut worked slowly. Still, George wasn’t just fast; he was manic. Copywriters complained to Bill. They found George and his ads a bit too vulgar, a bit too obvious. One such ad, for example, showed a giant ear with toothpicks, bent paper clips, and all kinds of other gruesome sharp objects sticking out of it: it was for a Q-tip product, of course. But Bill dismissed the complaints. He liked George. George was a curiosity, Bill thought, and that was a good thing.

  On George’s first day, when Bill came over to welcome the young man, he couldn’t help but notice George’s office had a shine uncharacteristic of the place. “They really fixed you up good,” he said. George sheepishly told him that he’d actually snuck in over the weekend and repainted the room: “It was too dingy,” he said. “Uh-huh,” said Bill. “And look at that chair! Did Gage give you that chair?” “It’s my chair,” George said, “I brought it from home.” The chair was a sleek Mies Brno, the product of a Bauhaus star.

  George’s arrival was a sign that a new generation was drifting into DDB—the agency was ten years old by now, successful enough to have moved out of its early cramped quarters and i
nto a larger space just off Madison Avenue, on 42nd Street. And it was on the cutting edge of a still-unarticulated shift that was taking place, rearranging the face of the city itself. New styles of architecture were springing up, and not surprisingly, that was tied to the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivist mix that was also affecting magazines and art at the time. In 1958, the same year George started at DDB, one of the Bauhaus movement’s leaders and stars, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (the same man who’d designed George’s office chair) was hired to design a new building for Seagram. The Seagram Building was like nothing the New York City skyline had ever displayed before: In Bauhaus terms, the functional utility of the building was also supposed to be its beauty. That meant all the building’s structural elements were visible—everything was obvious and transparent, and there was no ornamentation. It looked so unfinished, people said, so raw. George loved it. Bill did too.