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

by Andrea Hiott

  There was another powerful presence slinking in and out of the DDB offices around dusk at this time. Julian Koenig was tall, witty, and charming. Hired around the same time as George, the two young men fell into an instant friendship. George called Julian “the writer from Aqueduct,” “the Columbia beatnik,” the man in “horn-rims and rumpled suits.” Julian was indeed an Ivy League combination of sharp and smooth; he wore narrow ties and oxford shirts with button-down collars. He was articulate, mischievous, but with a deliquescent voice.

  The Mad Men: Helmut Krone, George Lois, and Julian Koenig. (photo credit 45.1)

  Born in 1921, Julian grew up in an intellectual, sophisticated home, the kind Helmut Krone would later admit he’d always admired. Julian had been brought up in New York City and had gone to grade school at P.S. 6. During his undergraduate years, he was considered one of the brightest and funniest in his class. He wrote for his college paper, and he dated beautiful blond women with names like Aquila. He loved baseball. And movies. And he loved the film persona Groucho Marx. He even looked a little bit like him, and maybe wrote in a style reminiscent of him too, gravitating toward the witty, the enlightened, the playful but suggestive phrase. Like Groucho, Julian4 seemed to always know just a bit more than he would ever let on, and yet, as many have attested over the years, he wasn’t afraid to call his colleagues out if they said something imprecise. He was (usually) piercingly honest, but he wasn’t sentimental. In fact, if he hadn’t been so sophisticated and articulate, he might have come across as rude.

  Julian’s father was a judge in the Court of General Sessions and a well-respected man around town. For a while it looked as if Julian might follow in his father’s footsteps. He attended law school at Columbia and did well there, until he realized that he didn’t agree with his professors, or the rules. It all seemed so constrictive and false. At the time, Julian was reading authors like Hegel and Karl Marx, and their ideas didn’t blend so well with the teachings of law school. He eventually dropped out and started hanging around art museums, trying his hand at writing radio scripts. He ended up writing advertising at an agency named Morton Freund for $20.50 a week, and soon started trying to unionize the place. That was how he first met Bill. It was back when Bill was still at Grey, head of the copywriting department and also the editor of an agency publication called Grey Matter. Julian’s attempts to unionize the advertising business sparked quite a controversy in the pages of Grey’s newsletter.

  Unionizing was not so popular with company heads in 1947. For some, even traditional workers unions seemed “too collectivist” or too much of a threat, given the Red Scare. In such an environment, Julian soon found himself out of a job for voicing his ideas. But while Julian did indeed think of himself as a Marxist, it had nothing to do with the Soviet Union: He had no respect for Stalin and his politics. What he liked about Marx was best summed up in the statement, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” He thought that was a “splendid way to build a society,”5 but the only problem was that “the instinct for power always corrupts.” That’s how the world ended up with men like Hitler and Stalin, he’d later say; they were the very antithesis of the Marxist ideas he liked.

  After a few more attempts to make it in the advertising business, the dissatisfied Julian packed up and went for an extended trip to Europe to try to get a bit of perspective. He lived in France mostly, but he ventured into Germany as well. His new wife Aquila was with him. They’d gotten married in 1951, and a young photographer named Richard Avedon (a name not yet known at the time) had taken their wedding pictures. When Julian and Aquila finally made their way back to New York City, Julian resumed his career in advertising. He still wasn’t satisfied, though. He was looking for something else, so he started working on “the book.” The gambling book, that is.

  In 1955, Julian had discovered horse racing. He’d been raised to think nobody could beat the horses, and that it was immoral to even try. The young Julian certainly had a rebellious streak in him, though, and when he came across the formula for a “secret system” in the pages of a magazine one day, he couldn’t help but try. He went to the horse races with high hopes. In three days, he was bankrupt. But he’d been bitten by the gambling bug, and he couldn’t stop. Sure he was on to something, he went to his boss at the advertising firm and said he’d like to take leave “to work on a book.” Everyone had always expected Julian to become a writer, so he let that image hold. And, in the end, he hit it big. In 1957 alone, he made more money at the racetrack than he’d ever made in advertising. In the flush of the win, he quit his old job. He would work only because he wanted to work now, and there was only one place he really wanted to be: DDB.

  Prior to his interview with Phyllis Robinson, Julian had sent his portfolio to DDB with a bit of hesitation: The only ad in it he liked was the one ad that every previous agency had refused to publish. When Bill had seen Julian’s portfolio, he’d told Phyllis that he didn’t like a single thing. Except this. Funny, Julian thought upon hearing this from Phyllis, but that’s the only ad I like in there too. It was for root beer. The image was of a sweet kid sipping on a straw with the caption “Finest beer I ever had.” In 1950s America, that was profane stuff. Bill didn’t love the ad, but he liked it, and he thought he saw something in Julian. He might just have it. Might. It’s worth a shot, Bill thought. And so Julian was hired.

  He fit right in at DDB. “It’s a disaster working with Julian,”6 Helmut once said, perturbed by the fact that Julian did not sit at his desk all day; but in truth, Helmut liked Julian very much, and like Bill, he too thought he saw something in him. But unlike George, Julian wasn’t seeking out the limelight, at least not overtly. He had a kind of internal humbleness, and it would manifest itself in his style of working: While Helmut pored over every ad to an almost comic degree, clearly wanting to impress, Julian worked on the fly, letting ideas roll out as they came and not worrying too much about them. Helmut just didn’t understand this.

  In a strange but fitting way, Julian became the intermediary and messenger between George and Helmut, helping to keep things peaceful between them. George and Helmut might not have gotten along, but they were curious about each other, and they respected each other’s work. And all the sparring, all the insecurities, all the competition, all the doubt—created exactly the kind of atmosphere Bill had wanted, a high-energy, creative workplace. And a challenging one. Bill was honest, but that didn’t mean he was easy. In fact, Julian found that getting his copy through at DDB was harder than it had been at any other place he’d ever worked! But there was a difference. The copy wasn’t rejected. Instead, Bill kept making him work on it, and then work on it again. Julian remembers days of waking up at dawn and sitting in one of Manhattan’s pocket parks before work, trying to get his copy exactly right before handing it to the fastidious Bill.

  In an interview that Bernbach gave later, he said that some of the most talented people to have worked at DDB were the people that took a while to mature: They were chosen with care, he says, nurtured for what he and the others could see in them waiting to make its way out. “[It’s such] a thrilling experience for me to see,” Bill says, “one day—and it happens just like that,7 in one day … the person has it.”

  Photos of Wolfsburg from 1950 can be deceptive. Especially when placed beside photos of the city from 1955. There is one picture, for example, of the long, main road (now called Porsche Street)—the road that visually connects the high point of the city (and Porsche’s old cabin) to the factory and castle. In 1950, this road is only half-paved, bare, and nearly deserted. There are a few figures, mostly women, in dark colors, standing in a circle by the end of the street. Near them, a little boy plays unwatched. A few houses are visible, under construction, spaced unevenly toward the horizon. There are some old barracks that resemble long thin barns. Seemingly out of place, there is one brick building, the most solid in the shot. In the caption, it says that this building is the Buchhandlung Grosskopf (Bookshop G
rosskopf), a place Heinrich used to frequent with Charlotte.

  Photos of Wolfsburg from 1955, however, look like advertisements of a shopping Utopia compared to that. All the buildings are uniform, built in fifties minimalist–style, but with a commercial feel. If it weren’t for the line of (fully paved) road leading from Porsche’s hill to the factory and castle, it would be hard to tell that it’s the same city. But in the photos from 1955, there is not an inch of space on either side of Porsche Street; the road is lined with storefronts. People walk and shop, towing bags or pushing baby carriages. The place has the look of a movie set, almost as if it would blow over if a strong wind came along. All but the brick factory in the background, which looks solid and muscular, permanent. And in these later pictures, cars are everywhere. But not just any cars. Row after row of Beetles line the streets and fill the parking lots.

  Porschestrasse, the main street in Wolfsburg, in 1950. If you look closely, you can see the Wolfsburg castle in the background. (photo credit 46.1)

  Looking at these pictures, and especially at those cars, they remind me of something I heard musician and punk rocker Patti Smith say about “relics.” In a 2010 interview about her memoir, Just Kids, interviewer Michael Silverblatt asks Patti Smith about magic. In the memoir, Patti suggests that an object can be transformed when it is placed in a new context, and Silverblatt wants to explore that idea. “I think it’s very Catholic,”1 Patti Smith says. “I wasn’t Catholic, but Robert [Mapplethorpe] was an altar boy … and I was always fascinated with Catholic imagery and saints … I think both of us had a very ‘relic’ sense of things, that once we infused an object with our own faith … it became almost like a holy relic, and you know, many relics are very humble but it’s the reverence of the people, or its approximation to someone great, that makes it special.”

  In Germany in the 1950s, Porsche’s Volkswagen was a car, a technological tool, a commonality—but it was also a symbol. In retrospect, after all the continents and peoples the car encountered, one can see how it transformed as it was placed into new contexts (from Nazi Germany to West Germany, then from West Germany to the rest of the world). It started out in the most racist nationalistic regime in Europe, and went on to become an epoch symbol in an “American-style” business and town where, according to a New York Times article from 1955, more than 80 percent2 of the population were refugees from the Soviet Union. “Nobody is from here,” one Wolfsburg worker told the reporter.

  Porschestrasse in 1955. The road is now bustling and full of life. (photo credit 46.2)

  Coming to life in Germany’s Stunde Null, its Zero Hour, though difficult, was actually a benefit to Volkswagen in many ways. Coming out of the Zero Hour, there were no traditions to be followed, no clear path. So VW could take the best of General Motors and Ford and mix that with German work philosophies and German needs to create a product that was something entirely new, perfect for the emerging international market that was equally new. “That was a blessing for us,”3 Nordhoff said in an interview he gave in 1953. “We solved our problems as we encountered them, in our own way, not by what the book told us, but usually by improvisation.”

  In a speech in 1952, Nordhoff could congratulate the workers for now being capable of building 1,200 cars per day. In that same year, 35 percent of Volkswagen’s production was exports outside of Germany, mainly to Sweden, Holland, Belgium, and Switzerland. The Swiss registration figures4 for the year 1953 show that the Volkswagen accounted for 23 percent of all new bought and registered cars. A New York Times article from December 1952 reported that Volkswagen had produced a record 135,970 cars and that this was 28 percent above last year’s number and still rising. Output was rising so fast, in fact, that by 1954, every other car on German roads was a Volkswagen, and there were 200,000 exported cars, with plans to export to Japan, Hong Kong, Burma, and Indonesia. Volkswagen was leading Europe in exports, and Nordhoff kept cutting prices to speed up those sales all the more, always a step ahead of competitors like Renault and Fiat. Wolfsburg might have been the oddest city in all of Germany, but it had found a formula that worked.

  And much of West Germany was experiencing that same growth, the “Economic Miracle.” One can find a million and one reasons for why prosperity suddenly washed over West Germany as quickly as it did. Some said it was the Social Market Economy, others credited the Marshall Plan. Some said it was denazification, others said it was the deep gratitude people had for having survived the NSDAP and the war. Some said it was the influence of the Allies, others said it was the threat of the Soviets. In Wolfsburg, it was a combination of all of those reasons, and the Volkswagen factory, a place that people could see from just about anywhere in the city, was a giant reminder to its citizens of every single one.

  The acceleration of growth was so dramatic that by 1955, Wolfsburg was making its millionth People’s Car. Around that time, the Allied High Commission5 that had been watching over Germany was dissolved and West Germany’s Federal Republic was accepted into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). At the NATO ceremony in Paris, fourteen foreign ministers gave speeches to welcome West Germany into the fold. The French refused to play Germany’s national anthem (understandably perhaps, as it was “Germany Over All”), but Norway’s foreign minister Halward Lange, a Jewish man who had endured two years in a German concentration camp, called the day a “decisive moment in the history of our continent.” Konrad Adenauer, the new chancellor of West Germany, said: “Today, everywhere in Germany,6 peace and freedom are felt to be the greatest treasures of all.…” Just a few months before that speech, Adenauer had been at the Volkswagen plant for a photo op: Heinrich Nordhoff drove him through the factory in a Bug.

  Workers coming over the footbridge that connected the VW factory to the town center, spanning the Mitteland Canal, 1954. (photo credit 46.3)

  In Wolfsburg, Nordhoff had come to be known as “the king,” a term people still use when referring to him in Wolfsburg today. The first time the term was used was in a ten-page cover story for Germany’s well-respected magazine Der Spiegel,7 with the title “In Heinrich Nordhoff’s Kingdom”: the kingdom was Wolfsburg, of course. And the comparison said a lot. Like Germany’s new Social Market Economy, Nordhoff’s methods were successful ones, but they were controversial for their ties to an authoritarian past, especially with a totalitarian present sitting just a few miles away over the East German line. Like the Social Market, the Volkswagen company was a partnership between government, business, and a centralized management, a confusing mix of paternalism, regulation, and an embrace of ideas typical of laissez-faire. Even the German press spoke of Wolfsburg as a “social-political enclave,” and Nordhoff himself called his way of doing business “social capitalism.”8

  Nordhoff, though far from perfect, gave the workers big salaries and benefits, policies that spread to become standard in new West German industries. It wasn’t really all that different from what Ford had done in America back in 1914, except Nordhoff had the advantage of hindsight. According to that same article in Der Spiegel, his workers hadn’t had a single day of strike. Somehow Nordhoff had made the factory feel like a home, a family, a place where the people were taken care of and well fed. It came with all the warmth and drama and discomfort that any family knows, but also with the loyalty. The car is our castle, people in Wolfsburg liked to say.

  A big part of Nordhoff’s “reign,” and of this familial feeling that developed with respect to the factory and the town, had to do with the cultural support he gave. He commissioned churches to be built by the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, a multipurpose exhibition space called the Stadthalle to be used for music and entertainment, and the Cultural Center located in the middle of town, equipped with a public library, an outdoor terrace, and numerous rooms where painting, drawing, dance, and other cultural programs were set up for the young. And then there was the music. In 1951, in a rather wild but brilliant move, Nordhoff convinced the famous Prussian conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler to bring his Be
rlin Philharmonie to the Volkswagen factory. (Imagine the New York Philharmonic packing up their instruments and going to play inside a factory in Detroit!) The concert was actually held in one of the main factory halls, and it was for the Volkswagen employees only. Most of them came there directly from their shifts. Furtwängler himself had been quite skeptical at first about playing in a factory, but the response, and the attention he and the orchestra received, left him in awe. The musician Johnny Cash once said that the crowd at Folsom Prison was the best crowd he had ever played for. Not that the workers and the prisoners are in any way comparable, but perhaps the attention and gratitude they gave to the performers was similar, a crowd more focused and appreciative than a typical audience, one for which such shows were easily accessible, would have been. It must have felt rather mystical to hear that music filling the halls of the Volkswagen plant. The orchestra was deeply moved by the experience too; they came back every year for the next ten years.

  Because of all the success, Wolfsburg was often referred to as a “gold rush town.” Certainly Heinrich knew he had a lot to be grateful for, and yet he still wasn’t satisfied. One very big piece of the puzzle was missing, and Nordhoff couldn’t stop thinking about that one piece: the United States. For both economic and personal reasons, the United States was the place Nordhoff and the Volkswagen company needed most. But it was also the country that seemed to want the least to do with them.

  A parade of Bugs. Wolfsburg, 1953. (photo credit 46.4)