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

by Andrea Hiott

  One of the men Van de Kamp found himself working with in America was Max Hoffman. Hoffman had met Ferdinand Porsche at his last Paris Auto Show in 1950. Though it was the Porsche 356 Hoffman had fallen in love with, the connection between the two men turned out to be Ferdinand Porsche’s last gift to his little Volkswagen as well. Through Hoffman, the Porsche brand would soon make its way into the States and start its own great journey there. But Ferry and Nordhoff’s contract meant that they shared dealerships, and so, in 1950, as Hoffman began selling the Porsche, he had no choice but to let the little VW tag along too. The Bug’s sexy sister got all the attention, but Hoffman pawned off some VWs on dealerships in the process; thus a very slight pickup in sales occurred for the VW in 1950: out of the nearly 7 million cars that were sold in America that year, 330 of them were Volkswagens. But as the years wore on, and as Van de Kamp and his team made their rounds and spread the word, some of the dealers that had gotten “stuck” with their VWs would come to find that the beetle-like car was selling even faster than the Porsche.

  While most Americans might not have been comfortable with foreign cars yet, in the 1950s, thanks to new innovations in passenger planes, it became much easier and much more affordable to travel to Paris or London or Rome. Americans began thinking of themselves as cosmopolitan, and while West Germany wasn’t really considered a part of that cosmopolitan world, perceptions of the country were much different than they’d been in 1946. With the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Soviet threat, West Germany was being seen not as Germany (in the old sense), but as a friend. Events like the Berlin Airlift, which took place for nearly an entire year under Truman’s presidency, made Americans feel connected to West Germans. At the time of the Berlin Blockade in the summer of 1948, General Clay cabled his superiors in D.C. and said “… the world is now facing3 the most vital issue that has developed since Hitler placed his political aggression … Only we have the strength to halt this aggressive policy here and now. It may be too late the next time.” And the American government listened to him. American planes flew in food and raw materials, providing Berlin with everything from bread to electricity, when the Soviet Union cut off the city’s basic supplies. One American who flew supplies to West Germany at this time—in a typical example of how events like the Airlift were changing American and German perceptions of one another—felt hostile about having to help the Germans, having ideas of the Übermensch of Nazi propaganda in his mind. But when his plane landed in the American Sector, that whole view he’d built up suddenly dissolved: A German man about his own age came running to his plane with tears in his eyes, unable to speak English but conveying his gratitude quite clearly. “I couldn’t understand what he was saying,”4 the American pilot said, “but I could understand the feeling.”

  This new understanding between Allied countries and West Germany would later have big effects in terms of exports for the Volkswagen plant. The change in relations was something men like Nordhoff and Hahn were conscious of; they knew what it could mean for VW sales. In the long term, both men believed that the United States would eventually be open to automotive exports from Europe. But that didn’t mean that the Volkswagen was going to be any American’s car of choice. In the past ten years, other European countries had succeeded in making People’s Cars of their own. In France, there was now the rear-engine 4CV Renault. In Italy, there was the Fiat 500. And in Britain, there was the Morris Minor. All of these cars had some market resemblance to the Beetle, and all of them had their eye on becoming the first successful European “small car” in the American market.

  In its attempt to become a player in the American market, it helped VW that both Nordhoff and Hahn spoke excellent English.5 They were also both charismatic and great with the press; both men had the kind of innate European charm that Americans found attractive. In 1954, Reader’s Digest did a piece on Nordhoff and Wolfsburg, referring to Heinrich as “noble,” and noting that he had nice blue eyes. The piece also called the city the “town that a little car had built.” At the end of the 1940s, most American press about the car had focused on Hitler. In 1949, when Pon and Nordhoff had tried to bring the Bug to America, the car had been flatly rejected. Now, five years later, American citizens had warmed to West Germany, and the article was focused not on Hitler and the Nazis but rather on Nordhoff and the “miracle town.”6 Wolfsburg was being rewritten as a success story of the West. In 1954, Time magazine decided to do a long article about Nordhoff and his town in their special issue called “Germany: the Fabulous Recovery.” A hand-drawn picture of Nordhoff is on the cover of that issue, alongside a VW sign with sunbursts of Beetles streaming out of it. Inside, Nordhoff is described as being “like a diplomat.”

  This new way of thinking of Wolfsburg—as a model town of the West—had great benefit for Volkswagen. Sales of the car increased quickly. In 1955, the time when Americans first nicknamed Wolfsburg a “gold-rush town,” Volkswagen suddenly found itself the single biggest exporter of foreign cars to the United States. In 1956, Road & Track did a road test of the car, writing of the Beetle:

  [It] has gained an unmistakable wheel-hold in the garages and hearts of the American car-buying public. Of the 51,000 cars imported into this country in 1955, 34,000 were Volkswagens, and for this year the figure should be raised by 10 to 15 thousand … The only mystery is: how did it happen? Especially with practically no national advertising? Of the various explanations, probably the simplest is that the Volkswagen fulfills a need which Detroit had forgotten existed—a need for a car that is cheap to buy and run, small and compact, light and maneuverable yet solidly constructed, and, perhaps above all, utterly dependable and trouble free.7

  It sounded good. And it was. But compared to America’s Big Three that were selling millions of cars each year, VW’s 34,000 was a small blip. All together, foreign car sales amounted to less than 1 percent of the U.S. market. Nevertheless, in the wave of VW’s small success, Nordhoff decided to open his own U.S. branch and factory in 1955.

  The idea of an American factory, however, very quickly proved to be a mistake. Just six months after the decision had been made and the land purchased, new studies came in that showed VW would never be able to sell enough cars in America to sustain the costs of having a factory there. There were also antitrust issues, and it became clear that the decision to buy land had been too rash. Nordhoff took full responsibility for the blunder, and they sold the factory and decided instead to have offices in the States (in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey), but not to produce cars there for now. The new division of the company would be called Volkswagen of America.

  Almost as soon as VW began to have some success in the United States, however, that success came under threat from the French automobile company Renault. In January 1958, Time magazine reported that “the car that has come up fastest in the U.S. market in the past year is Renault’s Dauphine.”8 The article goes on to say that Renault was “within striking distance” of overtaking Volkswagen as the number one exporter to the United States: “Dauphine is already outselling Volkswagen in eleven U.S. states, including Texas,” the article noted. Such developments worried Nordhoff considerably. That same year, just before his fifty-ninth birthday, he fell ill and had to have surgery at the Mayo Clinic in the United States. From his hotel bed in New York City, where he spent most of January recuperating, Nordhoff wrote a desperate note to his colleagues back in Wolfsburg telling them about the Renault sales. By 1958, a total of 200,000 Volkswagens had been sold in the United States (over the past twelve years), but Volkswagen was slowly losing its edge, he feared. Volkswagen of America needed a man who could lead it in a new direction. As Nordhoff languished in the St. Regis hotel, he summoned Carl Hahn.

  Hahn flew to New York City and met Nordhoff in his hotel room. The two discussed American exports for a while before Nordhoff finally disclosed the reason that he had called Hahn all the way from Germany: He wanted Hahn to take over Volkswagen of America, move to New York, and assume full control of U.
S. operations. Hahn hesitated. He wasn’t at all sure that he was ready to take on such a huge responsibility. But Nordhoff reassured him: He’d thought it through, he said, and he knew Hahn was ready for this. A few short months later, Carl Hahn was living in the United States.

  It became clear very quickly that Nordhoff had been right: Carl Hahn and America got along well. Hahn modernized VW’s offices with computers and hired people to train the staff in service and efficiency. He also standardized service facilities, giving the American Volkswagen dealership network a sense of cohesion and a way to communicate among themselves and help each other. Millions of dollars were set aside to get updated service centers up and running all over the country. It was essential that customers never lack parts for the cars they bought, and to make that happen, the system needed to work like a well-oiled machine. Still, there was an even bigger decision Carl Hahn made in his first year, something that had not been a concern of Volkswagen before that time. If Volkswagen was going to continue selling cars, he reasoned, if it wanted a future in the United States in the midst of all the competition that was setting in, then it was going to have to enter the deep waters of American capitalism: It was time to advertise.

  The first time Julian Koenig saw a Volkswagen, he found it such a strange sight that he stopped in midstep and watched it scoot around the corner of the street he was about to cross. Other than that one memory, however, he didn’t have any real impression of the car. In fact, in 1958, when DDB decided to take on a car dealership called Queensboro Motors—the only place in the New York tri-state area that sold Volkswagens—it was Helmut Krone who knew the most about Bugs: He’d actually bought one back in 1950, making him one of Volkswagen’s first American customers.

  Queensboro Motors was owned by Arthur Stanton and it was part of a larger importing company that Arthur, his brother Frank, and their partner, Victor Elmaleh, owned. That larger company was called Worldwide Automobiles and it was the sole Volkswagen distributor for all areas east of the Mississippi. The Queens section of Worldwide was a new building and its design was based on a Hamburg garage called “The House of Glass”: the walls were transparent. While a VW had its oil checked or wheels rotated, the car’s owner could watch. The first ad DDB did for the dealership shows an alienesque VW rising from the floor, as its owner drinks coffee nearby, observing his car through the sleek, clear walls.

  Arthur and Frank Stanton, the owners of Worldwide, were also two of the earliest American fans of the Volkswagen. In the late 1940s, having left their big New York corporate jobs and moved overseas, importing American cars to Europe and Africa and generally having a grand time—these two brothers had discovered the little VW and fallen for it. Arthur had even traveled to Wolfsburg to meet with Nordhoff and ask him for his permission to sell the cars in a dealership they’d set up in Morocco. Nordhoff was happy to say yes. Later, once Arthur and his brother decided to move their business back to America—now bringing over all the foreign cars they’d discovered in Europe to sell in the States—the VW was at the top of their list. As early as 1951, they entered into contracts with Nordhoff, and Worldwide became the main VW dealership on the East Coast. (Max Hoffman had brought the VW over too, but Hoffman was set up on the West Coast.)

  The Stantons’ staunch support of the VW seemed to have been an odd decision—sales in the States were terrible at first—but very soon, it became clear that they’d simply been ahead of the game. By the mid-1950s, being one of the only suppliers of the car, and with word slowly spreading about the VW, the Stantons were flooded with orders for the little car. And because delivery still took a long time, and wasn’t always predictable, they often had a long waiting list for the cars, and people who would show up immediately to claim the stock as soon as it arrived from Wolfsburg. All this attention the car was getting was simply by word of mouth. Just think what could happen if there was a bit of advertising involved, the Stantons thought. And Arthur was also wanting to publicize his new Queens-based “House of Glass.”

  Luckily for everyone involved, Arthur Stanton happened to be friends with Richard Avedon, the same photographer who had taken Julian Koenig’s wedding pictures in 1951. Avedon was on his way to being known as America’s most unique and captivating photographer; his portraits of presidents and cultural figures would eventually become legendary. But back in the fifties, Avedon’s style, like DDB’s, was still considered strange, at least in terms of America’s norm; thus DDB and Avedon were, so to speak, part of the same crowd. When Avedon was at dinner one night with Arthur Stanton and his wife, Joan, Arthur mentioned they were looking for someone to do their advertising. Avedon naturally suggested DDB. He even called and set up Stanton’s meeting with Bill Bernbach. The Stantons loved the ads that DDB did for them, so when, less than a year later, Carl Hahn happened to mention to Arthur Stanton that he was looking for an advertising agency, Stanton (like Avedon) immediately suggested that Carl Hahn go and talk to Bill. Word of mouth is a powerful thing.

  Still, even after hearing Arthur’s warm recommendation, Hahn didn’t expect much; he’d been all over Madison Avenue, met with thousands (literally) of ad men, and he hadn’t liked what he’d found there. “People presented me with all kinds of fancy offices and spins, but there wasn’t much behind it all.”1 The ads all looked the same, the only difference was “the color of lipstick they’d put on,” Hahn said2. But as it turned out, all those poor experiences actually served Hahn well: On the day he went to DDB, it was clear he had found something unusual. The meeting was friendly and informal. “There was nothing offered but water to drink,” Hahn said. “Bill sat on his desk.” But Hahn liked Bill from the start. He said that when he first met Bill Bernbach, he had the feeling he’d met a man who was being real with him, a breath of fresh air. And Bill liked Hahn as well; he found him elegant and regal, but also down to earth. The men fell into an easy friendship. And Bill Bernbach was excited about the possibility of such an account. He finally would have a chance to say a thing or two to both Detroit and the big ad agencies, or so he hoped.

  Admittedly, coming up with an ad for Volkswagen that could make any kind of impact on Madison Avenue, let alone Detroit, seemed like a pretty unrealistic dream. Helmut Krone, in his black glasses and freshly pressed button-down shirt and having recently (just months before any talk about a VW campaign had begun) purchased his second VW Bug, leaned his long frame against the wall and watched as Bill walked Hahn to the elevator after their meeting. Helmut was flabbergasted by Bill’s enthusiasm: “I still don’t, to this day, know what went on in his head when he accepted the account; in fact, he worked very hard getting it,”3 he said. And he wasn’t the only one confused about Bill’s choice. As Bill would soon learn, getting his team to do a few ads for a local Queens foreign car distributor was one thing. Getting them to create ads for a German car company was quite a different story.4

  George flat-out refused to work on the account. “I don’t have to tell you why,”5 he said. Bill was Jewish, after all, so George assumed he would understand. As George tells it, there was no way he was going to go to Wolfsburg and meet with a bunch of Nazis. “Let me give you a little history lesson, Bill,” he said, “about what the Germans did to the Greeks in the Second World War. See, it all started when Hitler diverted troops from the Soviet lines in order to help Mussolini—”

  “I know, I know,” Bill said, “but—“

  “Greek resistance fighters,” George went on, “were tortured and treated with the same malice and blindness as the Jews.”

  Bill nodded in earnest empathy: “But these are different times now, George. We’ve got to try and think of the situation a little differently now.”

  “No chance,” George said, though he didn’t like talking to “the maestro” this way. “No chance.”

  Nevertheless, Bill continued trying to get a team together from DDB to take the trip to Wolfsburg that Carl Hahn had arranged for them. The trip would include test-driving the cars and going on a personal tour of the plant. G
eorge had refused to go. Julian Koenig is clear about the fact that his being Jewish did not prevent him from wanting to work on the account. George, however, would like to believe that it did. In any case, when the Lufthansa plane took off from Idlewild Airport in New York, Bill and Helmut Krone were on it, and so was Bill’s account man (and friend) Ed Russell. George and Julian were not.

  Arriving in Berlin, I imagine Bill found himself more nervous than he’d expected to be. It was his first intimate encounter with Germany, a country whose recent history was somewhat difficult to come to terms with in regard to his past; after all, his parents had come to America because they were persecuted for being Jewish, and the Holocaust had been the ugliest example of that same persecution. But the sting of rejecting someone based on their religious beliefs was also a very personal matter to Bill, since his parents had cut him out of their lives because he’d fallen in love with a Catholic girl. Of course, no one at DDB would have had a clue about such things: Bill always kept his private life removed from his public one.

  But aside from emotional issues, there were also his philosophies regarding the difference between manipulation and persuasion, and the extreme power that the media can hold, ideas that directly opposed Hitler’s propaganda tactics and abuse of power. Carl Hahn, who was Bill’s tour guide for that trip, might have sensed a bit of these mixed feelings in Bill, even if they never spoke of it directly. The way one nation perceived another, the dangers and the liberations inherent in crossing racial or religious or national lines—these were things both men had firsthand experience with and so they approached their interactions with delicacy.6