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

by Andrea Hiott

  By 1959, the time of Bernbach’s trip, the Volkswagen factory and Wolfsburg, taken together, were an example of how precision and clarity in engineering could be achieved without denying such nuance, and without dismissing the artistic and the emotional side of life. Bill was quick to perceive this as Hahn showed him around the city, pointing out the new Stadthalle, the new Cultural Center, and even the new Volkswagen swimming pool that had been built in Wolfsburg for the workers’ children.

  But it was the factory that impressed Bill the most. There, he observed the dedication and extreme concern with detail, the extra effort and energy that went into getting things just right, the way no corners were cut to avoid spending a few extra cents. As he spoke with the engineers and workers, as he got to know the car, and as he listened and watched the way Nordhoff interacted with his employees, one simple word kept coming to Bill’s mind: honesty. To his delight, and perhaps to his surprise, Bill found himself face-to-face with an honest company and a very honest car. The factory was geared toward clarity, toward seeing the car exactly as it was, and selling it based on that impression. It was impossible not to see the contrast this presented to 1950s Detroit and all its glossy, slick advertising. And so, at the end of a long day of tours, walking back to the Volkswagen guesthouse with Ed Russell, Bill said, “This is an honest car. We have to give it an honest campaign.”7 It was as simple as that. That very day, after the factory tour, Russell wrote those thoughts up in a requisition. So many ideas were pouring out of him that the requisition was five pages long. “I definitely remember the first sentence,”8 Russell later recalled: “ ‘The Volkswagen is an honest car.’ That was Bill’s summation at the end of the factory tour.”

  If the Volkswagen had been given commercial birth by Adolf Hitler in a cloud of lies and propaganda, it was those words by Bill that allowed it to transform into a new incarnation. It could finally move into the future carrying a new history, the culmination of the past ten years of Nordhoff’s philosophy and work, by sending people the message Bill so badly wanted to say to both Detroit and New York. And the words of that message, coming from an American Jewish man, were much more powerful than they ever would have been if they’d come from Wolfsburg alone. In coming together, Volkswagen and DDB found they made each other’s messages stronger, and that meant they had a lot to share with everyone, including American consumers. But the important question on both the company’s and the agency’s mind was: Could honesty really sell cars? It was a gamble. Bill was willing to make that bet.

  In his own way, “honesty” was a word Helmut Krone was having to face on that same trip. He was now in his parents’ homeland, near the very same village where his mother and father had grown up, the one they used to tell him stories about. As a teenager, Helmut had called himself Bud and thus tried to distance himself from his origins. But in Germany, Helmut couldn’t deny his past. For more reasons than one, it was difficult for him. When he tried to speak German, a language he still knew well but hadn’t spoken in years, his words came out at a strange pace: At first, some of the Wolfsburg staff even thought he was “a little slow.” Additionally, as the only member of the DDB team who owned a VW9, and who was fluent in both German and English, Helmut was under a lot of pressure to help “translate” the little automobile. He owned one of them after all, and Bill liked to make a big deal of that.

  Taken together, Helmut, Carl, and Bill, the German American working for the Jewish agency in New York, the former Nazi youth and internationally trained economist heading the VW operation in the States, and the Jewish creative agency boss who had married a Catholic Italian girl, were a sort of amalgamation of the larger shifts taking place in the world, shifts that had come hard and slow.

  Back in 1951, West Germany’s newly elected leader, Konrad Adenauer, had reached out to Israel, making an unprecedented and controversial speech in the Bundestag. He said it was Germany’s responsibility to compensate Israel for the Holocaust, because Israel was the geographic representation of the Jewish people. There had been a lot of debate about this statement in both countries, and across the globe. An attempt had even been made on Adenauer’s life in March 1952, about a year after the speech. But six months later, a shaky agreement was reached between the two countries, and on March 27, 1953, the Reparations Agreement went into effect: Over time, West Germany would pay Israel reparations of 250 million DM. Some saw it as blood money, and through the 1950s, the argument continued to simmer.10 Adenauer had hoped the reparations would ease the tensions between Germany and Israel, but at first it seemed only to have raised them.

  Not long after Bill and Helmut got back from their tour of the Wolfsburg plant, however, Israel announced that it would be purchasing 45 million DM worth of goods from West Germany outside of that 1953 reparations agreement. It was front-page news. Nearly seven years after the reparations bill had been signed, Israel and West Germany were finally engaging in something that could be considered “normal trade.” In DDB’s offices, it felt like a good omen. On March 12, 1959, the morning that Israel’s decision was announced in the papers, George heard a thump against his door. When he looked up from his work, he saw that a page of the New York Post had been pressed to the door’s frosted glass. The headline read “Germany Sells Israel 32 Jets.” After a beat or two, Bernbach opened the door with a grin, and George agreed to go to Germany. “It was one of those moments with Bill where you just couldn’t say no,” he said.

  After Bill left his office, George darted up to Julian Koenig’s office:

  “You know what he just did to me?” George asked.11

  Cool as a cucumber, Julian responded: “Yeah, he showed you that Post headline.”

  “So what’d’ya tell him?”

  “I told him I’d go.”

  They were like two mischievous boys on a field trip, joking with the Lufthansa flight attendants and unable to sleep a wink. During the layover in Paris, Julian took George on a whirlwind tour through the Louvre. It was a place Julian remembered well from the time he’d lived in the city, and he knew exactly where to find the museum’s treasures. The two young New Yorkers also visited Longchamps horseracing track. That was Julian’s idea, of course, but George was hardly opposed!

  “An extraordinary thing happened there,” Julian recalled. He put his money on horse Number 4, and though it looked for a moment like his horse might actually win, Number 4 crossed the line in second place. Julian threw his ticket down in the walking room where it fell amid the hundreds of other scraps of paper, all the other losing numbers that littered the floor. But just as Julian and George turned to walk away, Julian heard “that magic word,” objection, blaring through the grandstand. Julian raced back to where he’d just thrown his ticket, reached down randomly into the mess, and somehow—to this day he can’t quite explain it—pulled up his exact discarded ticket. The winning horse had been disqualified. Number 4 now had first place, and Julian cashed in. “It was the high point of my life,” he later joked. With extra money in their pockets and an omen of good luck to see them off, George and Julian boarded the plane to Berlin.

  Compared to Paris, the Germany that greeted them was somber, to say the least. Their West Berlin hotel was near the Ku’damm (Kurfürstendamm), just across from Fasanenstrasse and the ruins of a giant Jewish synagogue that had burned down during Kristallnacht. “That brought up certain feelings,”1 Julian said. Nevertheless, when the car picked them up the following morning to take them to Wolfsburg, it was George, not Julian, who seemed angry and ready for a fight. “I was pissed off,” George later said. “I was ready to do anything that might piss people off. I even practiced goose-stepping like a Nazi.” But George had fought in Korea; he’d seen the chaos and violence of war firsthand, and he’d known the pain that racism—be it Irish against Greeks, or Greeks against Irish—could bring. “Here I was meeting these guys, these Germans, these very same people who had been there and probably done who knows what else during the war, and now I was supposed to work for them?”


  But once they were settled in Wolfsburg, George calmed down. Both of them had a good feeling about the quiet little town. George would remember that at first sight, he thought the city looked “like a toy town, like a Grant Wood painting in real life.” Julian found it pleasant as well. “We had a bully time,” he said. “They treated us well.” And it’s true, they were very much guests of honor while they were there. They were taken on extensive tours of the plant, allowed access to any area or equipment they wanted to see. They could easily understand why Bill had spoken endlessly about honesty; one couldn’t help but notice the sense of respect the workers had for their work. Each car went through four layers of careful painting sessions and cars got rejected for the slightest imperfections: a missing dot of paint under a door panel, a slightly imbalanced windshield wiper, an improperly measured piece of fabric covering the bottom of a trunk. Sometimes it took over 100 inspectors just to “okay” a single car, and the head inspector reported not to a manager in his section of the plant, but to Heinrich Nordhoff himself.

  Another thing that struck the men of DDB2 was Nordhoff’s policy not to change the look of the car, to stay true to Porsche’s original design. This was the very opposite of Detroit’s need for constant change, for always wanting to have a new, stimulating product to give customers a reason to discard their old models and make another purchase, even if their old models still ran fine. It was remarkable, one couldn’t help but realize, that in this whole town, every VW car was in effect the same car. Yet they all felt like individuals, automobiles with their own personalities.

  When they were introduced to Nordhoff, George and Julian found him reserved and hard to read. He was friendly, but aloof, not nearly as approachable as Carl Hahn. George couldn’t help but think: Now here is a man who was, certainly, at some point in the presence of Hitler. Or maybe Nordhoff was just aloof with them because George told Nordhoff that the steeple of one of Wolfsburg’s churches—one that had scaffolding around it and was still being built at the time—looked a heck of a lot like a V2 missile launching pad.

  One part of the factory tour was to what George remembers as a “secret, hidden basement”3 and what Julian remembers as “a kind of auto museum.” It couldn’t have been the Auto Museum that exists in Wolfsburg today, because that wouldn’t get built for another seventeen years, but it could have been simply a room (like a museum) in the factory where they kept the unusual or valuable cars. For instance, it was here they were shown the millionth VW, a gold car with shimmering jewels. “It was studded with rhinestones,” Julian recalled, “like a tart ready to walk the German streets.” In the same secret room, or museum, or storage area, George discovered an old military model of the Volkswagen that was concealed with a tarp. According to him, he ripped the cover from the “Nazi jeep” and jumped into it, “shooting” at their tour guide from the machinegun mount. Those jeep VWs do indeed exist. I saw versions of them myself at the present-day Auto Musuem. But George remembers a lot of mischief around their discovery of them, including Julian jumping into the car with him as he shouted “Ach! Ach! Ach!”

  Julian, however, only remembers the little tart.

  Toward the end of their stay, a dinner party was thrown for George and Julian. It was a fun night. Julian told the Germans all about American baseball, and he and George—perhaps after a drink or two—even demonstrated “the American baseball slide” for the gathered crowd. Julian was a good player, and his baseball slide was indeed something worthy of being watched. Julian got a running start as George covered the napkin that served as home plate. Nobody played umpire. Julian was safe.

  On the trip back, George had to admit to Julian that now he actually kind of liked what he’d previously (before the trip) been referring to as “the little Nazi car.” There was, at least to an American eye, something kind of sweet about the car that made it almost comical when seen as the center of all that earnest technical attention at the factory. Julian was also impressed. “Julian was already talking about it like it was a bug,” George said, “calling it a little beetle, that sort of thing, something kind of schmaltzy.” Still, George couldn’t help feeling a little guilty about his quick change of opinion. Once he was back in the DDB offices, in “an act of atonement for succumbing to helping sell Hitler’s People’s Car,” his old anger got one last comic vent; he spent hours creating a twenty-four-page flip book where the Volkswagen symbol ever so slowly morphed into a swastika. “Very interesting,” Bill said when he saw the little flip book. “Now throw it out.” As for Julian, his first “ad” of the campaign was a photo of Hitler behind a desk with a miniaturized Volkswagen sitting in front of him. The caption read: “The man behind Volkswagen.” Years later, Julian would still laugh at the memory of it: “It was just a joke.”

  In any case, Bill now had his team, and it was the very team he’d originally wanted. Julian was to be the copywriter on all the ads. Helmut was going to be art director for the Beetle. And George would do the art for the VW Bus. In typical DDB-style, that meant Julian was to spend his weeks shuffling back and forth between George and Helmut’s offices, brainstorming with the German perfectionist and then comparing notes with the rebellious Greek.

  It was beginning to look like Carl Hahn had made the decision to advertise just in time. According to a Time magazine article from October 1959, “Not since Henry Ford put the nation on wheels with his model T has such a great and sweeping change hit the auto industry.” And that big change was something now referred to as the “compact car.” With the recession setting in, Detroit finally took notice of the fact that small cars like the Volkswagen were indeed selling. The Big Three came up with plans of their own. Chevrolet was the first to introduce their compact car, the Corvair: “This is just a prelude,”4 Time magazine said upon the Corvair’s release:

  Next spring Ford will roll out a compact Edsel called Comet. In a year Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac will come in both compact and regular sizes. All told, Detroit is betting $700 million on these cars—about $150 million on the Corvair, $100 million each for Falcon and Valiant, $350 million for the “bigger” compacts. How well this huge gamble pays off will affect not only Detroit, but automakers and buyers round the world. Says West Germany’s Heinz Nordhoff, president of Volkswagen, with some understatement: “1960 will be the most interesting year in the history of the U.S. automobile industry.”

  And indeed it would.

  In the United States in 1959, one book seen in dentists’ offices, on subways and buses, in homes all across the nation, was the bestselling self-help book of the day, The Magic of Thinking Big.1 It’s not surprising that a book with that title would have become a hit in the 1950s, but the book’s message was not quite what you’d expect. It’s easy to look back and criticize the media or the car companies or capitalism itself for the deep societal problems beginning to surface at the time, but back then, it wasn’t so obvious that Thinking Big was truly a problem. And, in truth, dreaming big, fantasizing, wishing for the best: None of those things alone were problems. One has to look just a little longer and a little deeper to see what was really going on. And to remember that for Americans it was the first decade after the United States had become a superpower, and that the country was experiencing prosperity unequal to anything seen in former times. Likewise, one has to remember that the United States was still a segregated country, a place where blacks and whites weren’t supposed to mix, and where being a woman, or of a certain color or class, was enough cause for discrimination—problems that we are still trying to understand clearly even today.

  In the 1950s in America, there was an exaggeraged emphasis on thinking big. Thinking big in those days was heavily equated with the commercial world: As more of the population now had more money to spend, as the middle class expanded dramatically after the Second World War, this emphasis on thinking big quite often got misinterpreted as “buying big,” and this led many Americans (perhaps subconsciously or unconsciously) to feel a void in their lives that was hard to d
efine. The dominant culture of the time urged consumers toward believing that the answer to life’s ills was in acquiring more, and this resulted in the well-known inertia of trying to keep up with the Joneses.

  But that was only one part of a very complex nation. In the decades since that time, in recalling literature such as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique or Vince Packard’s The Status Seekers, or in films that have been made about the 1950s such as Pleasantville and Far From Heaven, the decade has sometimes been seen as a time of suppressed emotions and out-of-control consumer desires. And while there is truth in those notions, and certainly those books and movies express a legitimate reality, the 1950s was also a good moment in history, a time of abundance and enjoyment and progress. To put it another way: There is nothing wrong with thinking big; in fact, it can be very healthy, and the prosperity and well-being of many Americans in the 1950s is a testament to that fact. But that does not dismiss the other current that was running parallel to that progress: Many were coming to the sober realization that there is no end to the struggle to keep up, it is a race no one can win. Likewise, no matter how good life is, or how much prosperity one experiences, it never pays to turn a blind eye to the larger realities of other individuals, groups, and views. Mysteriously, in 1959, DDB was able to sense that conflicted moment, and reflect it in a way that would ultimately resonate beyond their intentions or control.

  The first DDB Volkswagen ad to run in Life magazine appeared on August 3, 1959. It was in black-and-white, and it showed a picture of two VWs from above, one covered by a sheet, the other not. The headline read: “Is Volkswagen contemplating a change?” DDB’s VW campaign got its first public plug on Madison Avenue because of this ad. In the issue of Advertising Age from October 5, 1959, in a piece titled “Didn’t Need Research,” that first ad is shown alongside the article. The article reads: