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

  Copyright © 2012 by Andrea Hiott

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Hiott, Andrea.

  Thinking small : the long, strange trip of the Volkswagen Beetle / Andrea Hiott.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-345-52142-2 (hardcover)—eISBN: 978-0-345-52144-6

  1. Volkswagen Beetle automobile—History. I. Title.

  TL215.V618H56 2012

  629.222’2—dc23 2011041090

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  FIRST EDITION

  v3.1_r1

  For all those driven

  by hunger and love

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Photo Credits

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One Wobbly First Steps

  Part Two The Darkest Hours Come Just Before Dawn

  Part Three Ooh … Growing Up

  Part Four Like Pigeons from a Sleeve

  Part Five Still Going …

  … And Going …

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  About the Author

  Photo Credits

  tp.1 From the archives of Volkswagen of America

  itr.1 From Thomasmayerarchive.com

  1.1 © 2011 DDB Worldwide

  2.1 Private

  2.2 Private

  4.1 From New York World’s Fair 1939–1940 records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

  5.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  5.2 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  6.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  6.2 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  6.3 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  8.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  8.2 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  9.1 From the collections of The Henry Ford

  10.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  11.1 From Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft

  13.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  13.2 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  13.3 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  15.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  17.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  17.2 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  17.3 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  17.4 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  17.5 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  18.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  19.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  19.2 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  19.3 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  23.1 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  24.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  24.2 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  25.1 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  27.1 From Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft

  28.1 From Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft

  31.1 © 2011 DDB Worldwide

  33.1 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  35.1 From Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft

  37.1 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  37.2 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  37.3 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  37.4 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  44.1 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  44.2 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  44.3 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  45.1 © 2011 DDB Worldwide, with permission from Kathryn Krone

  45.1 From the archives of Julian Koenig

  45.1 From the archives of George Lois

  46.1 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  46.2 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  46.3 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  46.4 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  48.1 From Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft

  51.1 From Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft

  51.2 From General Motors LLC. Used with permission, GM Media Archives

  51.3 From Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft

  52.1 From Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft

  52.2 From the Institut für Zeitgeschichte und Stadtpräsentation Wolfsburg

  54.1 Used by permission of Klaus Gottschick, Wolfsburg

  54.2 From Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft

  55.1 From the Museum at Bethel Woods, © 1969/2009 Doug Lenier, all rights reserved (photo has been cropped)

  55.2 From the Museum at Bethel Woods, © 1969/2009 Doug Lenier, all rights reserved (photo has been cropped)

  57.1 Used by permission of Klemens Ortmeyer, courtesy of the Phaeno Science Center

  57.2 Photograph by Mark Henderson, courtesy of the Autostadt

  57.3 Photograph by Lars Landmann, courtesy of the Autostadt

  58.1 From the archives of George Lois

  58.2 From the archives of George Lois

  bm.1 From Volkswagen of America

  bm.2 From Volkswagen of America

  bm.3 From Porsche AG (Porsche-Werkfoto)

  What is love? After all, it is quite simple. Love is everything which enhances, widens, and enriches our life, in its height and in its depths. Love has as few problems as a motor-car. The only problems are the drivers, the passengers, and the road.

  —Franz Kafka

  Introduction

  In 1949, a ship called the MS Westerdam departed from the coast of Europe, its hundreds of passengers headed toward U.S. shores. Nestled deep in the ship’s cargo compartment, a pair of headlights peeped out of a dark tarp; two wide, open circles leading to the soft curves of what would soon be known as the world’s most recognizable car. Protesters, rebels, dissidents, politicians, businessmen, the world’s corporate elite—all would eventually become entwined in its story. By the end of the 1960s, it would do what no other car had done before: transcend age, class, and country to become a symbol adopted by them all. Americans would call the car the Beetle. In other places it would become the Flea, the Turtle, the Vocho, the Foxi, the Buba, the Fusca, the Poncho, and the Mouse.

  Over the years, the car developed a cult following as well as a more public persona. It had fan club after fan club created on its behalf; it showed up in the films of Woody Allen and Stanley Kubrick; Disney endearingly dubbed it “The Love Bug”; it was even driven—briefly—by James Bond. For decades, the car filled college towns and campuses, the choice of students and faculty alike. It appeared on the cover of Abbey Road. John Lennon had a white one in his driveway. Packs of them dotted the beaches of California, surfboards strapped to their roofs. A children’s game even spontaneously developed around the car as kids scanned the roads in search of it: Punch Bug red! No punch back! The car became so ubiquitous that pop artist Andy Warhol included it in his iconic series of sil
k screens, placing it in the company of personalities such as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe.

  Today the original Volkswagen is still known as the longest-running and best-selling single car design in history, and it is the only car to have been brought back by popular demand … twice. Sometimes referred to as the world’s most huggable car, perhaps no other automobile has ever been lavished with such attention and affection. But onboard the MS Westerdam on that cold winter day in 1949, none of that had yet come to pass. In those days, very few thought the car had potential. Reaching U.S. shores for the first time, the car had much more in common with the millions of immigrants coming over on similar ships, men and women who had been through dark times and were now seeking refuge or hoping to reinvent themselves, eager to find out if what they’d heard about the American dream was real.

  It had been a long road. In fact, after nearly two decades of work and planning, the Volkswagen had only barely made it into existence at all. During the Second World War, the car’s country and factory were all but destroyed. Caught in the ugliness of the Nazi machine, it became a symbol of the hated party. By 1949, one of the men responsible for it had committed suicide and another had been kidnapped and placed in prison, where he languished, imagining he’d failed to fulfill one of his lifelong dreams.

  Needless to say, when the car was unloaded on the docks of New York City that first time, it was not greeted warmly. Not only because of the dark stain of war that washed over with it, but also because of the undeniable fact that the round little car just didn’t fit in. America had been through a long Depression and a long war, but now unprecedented prosperity was finally leaking into the land and the country was on the verge of an automotive boom. The United States of the 1950s would be marked by wide elegant cars—the bigger the better—with flamboyant tail fins, extra comforts, and plenty of chrome. In contrast, the Volkswagen was oddly shaped and excruciatingly austere. People found it comical, awkward, and strange.

  And yet on those very same New York shores, in pockets throughout the city, there were men and women—people considered just as out of place as the car itself was in those days—who were feeling a new kind of energy, readying themselves to take the risk of dissenting, of going against the common way of doing things, of thinking strange. Likewise, back in Germany, a similar change was happening as the country struggled to come to terms with its dark history. On both shores, there was a desire to evolve from within, a need for individual freedom and economic responsibility, for less empty extravagance and for more meaning and truth. It would take a while to mature, but a revolution was rising, and the Beetle would be at the center of the wave. After so many years of obstacles and near misses, the car would finally be in just the right place at just the right time, merging with the larger flow of modernizing governments and evolving markets to revive a sense of joy and wonder in the world.

  Beetle owners have a saying: They don’t find their cars, their cars find them. To some degree, that’s how this book came to be. My first real encounter with the original Beetle happened only after I’d graduated from college and moved to Germany. Riding back to Berlin after an artist residency in the countryside, lulled and drowsy in the backseat of an SUV, I was shaken from my daze when we came upon one particular town. That evening, the landscape had been empty and dark until suddenly there was the bright illumination of towering glass structures and fiery smokestacks: I was overwhelmed at the way this alien-like city suddenly sprang up out of the somber, empty terrain. One of the German friends I was with saw the effect it had on me: That’s Wolfsburg, she said, Isn’t it strange? She went on to explain that this town was originally built by the Nazis; Adolf Hitler had built it for his car. What car? I asked. You don’t know it? she wondered aloud. I thought everyone in America knows the Bug.

  In German, “Volkswagen” means “People’s Car.” At first, it seemed impossible to me that the same car that was once a child of Nazi Germany could grow up to become a symbol of freedom, democracy, and love. But as I would soon discover in my research, the car had always been meant for the people, and it lived up to that dream in ways no one expected and no one could have planned.

  The Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg, 2011. (photo credit itr.1)

  Through all the years of its development, the basic look and feel of the car did not change, but the world around it did. Like a still point through the storm, it survived the chaos of so much contradiction and turmoil, and—thanks to the persistence of the men who championed it—eventually proved that an idea created in darkness can indeed become a vessel for light.

  William Bernbach did not look like a revolutionary. His sober meticulous suits and conservative ties did not catch the eye or distinguish him from any of the other advertising men walking New York City’s bustling streets in the 1950s. Thin and compact, with short dark hair neatly combed to one side, Bill had a small physique that was almost childlike. True, he was the creative head of his own advertising agency—Doyle Dane Bernbach, soon to be familiarly known as DDB—but he didn’t come off as a typical executive of the time: his evenings were rarely full of expensive dinner parties or multiple martinis, he wasn’t embroiled in a string of heated affairs, he didn’t own a pristine country home, or live in a fancy penthouse uptown. Instead, for much of his life, Bill lived in an anonymous neighborhood in the Bay Ridge area of Brooklyn, he took the subway into work each day, and he left on time every night to go home and have dinner with his kids and his wife.

  Bill may not have looked like the kind of man who could catch the world’s attention, but he was, and by the late 1950s, people were beginning to notice him. Unlike the rest of the cookie-cutter ad agencies on Madison Avenue, DDB had a fresh sense of purpose filling its rooms, drawing people in. Walking into their offices in those days, through the haze of cigarette smoke, past the ringing phones and the interactive rush of talented young men and women, one always found Bill Bernbach at the center of the buzz, his Brooklyn-tinged voice—simultaneously gentle and disarming—leaking out of his office and into the halls, his door always open. There was something alluring about his clear, blue-eyed gaze, and as the years passed, Bill rose to be known as the creative center of his agency, the person all the art directors and copywriters wanted to speak to about their work, the man who could get that work into print, or make it disappear without a trace. Bill was confident, and his confidence became DDB’s backbone. It’s what made so many want to be near him—his approval was a good luck charm of sorts—but it was also what made people hide from him at times, unsure or unready to face his clear and veracious eye. There were no rules with Bill; only vigilance.

  Bill Bernbach, the unexpected revolutionary. (photo credit 1.1)

  The crew at DDB was a motley and roughish bunch, in no way typical of most advertising agencies in New York. In certain younger circles, DDB was considered one of the only ad agencies where a person could work on something different, something exciting, something “meaningful,” if you dared to use that term. Whereas other successful agencies at the time were full of serious-faced men in expensive suits, DDB was more like an experimental powwow. Art and writing were respected as crafts within themselves rather than as the means to a financial end. DDB employees worked in teams; they communicated and sparred. Those who witnessed this process called it creative, in a way that the advertising world had never really seen before.

  DDB was different, and different was exciting. But that didn’t mean the agency was going to leave its mark. In the larger scheme of things, DDB was more likely to be beaten by the establishment than it was to change it. After all, in 1959, the majority of Americans had never encountered a DDB ad. When it came to the heavyweights of economics and industries, DDB was small: They didn’t have any of the accounts that mattered—no car company from Detroit, no major tobacco brand, no national retail chain.

  And there was something else, too. In business terms, DDB was often dismissed as a quirky place that did “ethnic” advertising,1 a crude way of saying that most pe
ople considered DDB a Jewish company that did “unabashedly, recognizably Jewish”2 ads. Most of their clients were Jewish. Bill Bernbach was Jewish. And many on the staff were Jewish as well. Thus DDB’s success was a local success: advertisements for El Al airlines or Ohrbach’s department store caught the eye but had a limited scope, catering strictly to Manhattan and its boroughs. Bernbach’s shop was no more a threat to the established giants than were the strange beatniks and folk singers who had started congregating downtown.

  Advertising was incredibly lucrative in those days though, and the big agencies were prospering. Their ads showed beautiful and successful people enjoying a product, and upon seeing such stimulation, customers were supposed to be stimulated too. This underlying equation of “consumption equals happiness” had proven appeal: America’s culture of materialism was thriving, fed on eye-popping advertisements for big houses, big cars, big smiles, and big words. It was the decade of dazzle, and yet as that decade entered its final year, some began to wonder if any of it had been real. The country’s foundations no longer seemed so solid. A recession eventually set in, and it wasn’t solely economic. The spirit of the country began to change; there was a sense of disquiet. As poet Allen Ginsberg wrote in the Village Voice in 1959: “No one in America knows what will happen. No one is in real control.”3 The country was begging for a shift in perspective, and that would mean taking risks and thinking strange.

  And DDB epitomized thinking strange. Take Bill’s newest choice of projects, for instance: a German car that, for more than one reason, looked like an impossible sale. Manhattan’s major agencies were making millions advertising the cars of Detroit: Buick, Lincoln, Chrysler, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Ford—these were the brand names Americans craved and bought. One such advertisement for Pontiac depicted a large crowd chanting, “We’re everybody … and we want a Big Car …” Even the sound of the door closing had to be big. As the general manager of Chevrolet boasted in 1957, “We’ve got the finest door slam this year we’ve ever had—a big car slam.…”