The People's Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle

by Bernhard Rieger

Overview

At the Berlin Auto Show in 1938, Adolf Hitler presented the prototype for a small, oddly shaped, inexpensive family car that all good Aryans could enjoy. Decades later, that automobile—the Volkswagen Beetle—was one of the most beloved in the world. Bernhard Rieger examines culture and technology, politics and economics, and industrial design and advertising genius to reveal how a car commissioned by Hitler and designed by Ferdinand Porsche became an exceptional global commodity on a par with Coca-Cola.

Beyond its quality and low cost, the Beetle’s success hinged on its uncanny ability to capture the imaginations of people across nations and cultures. In West Germany, it came to stand for the postwar “economic miracle” and helped propel Europe into the age of mass motorization. In the United States, it was embraced in the suburbs, and then prized by the hippie counterculture as an antidote to suburban conformity. As its popularity waned in the First World, the Beetle crawled across Mexico and Latin America, where it symbolized a sturdy toughness necessary to thrive amid economic instability.

Drawing from a wealth of sources in multiple languages, The People’s Car presents an international cast of characters—executives and engineers, journalists and advertisers, assembly line workers and car collectors, and everyday drivers—who made the Beetle into a global icon. The Beetle’s improbable story as a failed prestige project of the Third Reich which became a world-renowned brand illuminates the multiple origins, creative adaptations, and persisting inequalities that characterized twentieth-century globalization.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674050914
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/16/2013
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	460,239
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Bernhard Rieger is Professor of European History at the University of Leiden.

Read an Excerpt

From Chapter Seven: “I have a Vochito in My Heart”

“It was an impressive sight when all the taxis had taken their stations on the city’s great square,” wrote Volkswagen’s senior manager in Mexico to his superiors in Wolfsburg on November 26, 1971. Helmut Barschkis had every reason to be proud: the taxis that had lined up in neat columns on Mexico City’s vast Zócalo before driving off in search of passengers to a “concert of honking horns” consisted of no fewer than 1,000 VW Beetles. The German manager had ensured that the delivery of the first substantial fleet of Beetle taxis to Mexico City’s local government was more than a commercial success quietly enjoyed. Gaining permission for a mass display of VWs on the Zócalo was a first-rate public relations coup for the company, an achievement Barschkis’s German bosses probably failed to appreciate. Framed by the National Cathedral and the Presidential Palace, the small Volkswagens briefly took over an architectural ensemble that towers at the apex of Mexico’s national iconography. Like the demonstrators that routinely flock to the square to launch themselves and their political causes onto the national stage, the Beetle self-confidently announced its growing presence in the country as 1971 drew to a close.

This public ceremony for the first Beetle taxis foreshadowed the car’s subsequent exceptional fortunes in Mexico. Over the years, the vehicle not only developed into a bestseller but came to rank highly among the country’s venerated objects. In fact, numerous Mexicans have gone so far to as to declare the small, rounded Volkswagen, locally known as el vocho and el vochito, a typically Mexican automobile. While the literal meaning and etymology of these endearing nicknames remain in the dark, the car’s ascent into Mexico’s national pantheon is a remarkable development. Commodities are rarely adopted as national icons in countries that played no role in their initial design and production, but, irrespective of its German roots, the Beetle counts among the artifacts that have achieved this feat in several nations. Many in Brazil, where VW has maintained production facilities since the late Fifties and manufactured the car intermittently for almost four decades, regard the Volkswagen as their very own fusca—another untranslatable moniker. The Beetle has thus evolved into an icon with multiple nationalities.

Even in countries where the vehicle does not count among the core national symbols, it still conveys distinctive meanings that are widely recognized across the social spectrum. When Ethiopian military rebels deposed Emperor Haile Selassie in September 1974, they sealed their coup with an automotive ritual whose implications were not lost on the ruler. A keen collector of glamorous cars who had accumulated a treasure trove of 27 Rolls Royces, Mercedes-Benzs, Lincoln Continentals, and other luxurious automobiles, Haile Selassie found himself led to a green Volkswagen Beetle as he was banned from returning to his palace. “‘You can’t be serious!’ the Emperor bridled. ‘I’m supposed to go like this?’” For a long-time ruler who traced his ancestry back to biblical King Solomon, being forced to ride in the back of the modest Beetle was the epitome of humiliation.

Table of Contents

Prologue: "Some Shapes Are Hard to Improve On" 1

1 Before the "People's Car" 11

2 A Symbol of the National Socialist People's Community? 42

3 "We Should Make No Demands" 92

4 Icon of the Early Federal Republic 123

5 An Export Hit 188

6 "The Beetle Is Dead-Long Live the Beetle" 233

7 "I Have a Vochito in My Heart" 256

8 Of Beetles Old and New 292

Epilogue: The Volkswagen Beetle as a Global Icon 325

Notes 337

Acknowledgments 392

Index 395

Editorial Reviews

[An] illuminating and elegantly written history… Rieger is particularly good on the gendered nature of Beetle ownership. At a time when fewer than 20 percent of driving licenses in West Germany were held by women, the Beetle became a vehicle for what he calls ‘automotive misogyny.’ …He is very good…on its appeal in the United States, where it became a popular second car for many families in the expanding suburbs of the 1950s and 1960s… It even became an icon of the counterculture.

London Review of Books - Richard J. Evans

The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle is a thorough and compelling new chronicle of the distinctive Bug.

Fast Company online - Jessica Grose

The Beetle had a stupendous run, which…Bernhard Rieger traces in his absorbing account… Rieger has written a fascinating book that will inevitably find resonance among those who were themselves touched by the magic of an object made of steel, glass, and plastic that was designed in the heart of Hitler’s Reich.

The National - Paul Hockenos

A fascinating book! Rieger takes readers on the Volkswagen Beetle’s global journey, showing the many meanings of this iconic product in different times and places. His history illuminates the worldwide allure of commodity culture, the spread of socioeconomic inequalities, and the protean meanings of purchased goods.

Emily S. Rosenberg

The People’s Car by Bernhard Rieger chronicles the life of the iconic Volkswagen Beetle, from its 1930s origin as a propaganda tool for Germany’s Third Reich through to the modern day, a run of popularity spanning a remarkable nine decades. Rieger’s research details the car maker’s obsessive pursuit for high-quality, low-maintenance and utterly dependable motoring, which were the treasured hallmarks of the Beetle through the middle part of the 20th century… While the meteoric postwar rise of the Beetle presents a chance to marvel at the model’s simple appeal and outstanding longevity, the years before its manufacture began present the most fascinating reading… The People’s Car is an exhaustive…and fascinating glimpse at a car that stood the test of time and of changing consumer tastes.

Sydney Morning Herald - Steve Colquhoun

The story of the Volkswagen Beetle is complex, interesting, international, unlikely, and utterly fascinating. Rieger does an excellent job of bringing together the history, events, and people that produced an iconic automobile that beat all the odds.

Choice - C. J. Myers

Bernhard Rieger tells the story of the Beetle and he does so with wit and ease… A German chronicle that always keeps an eye on international entanglements. [Rieger’s] cultural history with a transnational reach is…the intelligent alternative to traditional national historiography.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - Hedwig Richter

Bernhard Rieger’s The People’s Car conveys how inextricably 20th-century politics, culture and economics are linked… The story of ‘the people’s car’ is, of course, interesting in its own right—its commission, design, post-war production and worldwide success. But what is most intriguing is how a consumer commodity became an icon that, over decades, represented something different for a variety of countries and generations. Rieger shows this to informative and illuminating effect.

Times Higher Education - Ulrike Zitzlsperger

Rieger extracts from the history of the Volkswagen not just the story of a product—iconic though it was—but also its significance for Germany’s national image since the 1930s. Deeply researched, this history makes a cracking good read.

Jane Caplan

Rieger has succeeded in presenting the first comprehensive account of the truly amazing story of the Volkswagen Beetle. Starting with Hitler’s plans to provide a mass-produced people’s car for his projected ‘Aryan’ society, he shows how this ‘ugly duckling’ became an icon of postwar mass motorization around the world. A compelling read.

V. R. Berghahn

An engaging history of how a failed Nazi prestige project became a national icon in three different countries… A provocative look at one product’s unlikely journey through authoritarianism and globalization.

Foreign Policy online - Joshua Keating

With great richness and imagination, Rieger joins economics and social desire, advertising and politics, technology and culture, to track a distinctive German history through a truly transnational arena.

Geoff Eley