Thinking Small (50 page)

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 Grosskopf), 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.

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 percent
²
of the population were refugees from the Soviet Union. “Nobody is from here,” one Wolfsburg worker told the reporter.

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 figures
⁴
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 Commission
⁵
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.

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