Thinking Small (48 page)

But in the midst of so much hastily built worker housing, the residential neighborhood known as the Steimker Berg presented quite a contrast. It had been Wolfsburg’s first (and only) residential neighborhood completed by the Nazis, and only used by the party’s elite, and then later by the British soldiers who occupied the town. Even today, the Steimker Berg is an idyllic neighborhood, by any country’s terms: The houses are simple and elegant and
they blend in naturally with the trees and the earth, giving one the feeling of being outside the city, but safe and protected. The houses are all off-white with green shutters and clay-shingled roofs. Some would say they look more like ideal country cottages, a place where people sit by the fire and read a good book, or take a walk and breathe in the fresh air, or work in the garden, surrounded by large, flourishing fir trees. The design of the neighborhood came from Hitler’s
nostalgia for Germania, from the Nazi
Blut und Boden
(Blood and Soil) ideology about the power of the past: The houses are
Heimatschutzstil
or “conserved heritage.” Aesthetically, they are modeled on a feeling for the past, but from the very beginning, the interiors were designed to be very modern. Each house came equipped with the latest appliances and central heating, a very big deal at the time since most people were still using coal ovens for heat
and cooking.

Riding in the car with her mother that day, Nordhoff’s daughter later admitted that she’d thought:
Perhaps we will live in a house like this one day.
When the driver pulled into the driveway of one of the beautiful homes, no one in the car dared to move. It was only when Heinrich opened the front door, and Charlotte saw her husband, that they broke down.

The little cabin that Ferdinand Porsche had once built with such high hopes was just a few miles away from the new home where the Nordhoffs were restarting their lives. It sat alone in the midst of trees and a cleared field that offered a perfect view of the rest of Wolfsburg and of the Volkswagen factory. The cabin was closed in by a handmade wooden fence with a little gate. Resin-colored fir trees give the place a fairylike feel. By 1949, when
Charlotte felt like her dreams were finally coming true, the dreams Porsche had once had of building his car for the people were being realized too, in that very same town, and Porsche himself could see it with his own eyes now—for the first time since the end of the war, he’d just been granted permission to enter Germany again.

Once the entire Porsche family was allowed to return to Germany in 1949, they moved their offices back to Stuttgart. Ferry would always remember the tears that came to his father’s eyes the first time they drove down German streets and happened to see a Volkswagen pass by, the moment Porsche finally saw a People’s Car being driven by
one of the people.
The elder Porsche even took to counting Volkswagens as he saw them “in the wild.”
One day Porsche told Ghislaine excitedly that out of the twenty cars he’d seen pass by that day,
eighteen
of them had been Volkswagens. (Ghislaine recorded that in his diary; nearly everything he wrote in his diary had something to do with his uncle Ferdinand.)

The car was obviously still extremely close to Porsche’s heart. Thus, in the summer of 1950, he asked Ferry to drive him out to the Wolfsburg factory. It would be Ferdinand’s first time returning there since the war had come to an end, and would be a very different city from the one Porsche had known. In an issue of
Autocar
from around that time, an article titled “Production Is Their Wealth” relates the following about Wolfsburg:
“…  some 9,000
¹
Volkswagen employees live [there] with their families, making a total population of 25,000. Heating and light are supplied
from the Volkswagen works, and their own bus service connects villages within a radius of 20 miles, providing transport for those employees who cannot be housed at present at the
Volkswagenstadt … There is no one who can stop the German people from working hard; a people who have become fully aware … that production has become their wealth. The example of America is being followed by a European nation.”

There were many reasons for the shift in the public’s perception of the factory, but one part of it was certainly due to Heinrich Nordhoff’s expert use of the media and the press. In 1948 when he’d arrived, the papers were still calling the VW plant “Hitler’s pet” or “an Allied factory,” but Nordhoff, with the expert help of his pressman Frank Novotny, courted those same reporters, sending out press releases and
inviting them to meetings and events, opening up the factory for them to tour and inspect. Journalists liked Nordhoff. They often referred to him not as “Heinrich” but as “Heinz.” He was friendly and articulate, always ready to answer their questions. And the Volkswagen was a sort of German Cinderella story that the papers were (eventually) happy to report on. A former Nazi town, saved by the British, redefining itself by using an American model, with
Italian and German workers side by side on the assembly lines creating and exporting cars to all the European countries that had once been enemies—it was an inspirational tale for postwar Europe, for those who noticed. In 1950, the same year Ferdinand Porsche visited the factory again, the Volkswagen workers made their 100,000th car and many of Germany’s top papers were there to cover the event. The photos taken as the car rolled off the line are a stark contrast to the
ones taken during Hirst’s days in 1946 when the 10,000th car had been produced. The photos of 1950 show healthier workers, men who look proud of their work and happy to be there.

Under Nordhoff and Novotny, Volkswagen made deliberate efforts to reach out to the German people as a consumer base, to try to cultivate a specific, warm feeling for the car. It wasn’t really necessary for Volkswagen to advertise in Germany at the
time, as they were by far the leader in their market; by the end of 1949, growing lists and orders constantly flooded in. One survey done in 1949 by the Bielefeld market research institute
²
(TNS Emnid) asked customers “Which personal vehicle being built again today do you consider, independent of its size category, to be the best of its type?” The Volkswagen got 40 percent of the votes, while Mercedes got about 24 percent and Opel about 22 percent. Ford got close to 8 percent and BMW came in last, with about 5 percent of the popular vote. For
some reason, people found it was easy to like the Volkswagen.

But Nordhoff and Novotny were thinking in terms of the future. It was a matter of providing customers with the feeling that their cars were simple enough to be understood—because really, they were—and thus the advertising was more of an informational service (indeed, this division of the factory was called “Volkswagen Information Service”). The “ads” lent a feeling of accessibility and warmth to the purchase of an automobile,
and this was important in a psychological sense: Because these were the first cars working-class Germans (the burgeoning middle class) were buying, the way they felt about the car and the company would forever impact how they thought of automobiles. As the country moved forward, Nordhoff and Novotny understood that the car was writing its own postwar story. The men who had championed this car had come to think of it in personal terms, and the advertising and promotion reflected that
same feeling.

One such effort, for example, was a series of films Nordhoff commissioned. (Nordhoff was a bit of an amateur filmmaker and films were a big interest of his.) One of the first was
Kleiner Wagen, Grosse Liebe,
or
Little Car, Big Love,
which was screened 150 times in venues across Germany and was a big hit; as the dealers would later attest, customers referenced that film when they came in to buy their cars. To use the word “love” speaking
of the car, and to have that word accepted by the people, was telling. “Love” is not a word that Germans use lightly.

It was easy to link Germany’s Economic Miracle to the miracle
occurring at the Volkswagen plant. The car factory provided a concrete example of the Social Market Economy and the new direction that West Germany had chosen. In an important sense, Germany’s social and spiritual renewal in the 1950s is perhaps best understood through the country’s relationship with the automobile. For the first time
ever,
everyday Germans
were becoming motorized. The car was a symbol of ideas such as freedom and release as well as one of progress and stability; just as the car was reinventing itself, so too was Germany.

In that sense, when Ferdinand Porsche and Ferry entered Wolfsburg that day, it really was like entering a new world. Porsche was clearly shaken upon seeing the long brick factory again. It must have risen out of the Lower Saxon countryside like a ghost, bringing with it a strange mix of pain, guilt, and celebration. He told Ferry that it was strange how much easier it had been to build brand-new race cars than to build a People’s Car. And yet, perhaps for that
very reason—for all those memories of the years of testing it, of building it by hand in his garage with his close associates, of trying to get it mass-produced, of the dark regime that funded it, and of the dramatic way Porsche had lost control of the project and been placed in jail over it … it was the Volkswagen that held the most intimate threads of his past.

The elder Porsche hesitated for a moment when he and Ferry got out of the car. He didn’t want to go directly into the factory, so they went up to Nordhoff’s office instead. Porsche and Ferry were received reverently and warmly. Heinrich would later admit that this meeting with Porsche on the factory grounds in Wolfsburg had been unexpectedly difficult and moving for him. Nordhoff seemed to sense that it was the last time the two would meet. It was clear,
he said, that Porsche was a man who was looking back over his life. It was as though Porsche had made this trip for closure, in order to say goodbye. He sat with Nordhoff for quite a while that day, but he declined the invitation to tour the factory halls, only peeping in for a moment to greet the
workers as they built and worked on the car he had spent decades of his life trying to design. Before leaving, Porsche said something that Heinrich would recall for the
rest of his life: “Only now do I have the feeling,”
³
he remarked, “that I have done something right.”

It is fitting, in a way, that after all the movement in Ferdinand Porsche’s seventy-five years, it was this trip to Wolfsburg that would be his last. Not long after returning, he had a stroke from which he never recovered. Porsche died on January 30, 1951. He was buried near his home at Zell am See.

In my research, one thing that has always struck me about Porsche is how, in nearly every picture of him, his face is quite serious and determined. It’s rare to see him smiling. But in the few photos taken after his time in prison, he has a smile in nearly every one. There is a gentleness and warmth in his expression. Maybe it’s just the grace of old age, or maybe Ferdinand
had suffered so much in jail and spent so many days alone that
by the end of it, he’d found a new level of peace. In any case, Ferdinand Porsche would not be easily forgotten, nor would his little bug-shaped car.