Thinking Small (54 page)

“I know, I know,” Bill said, “but—“

“Greek resistance fighters,” George went on, “were tortured and treated with the same malice and blindness as the Jews.”

Bill nodded in earnest empathy: “But these are different times now, George. We’ve got to try and think of the situation a little differently now.”

“No chance,” George said, though he didn’t like talking to “the maestro” this way. “No chance.”

Nevertheless, Bill continued trying to get a team together from DDB to take the trip to Wolfsburg that Carl Hahn had arranged for them. The trip would include test-driving the cars and going on a personal tour of the plant. George had refused to go. Julian Koenig is clear about the fact that his being Jewish did not prevent him from wanting to work on the account. George, however, would like to believe that it did. In any case, when the Lufthansa plane took off from
Idlewild Airport in New York, Bill and Helmut Krone were on it, and so was Bill’s account man (and friend) Ed Russell. George and Julian were not.

Arriving in Berlin, I imagine Bill found himself more nervous than he’d expected to be. It was his first intimate encounter with Germany, a country whose recent history was somewhat difficult to come to terms with in regard to his past; after all, his parents had come to America because they were persecuted for being Jewish, and the Holocaust had been the ugliest example of that same persecution. But the sting of rejecting someone based on their religious beliefs
was also a very personal matter to Bill, since his parents had cut him out of their lives because he’d fallen in love with a Catholic girl. Of course, no one at DDB
would have had a clue about such things: Bill always kept his private life removed from his public one.

But aside from emotional issues, there were also his philosophies regarding the difference between manipulation and persuasion, and the extreme power that the media can hold, ideas that directly opposed Hitler’s propaganda tactics and abuse of power. Carl Hahn, who was Bill’s tour guide for that trip, might have sensed a bit of these mixed feelings in Bill, even if they never spoke of it directly. The way one nation perceived another, the dangers and the
liberations inherent in crossing racial or religious or national lines—these were things both men had firsthand experience with and so they approached their interactions with delicacy.
⁶

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 VW
⁹
, 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 DDB
²
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!
”