Thinking Small (60 page)

However, Wolfsburg didn’t want to make another Beetle. The Volkswagen managers felt it was “too emotional,” and they weren’t comfortable with the translation gap that existed in the way Americans and Germans saw the car; this would be a car built
just
for the American market, it seemed, and that was a risky venture. The Golf had remained the star of Wolfsburg, the European bestseller, and it was a very modern, very “rational” car. Those were the kinds of cars that the Volkswagen managers wanted to continue producing. They had no desire to harken back to a bygone era or design.

But popular desire for the car in the United States was so strong that the German executives eventually gave in. They said they would build Mays and Freeman’s Concept One (it would be called the New Beetle), but they absolutely required it to be modern and up to the German VW standard of quality. Thus it would be built using the Golf platform. The original Porsche design with the engine in the back would no longer be part of the new design. One ad for the New Beetle said it best: “The engine’s in the front, but its heart’s in the same place.”

It was a good thing the executives at Wolfsburg listened to J Mays and Thomas Freeman: The New Beetle literally saved Volkswagen of America. According to automotive writer David
Kiley, “by 1993, sales were so far in the toilet
³
and the company was losing so much money that talk of leaving the U.S. was on the table in Germany.” It was the New Beetle that put Volkswagen back on the map in the States. The discussion of Concept One marked the first time Volkswagen had really been back in the American public news sphere since the glory days of the original Beetle. Publicity built up alongside anticipation for the car. People were on tenterhooks wondering if a New Beetle would indeed come to be. And this anticipation alone made Volkswagen a brand Americans began to reconsider.

When the New Beetle was finally unveiled at its first public auto show in 1998, four years after Concept One had been developed, people cheered. The event had the feel of a class reunion or a sports match, not a corporate event. In celebration of the new model, VW had created a car covered in heat-sensitive paint that would change colors when touched. The car gave off a warm vibe that harkened back to its heyday in the sixties. In fact, when the car was first introduced to the press, the event was decorated with life-size posters of Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon, and Janis Joplin, and most of the guests came dressed in tie-dyed clothing. When it went on the market in March 1998, the car was a huge hit, with more than 55,000 sold in the United States by the end of the year. Mays and Freeman had done something that hadn’t been done before
anywhere
: They had created a successful new design based on a well-known model from the past; they had kept the
soul
of a car intact, even as they changed its look.

The 1998 New Beetle remained on the U.S. market from 1998 until 2010. A total of 477,347 cars were sold during this time. Mays and Freeman were celebrities themselves after designing the New Bug. Funnily and fittingly enough, they went on to become head designers at Ford, the home of the Model T, the original “People’s Car.”

Maybe it was
some of that same conflicted spirit from the 1960s, rekindled in the 1990s of my teenage years, that I sensed on that evening in 2007 when, three years after having graduated from college and moved to Germany, I was unexpectedly captivated by the glowing city of Wolfsburg. That night, riding back to Berlin from the countryside, I’d come upon the city by surprise, and from that moment on, for reasons I am still trying to understand, it was a place I could not forget. The glowing smokestacks, the huge glass buildings and doors and walls, the whole strange, electric feeling I’d had in passing through the town—all of that stuck like a bur in my mind, and soon I found myself on a train heading back to Wolfsburg.

It was all very confusing at first. In looking for the story of the Beetle, I was trying to reconcile my ideas of Nazi Germany with my ideas of the Summer of Love, and the city itself was an odd new reality for me. Having never even heard of Wolfsburg before that moment when I saw its lights, I had no idea of its history, and I had no idea what to expect. Traveling there was one of those trips you take when you sit and wonder the whole time, “why am I doing this again?” I had set off with little more than a printout from GoogleMaps containing directions from the Wolfsburg train station to the Wolfsburg Auto Museum; wanting to understand how the town was connected to the Bug, I’d thought the Auto Museum would be the right place to start.

Arriving on the train into Wolfsburg is an experience that still captivates me (and I’ve since been there many, many times). The small, almost bucolic train station does nothing to prepare you for what you see as soon as you pull into town. The towering brick presence of the VW factory seems to rise out of nowhere, then stays in your field of vision, regardless of where you move.

The factory takes up the entire opposing bank of the canal
that runs in a straight line parallel to the train station, so it is “standing right beside you” as soon as you disembark. The towering brick is a dirty industrial red, like something a Charles Dickens character might see walking down a grimy nineteenth-century London street. Simple, geometric, sturdy: one literal mile connected from start to end like a rusty paper that has been bent into long rectangular folds and then unfurled. Its dramatic length plays with the horizon: From the fat power station and its four brick smokestacks, a string of connected brick cubes push in and out as far as the eye can see, finally shooting upward again into the high-rise of executive quarters at the far end. Smack in the middle of the power station’s main wall there glows a giant blue-and-white VW sign, like a cyclopean eye watching over the city. I was told that if this sign were flat on the ground, you could drive a People’s Car in a perfect continuous U-turn all the way around it.

Henry Ford once said “The man who builds a factory builds a temple. The man who works there, worships there.” And there is indeed a feeling of reverence that comes with seeing the old VW factory stretched out across the bank, separated from the canal by a singular, long lonely road, giving it an unobstructed imposition, like a benevolent giant. Its southern façade seems to have its chest puffed out, nestled up close to the water with a further angle of pooled river cut in front like a moat. I would get a strange feeling sometimes when I walked near the factory and thought of the flood of foreign and German workers who’d poured over the bridges and through the tunnels to take up jobs there, of the British soldiers who made it their home once the Nazi regime had been beaten, of the DDB team, or of Nordhoff, Ferry, and Porsche. Realizing that all those men have also walked the grounds, the heavy brick factory transforms into a testament to what the car has endured.

In Wolfsburg today, the tradition of art and creativity that was started and nurtured by Nordhoff has become a staple of the
town. Carl Hahn, the young man whom Nordhoff sent to New York to head Volkswagen of America, eventually moved back to Wolfsburg with his wife and children in 1964, and continued the city’s legacy of artistic patronage when he became the chairman of the board of management at Volkswagen. The old Castle Wolfsburg, for example, which was home to a group of artists in the 1950s known as the Schloss Strasse 8 (Castle Street 8), is now full of art organizations, including a museum dedicated to the castle’s history (and the history of Wolfsburg), the esteemed City-Galerie Wolfsburg, and the lively Verein Junge Kunst (Young Art Association). And while the city is small, it is packed full of architectural gems, diverse works that have a kind of futuristic quality to them. There are two unique minimalist churches and one cultural center designed by the great Finnish architect Alvar Aalto; a long, modern theater built by another architectural great, Hans Scharoun, and, most recently, and perhaps most visually spectacular and strange, there is the Phaeno Science Center, a building shaped like a stretched rhombus that sits by the train station, just across the canal from the factory and Autostadt, designed by Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid.
There is also the magnificent Kunstmuseum (the Wolfsburg Art Museum), one of Carl Hahn’s pet projects, a looming bastion of metal created by renowned architect Peter Schweger, prominently located in the center of town, facing the Volkswagen factory from the far end of Porschestrasse.

The factory on one end of the city, the art museum on the other, both connected by one long, pedestrian walkway—it’s hard to imagine a better testament to the legacy of Heinrich Nordhoff.

In addition to all these wonderful, unique structures, there is another attraction, one that draws around two million visitors to the city annually. Sitting to the north of the VW factory, this giant enclosed enclave of landscaped vistas and buildings wrapped up in luminescent glass and steel is called the
Autostadt.
At Wolfsburg’s inception, rather than using the lugubrious name of The Town of the Strength through Joy Car, as Hitler christened it, most people (when they were not in Hitler’s presence) called the city the Autostadt, the Auto City, and now this name refers to a cultural center and theme park. Today, if you arrive at the right moment in Wolfsburg, you’ll get caught in a herd of tourists and visitors heading to the Autostadt. You are led toward it as soon as you exit the train station; moving sidewalks go over the bridge and deposit you in its mouth. When I first saw the signs for it, I thought it might be the Auto Museum that I was looking for, but as I soon found out, the Autostadt and the Auto Museum are two very different things.

The Autostadt is a miniature Epcot Center, or a modern, extended World’s Fair, stretching across twenty-five acres. It was designed in large part by Gunter Henn, one of Germany’s most famous architects, but hundreds of other architects have taken part in the conception of its structures and projects. Renowned international artists often “curate” the car pavilions and events. The result is that the entire place feels like an enclave of modern art and architectural development, and the strange ponds of water, mounds of earth, and vegetation between the various buildings and marquees creates an almost alien environment; everything is so carefully sculpted and unique. When I was
there, I even found myself wondering if the ducks swimming in the Autostadt ponds were real (they are!) because they swim in such perfect fashion, as if designed to play their part.

The Autostadt is a cultural hub as much as it is a tourist attraction: Classes and events are common occurrences—everything from sold-out rock concerts (Sting was there during one of my stays) and dance festivals to yoga lessons and self-help groups. There are numerous restaurants and bars. There’s a day care center. There are theaters that show 3-D films about mobility, a guided walk through the evolution of roads, and the longest printed line in the world. There are also all sorts of multimedia, interactive activities (some of which change regularly), everything from a program to calculate your carbon footprint, to areas where you can learn how to design a car. Visitors can also learn about various fuels and modes of engine propulsion, about the impact of automobiles on the environment, or about the stock market in relation to automotive business models. There’s an obstacle course for adults, little baby electric Beetles for the kids to drive, and a posh Ritz-Carlton where people can spend the night and swim in a heated pool that looks up at the giant brick Volkswagen factory.