The Good German Goes Global:

the Volkswagen Beetle as an Icon

in the Federal Republic
by Bernhard Rieger
He runs and runs and runs, proclaimed the headline of a one-page interview with Hans-Ulrich Wehler in Suddeutsche Zeitung in July 2008, hailing
publication of the five-hundred-page survey on postwar Germany which
brings to a close his monumental history of German society since 1700.
By referring to Wehlers ability to run and run and run, the journalists
did more than admire his stamina; they expressed their respect in terms
befitting the subject matter of Wehlers latest book, which, among other
things, treats the Federal Republic as a success story. Runs and runs and
runs is the well-known tagline of a 1960s advertisement for the Volkswagen
Beetle, one of the most potent symbols of West German success.
History Workshop Journal Issue 68
doi:10.1093/hwj/dbp010
The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.

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Fig. 1. In August 1955 Volkswagen celebrated the production of the millionth Beetle,
which rolled off the production line painted all in gold. This image was intended to
convey the social unity at VW as managers and workers gather around the symbol of
the economic miracle.

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Fig. 2. This ad from the early 60s coined a phrase that has entered colloquial German.
It praises the Beetles sturdy reliability as the cause of its phenomenal success,
proclaiming it runs and runs and runs (und lauft . . .).

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That slightly incredulous reference to Wehlers staying power was not the
only the allusion to Volkswagens fabled product. As Wehler denounced the
GDRs repressive politics, praised the stability and wealth of the Federal
Republic and warned against rising social disparities in unified Germany,
a central inset photograph from 1957 provided a light-hearted counterpoint
to his observations. It depicted a family picnicking peacefully in the sunshine
of a forest clearing in front of their parked VW an idyllic scene invoking
the simple pleasures of incipient affluence in West Germany. Running and
resting, work and leisure, production and consumption these themes can
readily be summoned up by alluding to the Volkswagen Beetle. The circumstance that neither Wehler nor his interviewers ever mentioned the vehicle in
their conversation was by no means unusual.1 Volkswagens most famous
product has been called upon as a symbol of the Federal Republic with such
frequency and regularity that it seems superfluous to Germans to spell out
how exactly this automobile stands for the postwar order. Former West
Germans in particular see in the Beetle much more than yet another car.
To them it is a much-loved, multi-layered and uncontroversial icon of the
Federal Republic.
That this car would secure such prominence in postwar German culture
was by no means a foregone conclusion. Like many a popular material
object, the Beetle has taken numerous twists and turns over its long life as
a commodity from Nazi Germany to the present. Rather than remaining
a merely functional object, the car came to articulate and communicate a
broad range of sentiments that, given its prominence, highlight key aspects
of West German collective identity. A large number of people including
politicians, engineers, line workers, management executives, advertising
agents, car dealers and, last but not least, countless ordinary drivers
played important roles in making this vehicle an exceptional success that
gained symbolic significance despite inauspicious beginnings.2 In 1945 the
Volkswagen was burdened by its origins in the Third Reich, an ambivalent
legacy that might well have obstructed its adoption as the new republics
talisman. Both in Germany and abroad, it was common knowledge that
the cars main design features its round shape, its torsion-bar wheel suspension, its air-cooled rear engine stemmed from the 1930s. It was also
well known that Ferdinand Porsche had secured Hitlers support to develop
an inexpensive, robust family vehicle as part of the dictators plans to
advance mass motorization so as to demonstrate National Socialisms purported commitment to creating a classless, racially pure national community [promoted as the Volksgemeinschaft] in the sphere of consumption.
Finally, it was common knowledge that the Nazi regime had financed
and constructed VWs factory in Wolfsburg, Europes largest auto plant
intended to buttress portrayals of Nazi Germany as a powerful, highly
productive and technologically modern country on a par with the United
States.3 After 1945, the Beetle more than any other automobile pushed
ahead mass motorization in the Federal Republic, turning the dream of

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individual car ownership into a reality for millions during the 1950s and
1960s. Moreover, with more than twenty-one million sales worldwide, VWs
export success helped restore West Germany on the global economic stage.
From this perspective, the Beetle signalled both the achievements of postwar
reconstruction and the countrys integration into a new international order.
Still, how a product that began life as a National Socialist prestige project
came to be adopted by Germans as a symbol of the postwar order remains
an open question.4
Despite the intimate links with the Nazi dictatorship, the Volkswagen and
its production site provided a collective marker of West Germany from the
earliest postwar days. No period of critical detachment or uncomfortable
silence preceded the Volkswagens public embrace after 1945. In 1949, the
year of the Federal Republics foundation, a photo-book entitled Kleiner
Wagen auf groer Fahrt (Small Car on a Big Journey) already extolled car
and factory as the most convincing emblem [Sinnbild] for the genuine
values of this country and this people.5 Assessments along these lines are
a staple of public commentary to this day. When Spiegel TV produced
a documentary on Germanys socio-economic difficulties in 2005, it chose
to interview several generations of Volkswagen workers in Wolfsburg,
assuming that the city still offers noteworthy indicators of national trends
even after unification.6
With its long-standing eminence the Volkswagen presents a promising
focus for a study of how West Germans made sense of their new country
and its place in the world. This article approaches the topic through two
lines of inquiry. First, it examines how the West German public assessed the
Beetle in a domestic context where the car emerged as a symbol of dynamic
reconstruction during the 1950s and 1960s. With its phenomenal commercial
success, the Beetle struck contemporary observers as the quintessential
embodiment of the values West Germans embraced as they rebuilt their
ruined country. But commentators by no means ignored the Volkswagens
origins in the Third Reich. Tales about the Beetle reveal how contemporaries imagined the relationship between the Third Reich and the Federal
Republic, positing links and ruptures between both. Recent work has
emphasized that in the 1950s and 1960s West Germans frequently viewed
themselves as historys victims rather than its perpetrators, as a result of
Allied bombing as well as mass expulsions and rape at the Second World
Wars end.7 Still, it remains unclear how they came to embrace their new
state as a success and how they connected this success to the recent past.8
Second, West Germans never saw the Volkswagen in exclusively domestic
terms. Its global appeal made an important contribution to its iconic status.
West Germans attentively followed how the Volkswagen turned into a
sales hit abroad, registering with relief the affection it inspired in countries
near and far. They viewed the car as their unofficial, yet prominent representative on the international stage. It was a source of collective pride that
the Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle] of the 1950s and 1960s rested on

The Volkswagen Beetle

A SYMBOL OF THE ECONOMIC MIRACLE: NECESSITY

TURNED INTO A VIRTUE
Having produced armaments and military vehicles during the war, the
Volkswagen works survived the immediate postwar years intact because
British authorities began car production at Wolfsburg to alleviate a serious
vehicle shortage in their occupation sector. Although the British motor
industry identified the German vehicle as a potentially powerful competitor,
plans to transfer the facilities from Wolfsburg to Britain failed because of
divisions between government departments in Whitehall as well as the difficulty of accommodating a factory that would dwarf all car plants in the
UK.10 In 1948, Heinrich Nordhoff, who had worked for General Motors

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foreign demand for German goods, generating self-congratulatory celebrations of the new republic as an Exportweltmeister [export world champion].
The Beetles proliferation signalled to West Germans that their country had
left behind its pariah status and become part of the international community. Few industrial products have matched this cars lasting attractiveness
in highly varied markets across the globe. As early as the mid 1950s,
it emerged as the most popular import vehicle in the United States, a position it retained into the early 1970s. After the collapse of the US market
during the oil crisis of the 1970s, the cars career took off during mass
motorization in Mexico, where VW has maintained a large plant in
Puebla since 1967. In 1993 annual production of the automotive classic in
Puebla peaked at almost 100,000 cars.9 As news of the vehicles fortunes
in foreign lands filtered back to the Federal Republic it established among
citizens of the Federal Republic a view of their countrys place in the world
that, as we shall see, was as selective as it was self-flattering. As a symbol of
the export miracle the Volkswagen contributed to a very partial understanding of the countrys international role which continues to reverberate
in current German debates about globalization.
The following pages examine the Volkswagen Beetle in domestic
and international context, accounting for the vehicles rise to continuing
symbolic eminence in Germany. Three aspects uncover how the interplay
between domestic and international dimensions lent the Beetle exceptional
prominence in the German imagination. To begin with, VW emerged as an
icon of West German postwar reconstruction. Moreover, the cars surprising
popularity in the USA signalled to German observers their countrys return
to the wider world. Finally, Volkswagens activities in Mexico demonstrate the German publics reluctance to acknowledge their countrys role in
processes of economic globalization. By bringing into view how the German
public has positioned itself vis-a`-vis the past, the success of the Federal
Republic as well as its place in the wider world, this study allows us to
probe core elements of postwar collective identity. As we shall see, the
Beetle embodies a very specific notion of normality that has proved as
durable as the car itself.

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affiliate Opel in the 1930s and subsequently ran Germanys largest truck
factory during the war, became director general at the Volkswagen works.
A textbook patriarch, Nordhoff was to determine the companys strategy
until his death in 1968, overseeing Volkswagens development into one of
the Federal Republics leading firms. Predicated on constant and incremental technical improvements of Ferdinand Porsches basic design from the
1930s, Nordhoffs single-minded pursuit of a single-model policy exploited
an exploding market for basic motorization in West Germany as well as
booming international demand for inexpensive, dependable vehicles.11
Between 1948 and 1962, annual output rose from 19,244 to 1,004,338 cars
while VWs German workforce increased from 8,719 to 78,000.12 During
Nordhoffs command, Volkswagen not only became a German household
name; the company from Wolfsburg and its main product also towered as
one of the most prominent, undisputed symbols of the West German postwar recovery, turning into what the weekly Der Spiegel called with only mild
mockery the German miracles favorite child.13
The city of Wolfsburg Volkswagens corporate headquarters to this day
loomed large in the Beetles iconography in the postwar years. Situated in
agrarian countryside less than ten miles west of the border with the GDR,
and previously known as City of the Strength-Through-Joy Car (Stadt des
KdF-Wagens), Wolfsburg gained its name from a nearby medieval castle
during the period of British administration. Since plans to accommodate
factory workers in a new model town had been halted in 1939, at the wars
end the place consisted mainly of a large, partly bombed-out factory building, numerous cramped barracks for forced labour and a few solid residential dwellings. As the post-war factory prospered and the population rose
(to 58,000 by 1958), a construction boom remedied dramatic housing
shortages and established an urban infrastructure.14
With its disproportionately large number of German refugees from eastern Europe, Wolfsburg struck visitors as emblematic of the wider social
reconstruction apparently underway in the early Federal Republic. Heinz
Todtmanns Kleiner Wagen auf groer Fahrt (Small Car on a Big Journey,
1949) was among the first publications to comment on Wolfsburg as a city
where people stranded from all areas and strata . . . made a virtue of necessity by creating a new type of community (Gemeinschaft) in which nothing
counts as much as achievement [Leistung]. Seeking to prove how serious
they are about thoroughly learning anew and rebuilding decently,
Todtmann went on, Wolfsburgs inhabitants embraced an ethos of achievement that provided the basis for a raw and roughly hewn . . . form of democracy born out of existential need and necessity.15 Although Todtmann
never specified what concept of democracy he had in mind, his assessment
that hard work turned Wolfsburg into a noteworthy social experiment
became a familiar theme in contemporary writing. The topic loomed
as large in Horst Monnichs novel Die Autostadt (The Car City, 1951), an
instant bestseller, which attracted Heinrich Nordhoffs praise for truths that

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lie deeper than the surface. Journalists too, expressed admiration for the
proud workers, who saw their chance in Wolfsburg and rolled up their
sleeves.16
Hard work and dedication, public consensus had it, put the company in a
position not only to prosper but also to offer its workforce safe jobs that,
from 1950 on, paid the highest wages and benefits in West Germany.17
Moreover, Volkswagens local taxes financed the transformation of a
temporary barrack settlement into a medium-sized city, whose inhabitants
enjoyed up-to-date infrastructure, state-of-the-art housing, new schools and
other amenities. In 1957, a conservative weekly pointed out that the company has done much for the well-being and the health of Wolfsburgs
inhabitants.18 Such accolades derived partly from tightly planned publicrelations initiatives, through which Volkswagen trumpeted its triumphs.
In 1955, the management ensured that no fewer than 1,200 journalists
were on site to cover the spectacular celebrations marking the production
of the one millionth Beetle. This extravaganza in honour of the economic
miracle [wirtschaftswunderbare Kostbarkeit], as one reporter put it, comprised three hours of performances, including ladies from the Moulin
Rouge in Paris, South African gospel choirs and Scottish female dancers,
before 100,000 spectators; it culminated in a lottery in which Nordhoff
magnanimously distributed fifty-one Beetles among the employees. An
address by Nordhoff concluded the festivities and ended characteristically
with a rallying cry for a new production target: And now on to the next
million!19
As a self-confident site of disciplined industrial production whose economic success under a patriarchal leader brought the workforce material
benefits and fuelled urban development, Wolfsburg and its factory provided
a social microcosm that rendered visible to contemporary observers what
West Germanys economics minister Ludwig Erhard termed the social
market economy. According to this concept, the states role was to establish
a political order that protected free enterprise, encouraged entrepreneurship
with a sense of social responsibility, expanded property ownership among
the wider population and put in place social safeguards for the weak.20
Despite its significance for economic politicians, for the wider public the
concept remained rather nebulous and enigmatic throughout most of the
1950s. Trends in Wolfsburg, however, demonstrated in concrete terms that
the boom did benefit citizens across the social spectrum, even as elsewhere
the new republic continued to suffer from persistent unemployment and
poverty into the second half of the 1950s. Volkswagen and Wolfsburg
offered not only an example of recovery but also a promise of future prosperity. Erhard himself did much to encourage this view. In the run-up to the
1957 Federal elections, for instance, he floated a highly popular scheme to
complement public ownership of Volkswagen with an issue of peoples
shares [Volksaktien] in order to spread co-ownership [of the company] to
the man in the street.21

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It was, of course, the car Wolfsburg produced that most potently embodied the promise of prosperity. In the 1950s, a prospect with an almost
utopian appeal began to appear on the horizon: universal car ownership.
The number of passenger cars in West Germany increased from 515,608 to
8,630,240 between 1950 and 1965. Demand from the middle classes, whose
real incomes doubled in the 1950s, was fuelling a process of mass motorization and signalled the beginnings of affluence, even if was it still limited by
material constraints.22 In 1956, for instance, vehicles costing under DM
5,000 made up almost two thirds of all new registrations.23 While a range
of automobiles including Borgwards Lloyd (DM 3,850), the Goggomobil
(DM 3,280) and BMWs bubble car Isetta (DM 3,890) conveyed, in Werner
Abelshausers words, the social well-being, . . . the sense of liberty . . . and the
social prestige of car ownership, no model even remotely approached
the popular Volkswagen, with its market share of over a third during the
1950s.24 At DM 4,600 the VW cost more than some of its competitors, but it
offered the best investment in the small-vehicle market. Test reports in the
West German automotive press consistently praised the car for combining
economy and power during operation, modernity in technical design, and
meticulous finishing. Requiring little maintenance and few repairs, the
Volkswagen was deemed the best car on the [German] market, because it
proved cheap to operate in the long term. Even when journalists admitted in
the second half of the 1950s that the Beetle was no longer the most modern
car they remained impressed by its economy and indestructibility.25
Beyond highlighting the financial strictures under which the German
economic miracle unfolded, the emphasis on the vehicles thrift and reliability developed wider cultural resonance. The Volkswagens success, argued
the company, reflected a normative framework that lent stability to
the postwar order. VW went to great lengths to position its product as
a measure of sobriety and solidity. Like industrial design products, the
Volkswagen exerted a strong appeal in West Germany because its plain
appearance contrasted starkly with National Socialisms brash promises
and the chaos of war.26 At the beginning of the 1950s Heinrich Nordhoff
maintained that a new landscape of desire stood behind the Volkswagens
rise to prominence. Forced to turn necessity into a virtue after the war, he
declared (resorting to Todtmanns phrase), people in Germany [had]
become realistic. Rather than the primitive which we came to despise the
more the accursed war forced it upon us, we revere the useful and serviceable
[das Nutzliche und Zweckmaige], the truly progressive.27 Detaching the
automobile from the Nazi era, Nordhoff linked his product to values like
moderation and utility, which, in his reading, dominated the culture of
the postwar era. Gute Fahrt (Safe Journey), VWs monthly magazine for
Volkswagen owners, took up this theme. It welcomed the postwar years
for restoring real values gradually to the place they deserved. The small
car from Wolfsburg appealed because of its consistency and trustworthiness. It was true to itself and to its friends, and so signalled

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a normalization of life.28 The Beetles virtues, according to VWs own

PR, thus stood for new, stable form of normality that ordinary people
could rely on.
The companys efforts to identify the Volkswagen with new peacetime
normality struck a chord among the wider population. Through its ubiquity,
the Beetle gave values like thrift and dependability a pervasive and visible
presence in West German culture. In the late 1950s, when journalists
declared the model technically dated and began lobbying Volkswagen for
a replacement, the citizens of the Federal Republic fervently defended it as
a much-loved token of stability.29 One aficionado used the most conventional idiom of loyalty and obedient companionship available to middleclass man: I like [my Volkswagen] like a dog on the street corner with its
faithful eyes.30 Such affection was rooted, as another devotee pointed out,
in the cars absolute dependability. How light-heartedly one drives it,
how strongly one trusts it! . . . This trustworthiness is a guarantee that
VW-drivers nerves will be spared as much stress as possible a very important consideration in our hectic times.31 Statements along these lines were
more than mere expressions of private attachment; they highlight what
Eckart Conze has termed a need for compensatory stability that ran
through many spheres of life in the early Federal Republic.32 The
Volkswagen was material proof that the achievements of the 1950s rested
on solid, reliable foundations.
That this automotive symbol of the postwar order had its origins in the
Third Reich was common knowledge. West Germans, however, held on to
a politically sanitized interpretation of Volkswagen in the Third Reich
which disconnected the car from National Socialist ideology, regarding it
as an unpolitical legacy of the immediate past. While journalists celebrated
the reliability and endurance of the so-called Kubelwagen, the military
vehicle based on the Beetle design which the VW works had mass-produced
during the war, they never mentioned the wartime abuse of forced labour
in Wolfsburg.33 Praise for the Kubel reflected a collective denial of the
Wehrmachts participation in atrocities and emphasized the supposedly
honourable conduct of the Germans on the battlefield.34 Beyond the
Kubelwagen the public conviction that the Volkswagen emerged untainted
from the Nazi era gained its strongest expression from the erstwhile members of the official Third Reich savings scheme who had paid up to 1,000
Reichsmark into a savings account administered by National Socialist
organization Strength Through Joy (Kraft durch Freude, or KdF). Of
course, the members of this scheme had never received a single vehicle.
Under the leadership of retired salesman and former party member Karl
Stolz, 40,000 of the VW-Savers (Volkswagensparer) set up an association to
demand compensation for their investment loss after the war. Although it
represented only a fraction of the more than 300,000 people who had joined
the scheme before 1945, the associations activities attracted considerable
interest for more than a decade.

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Fig. 3. In this 1956 ad Volkswagen presented the idea that the Beetle was a friendly,
faithful companion in highly gendered terms. Entitled His Better Half, the image
implied that this car stood by its man.

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In 1949 Stolz initiated what evolved into the young republics largest civil
suit, which by 1961 had generated no fewer than eight verdicts on all three
levels of the civil-court circuit. To press its case, the savers association
remained consistently silent about the vision of a classless national community of consumers that had ideologically underpinned the Volkswagen
project in the 1930s. Instead Stolz and his association insisted that joining
the NSDAP-run instalment scheme had not amounted to a political act.
Both members and non-members of the party, Stolz declared time and
again, had paid money into the scheme to secure a car: Drawing attention
to the political side is an irrelevance.35 Moreover, the association characterized its clientele as ordinary, average people. Most Volkswagen savers, Stolz
wrote, were industrious, hard-working and thrifty people from nonpropertied circles who had lost their hard-earned money.36 By placing
virtues such as thrift, hard work and self-denial in the foreground, the
association identified its members as apolitical savers who could see themselves as most badly deceived and blameless victims.37 Not even when Stolz
encouraged his followers to wear on their lapel small round badges which
combined black, silver and red did the similarity with the colour, shape and
placing of the former Nazi party badge trigger public comment on the
political leanings of VW-savers.38 As it strove to present its members as
apolitical, the savers association benefited from the position taken
by the Volkswagen works. The Volkswagen corporation, for obvious PR
reasons, did not emphasize the Nazi regimes role in founding the Wolfsburg
works, thereby leaving uncontested the political claims of the savers association. Notwithstanding their legal conflict, the savers and Volkswagen
inadvertently colluded to downplay the ideological contours of the
Volkswagen scheme in the Third Reich. Widespread consensus as to the
supposedly apolitical origins of the Volkswagen not only explains the positive public response to the substantial compensation won by the savers
in 1961;39 it also renders intelligible the ease with which the little car from
Wolfsburg turned into a symbol of postwar normality. For the Suddeutsche
Zeitung this automobile was an emblem of German diligence, reliability
and flexibility; it was not an object weighed down by ideological ballast.40
Only indirectly did a sense that National Socialism had left a problematic
moral legacy affect the Volkswagen as a postwar icon. As a result of mass
motorization, the number of people killed in road accidents in West
Germany rose from 8,800 to almost 13,000 between 1952 and 1956.41 The
ensuing discussion on the causes of this increase, which was to persist into
the mid 1970s, raised the question whether car owners could be trusted
to operate their vehicles responsibly or whether the state had the duty to
enforce road discipline through stringent traffic laws. The issue of traffic
regulation triggered controversies in parliament and press about the relationship between state, civil society and the individual, with strong historical
overtones. Since excessive speed was one of the most frequent source of
fatalities, speed restrictions were a sensitive topic and provoked a robust

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A GOOD GERMAN: THE BEETLE AS ICON OF EXPORT SUCCESS

If the Volkswagen functioned as an icon in the Federal Republic, it gained
this status not only for embodying the advent of postwar normality but
for leading an export drive that commanded domestic and international
attention. On the assumption that the West German market alone would
ultimately prove too small to support the Volkswagen corporation, general
director Heinrich Nordhoff took an early strategic decision to develop
sales abroad. The management had succeeded in turning the business

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lobby demanding free roads for free citizens. The introduction of speed
limits meant modifying a 1952 Federal Law that had removed restrictions
previously imposed by the Nazi regime to save fuel for the wartime economy. Re-establishing speed limits a process that began in 1957 reminded
at least one journalist of Nazi laws.42 Unsurprisingly, state officials were
deeply reluctant to advocate a political measure that recalled regulatory
practices of the Third Reich.
Moreover, comprehensive speed limits suggested that politicians had
doubts whether West German drivers possessed the character traits to
enjoy the freedom of the road. In the early 1950s, this topic was much on
peoples minds. German travellers returned from trips abroad impressed by
the courtesy with which drivers encountered each other elsewhere. Rather
than better roads, one passionate car lover wrote in 1953, the explanation
for lower accident rates was that the French driver is more polite and
considerate in the same way that the English driver is polite and considerate. German roads, by comparison, resembled wartime battlefields:
Whenever I take a journey, I feel as if Im off to the front. You never
know whether you will get back home safe and sound.43 In this reading
mass motorization revealed a deficit in civility among West Germans, who
continued to display behaviour they had supposedly learned in times of war.
Here, then, a moral legacy of the Third Reich was exposed. Suspicions about
the suitability of the national character for mass motorization re-surfaced as
late as the 1960s. Are Volkswagen drivers reckless [gemeingefahrlich]?
asked one journalist in 1963.44
Despite the Volkswagens paramount contribution to West German mass
motorization, its reputation did not suffer from the controversies about
traffic safety. After all, this debate centred on individual conduct. While
public exchanges might reveal unease about behavioural consequences of
the recent past, they never focused on the vehicles people drove. Since
automobiles safety features were not subject to public scrutiny, technical
flaws that contributed to hazards on the road did not come into view during
the 1950s. Car traffic was widely acknowledged as a pervasive public danger,
but contemporaries identified drivers rather than cars as its source. The
Volkswagen Beetle thus retained its aura as a friend with an unproblematic
pedigree whose reliability assured the West German public that good times
had come to stay.

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into an export concern by 1955, when annual international sales (177,657)

first overtook the number of vehicles delivered to the domestic market
(150,397).45 The United States became the most significant export destination. Annual Beetle sales in the US stood at a meagre 887 in 1953, but
by 1955 they had risen to about 32,000 and in 1959 they reached
120,422.46 By then, VW had secured the largest share of export vehicles
on the US market.
The success of this car with a Nazi past in a former enemy country within
a decade of the wars end had many causes. Attempts to sell the vehicle in
the United States immediately after the war had failed in part because of raw
memories of recent hostilities. In the early 1950s, Germanys status as a
former war enemy began to be replaced among American politicians and
the wider public, not least due to persistent public-relations efforts on
the part the government in Bonn, which ran an extensive visiting scheme
for US-journalists. West Germany came to be seen as a Cold-War ally first
and foremost, and a former dictatorship and adversary second.47 Once the
cultural hurdle of its Nazi pedigree had been surmounted, the car recommended itself through its quality, which Nordhoff had boosted in the late
1940s in particular to enhance VWs competitiveness in export markets.
At the beginning of the 1950s, his strategy began to pay off. In November
1951 Americas leading car magazine, Road and Track, praised the
deutschkraftwagen for its light weight and good balance [that] produced
road-holding gratifying the most fastidious. A year later, this magazine
found that it is difficult to attach negative criticism to the little
Volkswagen.48 The American public was equally taken with the engineering
that went into the car, because its quality saved owners from expensive
repairs. Together with a high resale value and a modest purchase price
($1,547 in 1956), the cars low maintenance costs added to the appeal.
And when their car did require an inspection or fixing, Volkswagen drivers
profited from Nordhoffs foresight in establishing a tight network of dealerships offering their services at comparatively moderate rates.
Here was a small, efficient, practical and cheap car and it entered a
boisterous postwar market. After decades of national austerity caused by the
Depression and prolonged by the Second World War, Americans were out
on a spending spree that lasted until the late 1950s. The auto sector was
particularly dynamic because the expansion of suburbs all over the USA
created additional demand for means of individual transport. The Beetle
proved particularly attractive among white middle-class families in the suburbs who required a handy, reliable and economical second car for everyday
use. Detroit targeted this market segment only in the late 1950s, when it
launched the so-called compact cars. While US-made compacts squeezed
out most other European competition, they matched the Beetle neither in
price nor quality. As a consequence, this German import managed to defend
and expand its position in the USA, reaching annual sales of 423,000 in
1968.49 In a market where far larger automobiles set the standard, part of

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the Beetles appeal derived from what American drivers considered its
unconventional oddity.50
The West German press followed the Beetles American progress closely.
German observers emphasized that the attributes of reliability and quality,
which had rendered the company a synonym for national recovery at home,
commanded respect in the USA, too. They repeatedly pointed out that
Americans praised the car for its dependability as well as its moderate
maintenance and repair costs.51 Reports along these lines construed the
cars appeal in the United States in terms that were eminently familiar to
German readers, implying that VWs dedication to hard work and high
production standards offered a promising example for returning Germany
to the international scene. These news items not only suggested to West
Germans that their culture shared crucial values with the United States in
the realm of consumption; it also showed them that Americans took their
new ally seriously because they valued the Beetle as a product of substance.
In fact, few developments provided better evidence to the West German
public of their countrys recovery than Volkswagens prominence on the
much-vaunted American market.
At the same time, German writers noted that Americans regarded the
Beetle as an unusual and peculiar vehicle a different car, a thing with zip
[Ding mit Pfiff].52 Its appeal among the technical and cultural intelligentsia
also caught their eye.53 The Beetles appeal in the middle class indicated two
things to German observers. First, the car made inroads into a socially
prestigious segment of the market. Second, its increasing presence on
American roads and highways resulted from its ability to attract discerning,
self-confident consumers. These people know who they are. They do not
need a big car to look like more than they are, a German provincial paper
pontificated.54 Rather than attracting drivers susceptible to hype, this reading implied, the car appealed to self-assured customers supposedly devoid of
status anxiety. These owners, German readers learned, loved their vehicles
despite the taunts about its size and shape that marked out the volks as a
slightly bizarre motor. Its reputation as mildly wacky also predisposed the
Beetle for lead roles in cults and pranks [Kult und Ulk], which German
journalists reported with bemusement.55
More than one subtext ran through accounts of the Beetle as an unorthodox quality product. One was that the Beetles humorous reception counteracted Germanys mixed reputation, persistently burdened by a dark
atmosphere of the uncanny [Ruch des Unheimlichen], as a leading weekly
magazine put it twenty years after the wars end.56 Another was pride in
having secured a prominent presence in everyday American culture through
a product that convinced through charm and unpretentiousness.
Satisfaction at achieving success through a smart, simple commodity went
hand in hand with a notably sober tone in German coverage. German criticisms of America as a car society of excess were very uncommon. Even rarer
were statements that played on the well-established stereotype of American

The Volkswagen Beetle

17

THE GERMANS GO OFF WITH THE MONEY WE HAVE

EARNED: VOLKSWAGEN IN MEXICO
If the Beetle owes its iconic status in the Federal Republic to sales abroad,
the car continues to sparkle in the German imagination because less

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cultural inferiority vis-a`-vis the Old World. The Spiegels claim in 1965 that
Americans were only now discovering the VW-feeling that the Germans
had long outgrown offered an exceptional insight into notions of German
cultural superiority.57 More representative was the storyline by a journalist
who dismissed as an exaggeration the management assertion that the Beetle
had become a part of America, and settled on the more modest claim that
one cannot imagine Americas roads without the Volkswagen. He thought
it was sufficient to say that the Beetle revives the somewhat faded shine of
the label Made in Germany.58 A reticent tone that steered clear of triumphalism marked the coverage of VWs strength in the American marketplace.
Since West Germans cherished the Volkswagen as a symbol of their
country, such comments did more than reflect upon the Beetle as an international commodity. They also helped to shape how Germans viewed their
own place in the world. In line with wider attempts to show that the Federal
Republic had rejected the fantasies of global domination that had motivated
the Nazis, German writers were reluctant to trumpet postwar international
achievement in triumphalist terms. The Beetle is a good German, an illustrated weekly magazine found, as it reflected on the reasons for the cars
worldwide proliferation.59 The reserved responses to the Beetles transatlantic popularity corresponded with the style of modesty that West German
diplomats abroad adopted from the 1950s.60 Beyond reassuring West
Germans that the Beetle projected an unthreatening international presence,
the car also suggested acceptance by the Federal Republic of a subordinate
position vis-a`-vis the United States. Delighted as he was to see a series of
Volkswagens speed across Times Square on a summer evening in 1965,
a German visitor reminded himself that VW had a market share of only
three per cent in the US, although the company exported one third of its
production across the Atlantic.61 Despite Americas economic importance
for VW, the article made it clear that the Beetle remained a niche product
across the Atlantic. As they acknowledged the USAs undisputed Western
leadership, observers from the Federal Republic assigned to the selfproclaimed export world-champion a secondary role in the world economy. Loveable, reliable, modest, unorthodox and small these antonyms of
Germanys previous behaviour in international affairs shone strongly
through reports about the Beetle in the United States. They signalled
how, despite their dynamic, rapid economic ascent, West Germans wished
to be perceived on the international stage. The Beetle, then, met a profound
desire to compensate for Germanys tarnished reputation in the world. By
analogy with the small car itself, the West German public imagined the
Federal Republic as a small country with strictly limited power.

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salubrious aspects of its product history have failed to leave an imprint on

public awareness. Like all symbols, the Beetle derives its symbolic salience as
much from what remains unsaid about it as from what is said. As we have
seen, motifs presenting the Beetle as endearing and harmless are central to
its iconography. Aggressive overtones are conspicuous by their absence in its
early public appearances. Beyond publicly detaching the vehicles origins
from National Socialist ideology, the marginalizing and downplaying of
Volkswagens increasing power in the global economy have effectively
cloaked the car in apparent harmlessness.
Thanks to profits from its best-known product, Volkswagen developed
into a major international automotive player from the late 1950s. While in
the United States it did not rise from the secondary level, it established
dominance in many a significant emerging market. In Mexico, as in some
other countries, strong Beetle sales enabled VW to gain and defend a leading
position from the 1970s to 1990s. Here Volkswagen was by no means an
underdog. Moreover, its Mexican production site in Puebla has steadily
gained prominence in Volkswagens global corporate strategy since the
1970s. After Wolfsburg began to make the Golf in the mid 1970s, Puebla
gradually became the main plant manufacturing the Beetle. While VW
maintained Beetle production in Mexico until 2003, some of its business
and management practices were distinctly aggressive. But if the contentious
nature of Volkswagens Mexican operations had the potential to mar the
Beetles image as a friendly machine, it left not a scratch on the cars iconic
body in West Germany.
Volkswagen entered the Mexican market through a subsidiary in 1954
and opened a comprehensive production plant for Beetles in Puebla in 1967.
The company invested more than DM 330 million in this Central American
nation because, with growth rates averaging over seven per cent between
1963 and 1971, Mexico was seen to be pursuing a highly promising development strategy.62 Praising the country for political stability and steady
economic growth, the German press went so far as to label Mexico the
Japan of Latin America in 1966.63 This positive coverage reflected wider
optimistic assessments of the economic policies initiated by the government
of the left-leaning Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional
Revolutionary Party, PRI) from the 1950s. The PRI pursued a strategy of
import-substituting industrialization that, beyond strengthening the agrarian sector through land reform, aimed to establish a dynamic manufacturing
sector behind high tariff walls so as to reduce dependence on foreign
imports.64 Mexican officials identified the auto sector as a key industry
for their developmental drive, decreeing in 1962 that car manufacturers
must produce at least sixty per cent of the parts for their vehicles locally
if they wished to maintain their sales presence in the country. To secure
a foothold in what it deemed a lucrative future market, VW erected in
Puebla a sizeable production plant featuring a training centre, a foundry,
a paintshop and assembly lines which by the early 1970s employed between

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8,000 and 12,000 workers.65 The Beetle became Mexicos leading car with
a market share rising from twenty-five to thirty-two per cent between the
late 1960s and early 1970s. While German diplomats and VWs managers
were delighted that this product enjoyed exceptional popularity, executives
in Wolfsburg criticized Puebla for low productivity and agonized over the
plants losses in the early 1970s.66
Beyond an expanding market, a cheap workforce as well as employerfriendly legal arrangements for industrial relations attracted Volkswagen to
Mexico. The PRI, which all but monopolized state power between 1946 and
2000, exerted extensive influence over industrial relations through its trade
union arm, the Confederacion de Trabajadores Mexicanos (Confederation of
Mexican Workers). This proved particularly important during conflicts over
pay and labour conditions. If disagreements between workers and employers
could not be resolved, they were referred to an arbitration board under the
authority of the Ministry of Labour, which tended to rule in employers
favour. In the early 1970s, however, this system of industrial relations
broke down amid protests by assembly-line workers in Puebla who charged
trade-union officials with indifference to their concerns, collusion with the
management and corruption. Against this background VW workers set up
one of the countrys few independent trade unions, defending their strengthened bargaining position throughout a series of severe economic crises which
threw Mexico into turmoil during the Eighties.67 As production of the
Beetle continued into the new millennium, industrial relations at the plant
remained tense. Although locals considered themselves lucky to secure work
at VW in Puebla, comparatively high wages and benefits did not prevent
repeated conflict.68 As part of its strategy to integrate global manufacturing
operations more closely, Volkswagen sought to introduce organizational
changes in work processes aimed at raising productivity in Puebla from
levels that had stayed below international norms all through the 1980s.
Moreover, the management strove to cut the wage and benefits bill. In an
economic environment where levels of annual inflation periodically exceeded
140 per cent, such measures predictably triggered industrial strife that
culminated in lengthy strikes, violent protests, and mass redundancies.
Despite their recurrent and protracted nature, the clashes between
Volkswagen and its Mexican workers remained marginal and even opaque
in the mainstream media of the Federal Republic. When employers
and workers in Puebla began to thrash out a wage settlement after more
than seven weeks of work stoppages in the summer of 1987, the leading
conservative-liberal daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) chose to
report that the management had predictably rejected demands for wage
increases of 100%. The company had now tabled an offer of thirty per cent,
the article went on, while the trade union had lowered its negotiating position to seventy per cent. Within a German context such figures were bound
to appear excessive, but the account failed to point out that annual inflation
in Mexico was running at 120 per cent. The claim in the articles concluding

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paragraph that VW headquarters in Wolfsburg had begun to criticize local

managers for their headstrong tactics received no further explanation.69
This report displayed as little interest in workers living and employment
conditions as did a piece five years later informing German readers that,
in reaction to a minority wildcat strike, the local management had locked
out all 14,000 employees with the aim of making them redundant.70 FAZ
coverage of events in Puebla thus provided little context.
Readers seeking to understand the local dynamics between management
and workers in Puebla had to turn to tageszeitung, a left-leaning daily
sympathetic to economic critiques of neocolonialism. This publication
pointed out in 1987 that the management had opened negotiations with
demands for a fifteen per cent pay cut despite high inflation and annual
profits of DM 200 million. Personnel costs, the report added, amounted to
no more than ten per cent of overall expenditure, not least since average
daily wages stood at a mere DM 12.71 The newspaper also emphasized
that the sense of frustration behind protest actions like the blocking of a
motorway and threats to occupy VW showrooms extended beyond issues of
pay.72 Lack of protective clothing such as leather gloves as well as VWs
unwillingness to provide affordable daycare for children were among
workers grievances.73 When the paper related VWs conduct in Puebla to
employment standards in the Federal Republic, the company emerged in a
distinctly unflattering light. While a manager stated that wages and benefits
in Puebla were twice as high as at other Mexican car plants, tageszeitung
relativized this assertion by commenting that VWs Mexican workers earned
less per day than West German VW-workers in an hour.74 Moreover,
the companys decision in the summer of 1992 to fire its entire workforce
of 14,000 was a measure whose ruthlessness was inconceivable in German
enterprises.75 Interviews with employees revealed considerable distrust of
the German management. One female assembly-line worker summed up her
view of the situation in the following manner: The Germans supposedly
come to teach us something but in reality they just go off with the money we
have earned.76
Tense industrial relations in Puebla received no mention during President
Weizsackers state visit to Mexico in November 1992. When Weizsacker
toured the companys production site as an example of German-Mexican
co-operation, reporters stereotypically proclaimed relations between both
countries to be as cloudless as the sky over Mexico.77 That German criticism
of Volkswagens business practices in the late 1980s and early 1990s emerged
only in a newspaper harbouring suspicions about global capitalism as
a matter of principle is not particularly surprising. However, silence on
this topic in the mainstream media indirectly stabilized the Beetle as an
icon in Germany. Large parts of the German public remained unaware
that VWs Latin American operations relied on methods that were within
Mexican law but would have been entirely illegal in the Federal Republic.
While ignorance about its practices abroad protected the companys

The Volkswagen Beetle

21

domestic reputation as an exemplary employer, silence about animosity

between workers and employers at its Mexican production site shielded
the Beetle itself from blemish. Reports of conflict-ridden industrial
relations could have tarnished the product with the stigma of exploitation.
As a result of silence about developments in Mexico, the Beetle retained its
iconic shine.

Germany has become unfaithful to itself. For a long time, we have

neglected the recipe of success that brought the Federal Republic optimism and affluence, stability and prestige after the war. Those were times
when no one yet spoke of globalization, but the Beetle ran all over the
world and ran and ran and ran. At that time, the Federal Republic was
characterized by an order that encouraged achievement and social
progress.80

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CONCLUSION: OF BEETLES AND LOCUSTS

Of course, it would be wrong to attribute the Beetles persistent prominence
in the Federal Republic solely to wilful media neglect of Volkswagens
strong-arm tactics in Mexico. The decision to concentrate Beetle production
in Mexico in 1978 had already taken the car out of the West German limelight, and company practices in Mexico were on the whole of little interest to
the German media. Transfer of Beetle production to Puebla came on the
heels of a profound crisis at Wolfsburg which culminated in mass lay-offs; it
also coincided with the onset of the Oil Crisis, the rise of environmental
concerns and long-term mass unemployment.78 As its production in
Germany ceased, the Beetle began to seem like a thing of the past, from a
time when expansion and full employment had characterized the Federal
Republic. The commercial success of the Beetles successor, the new Golf
model, underscored this break. Of course, the Golf was no symbol of a
country in crisis. On the contrary, it gained such prominence in the 1980s
that, by the turn of the millennium, a witty best-seller by Florian Ilies
declared its authors membership of generation Golf, an age cohort born
between 1965 and 1975 which grew up in a country allegedly as boringly
stable as the Beetles successor.79 More expensive, safer and faster than the
Beetle, the Golf became the transport of the prosperous, economically
secure middle class in a Federal Republic in which consumerism developed
dynamically as mass joblessness persisted and grew especially among
manual workers. The Golf, then, stood for a rich country with recalcitrant
problems in its labour market.
In (re-)united Germany, the Beetle has come to be regarded as a
historical commodity which nonetheless holds important lessons for the
present. During hot debates about welfare reforms in 2005, President
Horst Kohler weighed in with a speech that opened on the following
note:

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Part of a chorus demanding welfare cuts, Kohlers speech encouraged

workers and employees to become more like the undemanding, reliable
and tough Beetle in order to build a better future on the virtues of
the past. In effect, the President praised the little car as a role model to
recapture past growth and make the Federal Republic again what it once
had been.
Kohlers address highlights both explicit and tacit assumptions that
continue to lend the Beetle public prominence in the Federal Republic.
To begin with, this automobile retains its status as an embodiment of the
qualities that supposedly made a successful postwar order. As a result of
its cheapness, robustness and dependability, the vehicle emerged soon
after 1945 as a symbol of a reliable postwar normality characterized by
increasing prosperity. As an unpretentious product, it spoke of the solidity of a public order that satisfied consumer demands that had been
illusory before 1945. While the Beetle became a postwar icon partly
because the Federal Republic, in advancing mass motorization, fulfilled
what had remained an empty dream under the Nazis, it gained a stable,
lasting association with normality during the Federal Republics consolidation phase. Due to its rise to fame in a period of expanding prosperity
and full employment, the car also evokes a benign chapter of Western
capitalism. As a symbol of postwar normality, the Beetle continues to
hold up to the German public a socio-economic promise from the past
that, since the advent of mass unemployment in the mid 1970s, has
remained frustrated for decades. Yet German speakers who extol the
car as a role model overlook the fact that the Beetles success unfolded
under atypical circumstances, which are highly unlikely to return. Many
Germans refuse to acknowledge that, as the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler
has noted, the quadrupling of average earnings between 1950 and 1973
occurred in an absolutely exceptional situation in modern global economic history.81 As it derives much of its symbolic energy from a
desire for a normality that evolved in an altogether unusual phase in
history, the Beetle combines both nostalgic and utopian dimensions
nostalgic because it indirectly speaks of lost social prospects and utopian
because it refuses to accept this loss.
That similar tensions run through the Beetle as a symbol of Germanys
place in the world is borne out by Kohlers remark that no one spoke of
globalization in the cars heyday. At the height of the export miracle in
the 1950s and 1960s, West Germans considered the Beetle their unofficial
representative on the international scene. The sympathy which greeted
the car abroad signalled to them that the Federal Republic had gained
acceptance within an international, American-led order that assigned their
country a secondary role. While no one may have talked of globalization
at the time, the process subsequently labelled as such was already in full
flow, and among its main beneficiaries and promoters were West Germany
and its corporations. The circumstance that Volkswagen developed into

The Volkswagen Beetle

23

Bernhard Rieger teaches in the History Department at University College

London. He is the author of Technology and the Culture of Modernity in
Britain and Germany, 18901945 (CUP, 2005). His research interests include
the cultural history of technology, the history of memory, postwar
Germany, and transnational history. He is currently working on a book
tentatively entitled The Peoples Car: a Global History of the
Volkswagen Beetle that places the car in German, British, US-American
and Mexican contexts.

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a powerful multinational company with production sites in Latin America

left no imprint on the Beetles iconography in Germany, however. Put
differently, the car conveys none of the ways in which, beyond developing
exports, German companies (and the government) have contributed to the
shaping of a global economy. Neither does the car speak of the considerable power Volkswagen can wield in global markets. The Beetle is thus
well suited to portray the Federal Republic as mostly a passive bystander
rather than an active champion of globalization. Many observers have
recently taken this self-characterization one step further by painting their
country as a prey of global economic developments. A storm of approval,
for instance, met Social Democrat Franz Muntefering in 2005 when he
denounced foreign investors as locusts that descended upon German companies like a biblical plague, leaving behind them ruin and despair in the
form of unemployment.82 These depictions of the export world champion
as a helpless victim of foreign financial invaders take up messages which
the Beetle has conveyed for decades. As a picture of international economic innocence, this car does not disturb the self-image of the Federal
Republic as a secondary country which refuses to flex its muscle on the
international scene but owes its global presence to hard work and a dedication to quality.
The Beetle still carries many of the meanings that first turned it into an
icon in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. It retains its association
with quality and durability, conveys prospects of socio-economic expansion and underpins portrayals of unified Germany as a minor international player. Beyond its sales figures, there appears little that is
exceptional about the vehicle and that is exactly the source of its continuing appeal. As a symbol of postwar normality, it conveys a very
flattering picture of Germany: peaceful, likeable and small. Its lasting
prominence as a national symbol illustrates how far the German public
has detached itself from the power fantasies of the twentieth centurys first
half. At the same time, its continuing appeal also speaks of the difficulties
Germans encounter in acknowledging prominent features of the present
they inhabit, namely accepting life in a unified nation that, despite mass
unemployment, exerts considerable international economic power. When
they think of the Beetle, Germans have no need to ponder these aspects of
normality.

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NOTES AND REFERENCES

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I would like to thank the British Academy for funding the research for this article. I am also
grateful for constructive suggestions and help from Elizabeth Buettner, Martin Geyer, Huberto
Juarez Nunez, Friedrich Kieling, Ethan Kleinberg and Johannes Paulmann as well as from
seminar audiences in Munich, Cambridge, Middletown, CT and Tubingen.
1 Suddeutsche Zeitung, 12/13 July 2008, p. 14.
2 Approaches to the historical study of material culture are discussed in Leora Auslander,
Beyond Words, American Historical Review 110, 2005; Harvey Molotch, Where Stuff Comes
From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computer and Many Other Things Come to Be As They Are,
New York, 2003; The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun
Appadurai, Cambridge, 1986.
3 Hans Mommsen, Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich, Dusseldorf,
1997.
4 Curiously, the essay by Erhard Schutz barely touches on this issue. See Erhard Schutz,
Der Volkswagen, in Deutsche Erinnerungsorte: Eine Auswahl, ed. Hagen Schulze, Etienne
Francois, Munich, 2005.
5 Heinz Todtmann and Alfred Trischler, Kleiner Wagen auf groer Fahrt (Offenburg,
1949), Bielefeld, 2002, p. 5.
6 Stefan Aust, Claus Richter, Fall Deutschland, Spiegel-TV Spezial, aired on VOX on
20 August 2005. The programme served to promote a bestseller on German decline by a
Spiegel journalist: Gabor Steingart, Deutschland: Der Abstieg eines Superstars, Munich, 2005.
Earlier commentary explicitly construing Wolfsburg and the Volkswagen as emblems of West
Germany included a multi-part series in Der Spiegel running in May and June 1950;
Suddeutsche Zeitung, 29 March 1960.
7 Important works on this include Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: the Search for a
Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany, Berkeley, 2001; Peter Reichel,
Vergangenheitsbewaltigung in Deutschland: Die Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Diktatur von
1945 bis 1945, Munich, 2001.
8 For promising explorations along these lines, see Alon Confino, Traveling as a Culture
of Remembrance: Traces of National Socialism in West Germany, 19451960, in Germany as a
Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History, Chapel Hill, 2006. For
reflections on continuities in the context of popular culture, see Konrad H. Jarausch and
Michael Geyer, Shattered Past: Reconstructing German Histories, Princeton, 2003.
9 Gerhard Schreiber, Una historia sin fin, Puebla, 1998, p. 395.
10 On the immediate postwar years, see Steven Tolliday, Enterprise and State in the West
German Wirtschaftswunder: Volkswagen and the Automobile Industry, 19391962, Business
History Review 69, 1995. Tolliday notes that the factory in Wolfsburg was more than
three times as large as Britains most sizeable works, in Longbridge. On the early postwar
years, see also Markus Lupa, Das Werk der Briten: Volkswagenwerk und Besatzungsmacht,
19451949, Wolfsburg, 2005; Ralf Richter, Ivan Hirst: Britischer Offizier und Manager des
Volkswagenaufbaus, Wolfsburg, 2003.
11 Tolliday, Enterprise and State, p. 329.
12 These figures are from Volkswagen Chronik, ed. Manfred Grieger, Wolfsburg, 2004,
pp. 21, 63.
13 Der Spiegel, 18 Feb. 1959, p. 47. See also The Times (London), 21 Oct. 1959; La Liberte,
11 March 1960.
14 For the figure, see Stuttgarter Zeitung, 8 Dec. 1959.
15 Todtmann, Kleiner Wagen, p. 52.
16 The quote is from Lubecker Nachrichten, 17 Sept. 1950. Horst Monnich, Die Autotstadt,
Munich and Vienna, 1951. For Nordhoffs assessment, see Volkswagen AG, Werksarchiv
(hereafter VWA), file 319/10226, VW-Informationen: Mitteilungsblatt fur die VWOrganisation, November 1951, p. 56.
17 Tolliday, Enterprise and State 319.
18 Christ und Welt, 11 July 1957. Other articles full of admiration for Wolfsburg appeared
in Stuttgarter Zeitung, 30 June 1956; Die Welt, 11 April 1957.
19 For admiring coverage, see Der Spiegel, 19 Aug. 1955, pp. 1617. See also Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 8 Aug. 1955; Hannoversche Presse, 8 Aug. 1955.

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20 For a good discussion of the concept and its origins before 1945, see Anthony J. Nicholls,
Freedom with Responsibility: the Social Market Economy in Germany, 19181963, Oxford, 1994.
A brief outline of the concepts social dimension can be found in Werner Abelshauser, Deutsche
Wirtschaftsgeschichte seit 1945, Munich, 2004, pp. 1904. On the limits of consumerism in the
1950s, see Arnold Sywottek, From Starvation to Excess? Trends in the Consumer Society from
the 1940s to the 1970s, in The Miracle Years: a Cultural History of West Germany, 19491968,
ed. Hanna Schissler, Princeton, 2001, esp. pp. 34551.
21 Der Spiegel, 20 Feb. 1957, p. 27. On the peoples shares see Nicholls, Freedom with
Responsibility, pp. 3578; Heidrun Edelmann, Heinz Nordhoff und Volkswagen: ein deutscher
Unternehmer im amerikanischen Jahrhundert, Gottingen, 2003, pp. 22641.
22 Statistisches Jahrbuch fur die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1952, Wiesbaden, 1952, p. 299;
Statistisches Jahrbuch fur die Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1966, Stuttgart, 1966, p. 365.
23 The exact percentage was sixty-four according to statistics of new registrations in Auto,
Motor und Sport, 8 June 1957, p. 30.
24 Abelshauser, Deutsche Wirtschaftsgeschichte seit 1945, p. 338; Edelmann, Heinz
Nordhoff und Volkswagen, pp. 129, 231.
25 The quotes are from Auto Motor und Sport 19, 1951, p. 649; 3, 1953, p. 84; 21, 1957,
pp. 13, 14. Praise for the cars reliability also permeated the daily press: see Suddeutsche
Zeitung, 8 Aug. 1958; Rheinischer Merkur, 4 March 1960.
26 Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: a Cultural History of West German
Industrial Design, Berkeley, 2004.
27 Gute Fahrt 1, 1951, p. 16.
28 Gute Fahrt 9, 1952, p. 3.
29 For an articulation of this criticism, see Der Spiegel, 30 Sept. 1959, pp. 4058.
30 Der Spiegel, 7 Oct. 1959, p. 12. See also Der Spiegel, 14 Oct. 1959, p. 16.
31 Auto Motor und Sport 21, 1957, p. 14.
32 Eckart Conze, Sicherheit als Kultur: Uberlegungen zu einer modernen
Politikgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Vierteljahreshefte fur Zeitgeschichte 53,
2005, p. 366.
33 Wolfsburg delivered 37,320 Kubelwagen during the war. For postwar praise, see Der
Spiegel, 18 May 1950, p. 24; Industriekurier, 23 June 1959.
34 On this issue see Thomas Kuhne, Zwischen Vernichtungskrieg und Freizeitgesellschaft:
Die Veteranenkultur in der Bundesrepublik (19451995) in Nachkrieg in Deutschland, ed. Klaus
Naumann, Hamburg, 2001; James M. Diehl, The Thanks of the Fatherland: German Veterans
After the Second World War, Chapel Hill, 1993.
35 Bundesarchiv Koblenz (hereafter BAK), file B 133 vorl./24, Rudolf Meichsner,
Rundschreiben, copy, Berlin, n.d. [1948/9], p. 1.
36 BAK, file B 133 vorl./11, enclosure to letter, Karl Stolz to Werner Jacobi, 11 Sept. 1948,
4. Ten years later, he pursued the same line of argument in Deutsche Zeitung, 19 Feb. 1958.
37 BAK, file B 133 vorl./11, enclosure to letter, Karl Stolz to Werner Jacobi, 11 Sept. 1948,
p. 12.
38 BAK, file B 133 vorl./24, Rundschreiben Nr. 61, Erlinghausen, 5 Nov. 1952.
39 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17 Oct. 1961; Mannheimer Morgen, 17 Oct. 1961;
Deutsche Zeitung, 17 Oct. 1961; Rhein-Koblenz-Zeitung, 17 Oct. 1961.
40 Suddeutsche Zeitung, 29 March 1960.
41 Dietmar Klenke, Bundesdeutsche Verkehrspolitik und Motorisierung: Konflikttrachtige
Weichenstellungen in den Jahren des Wiederaufstiegs, Stuttgart, 1993, p. 356.
42 Der Spiegel, 17 Oct. 1956, p. 25.
43 Both quotes are from Carl Otto Windecker, Besinnliches Autobuch. Eine gedruckte
Liebeserklarung, Bielefeld, 1953, pp. 75, 77. See also Martin Beheim-Schwarzbach, Der geolte
Blitz: Aus den Aufzeichnungen eines Volkswagens, Hamburg, 1953, p. 37.
44 Gute Fahrt 11, 1963, p. 12. See also Der Spiegel, 28 Oct. 1964, pp. 6572.
45 Grieger, Volkswagen Chronik, p. 43.
46 Henry Walter Nelson, Small Wonder: the Amazing Story of the Volkswagen Beetle
Boston, 1970, p. 357.
47 Important changes in German-American relations are documented in The United States
and Germany in the Cold War, 19451990: a Handbook: Vol. 1: 19451968, ed. Detlev Junker,
Cambridge, 2004.

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48 Road and Track, November 1951, p. 5; December 1952, p. 6.

49 Nelson, Small Wonder, p. 357.
50 A brief outline of the Beetles success in the US can be found in Tom McCarthy, Auto
Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment, New Haven, 2007, pp. 1314.
51 Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, 13 July 1963. See also Handelsblatt, 12/13 July 1963;
Frankfurter Rundschau, 9 July 1963.
52 Der Spiegel, 10 Aug. 1955, p. 19. This aspect still received mention in the 1960s. See Der
Spiegel, 17 Jan. 1966, p. 47.
53 Der Spiegel, 28 May 1958, p. 54.
54 Hessische Nachrichten, 24 July 1957; Schwabische Landeszeitung, 6 April 1957.
55 Der Spiegel, 26 May 1965, p. 125.
56 Der Spiegel, 22 July 1964, p. 37. See also Frankfurter Neue Presse, 22 Oct. 1962.
57 Der Spiegel, 22 July 1964, p. 125.
58 Christ und die Welt, 19 July 1963.
59 Quick, 22 January 1967, p. 45.
60 Style of modesty refers to the term Haltung der Zuruckhaltung that characterized
German foreign policy during the Cold War according to Johannes Paulmann, Deutschland
in der Welt: Auswartige Reprasentation und reflexive Selbstwahrnehmung nach dem 2.
Weltkrieg eine Skizze, in Koordinaten deutscher Geschichte in der Epoche des Ost-West
Konflikts, ed. Hans-Gunther Hockerts, Munich, 2004, pp. 6378.
61 Die Zeit, 11 June 1965.
62 The investment figure is in Tagesspiegel, 22 Nov. 1966.
63 Welt, 22 Nov. 1966.
64 For a brief summary of ISI see Jeffry Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the
Twentieth Century, New York, 2006, pp. 3036. For two contrary Mexican interpretations,
see Enrique Cardenas, La poltica economica en Mexico, 19501994, Mexico City, 1996; Elsa
M. Gracida, El desarollismo, Mexico City, 2004.
65 For the employment figure, see Huberto Juarez Nunez, Global Production and Worker
Response: the Struggle at Volkswagen of Mexico, WorkingUSA 9, 2006, p. 10.
66 On the market share, see VWA, file 174/640/1, Interne Mitteilung, Monatlicher
Bericht Consejo Ejecutivo, 2 April 1970; file 174/641/2, Marketing Plan, Volkswagen de
Mexico 1972, p. 18. On losses, see VWA, file 174/640/2, Bericht Nr. 91 uber die Prufung
der Volkswagen de Mexico, 30 Sept. 1969. On the cars popularity, see VWA, file 69/826/2,
minutes, Verwaltungsrat der Volkswagen de Mexico, 7 Feb. 1968, p. 1; Politisches Archiv
Auswartiges Amt, Berlin, file B65-IIIB4-375, Wirtschaftlicher Jahresbericht 1967, p. 15.
67 Yolanda Montiel, Proceso de trabajo, accion sindical y nuevas tecnologias en Volkswagen
de Mexico, Mexico City, 1991, 157178; Nunez, Global Production, pp. 911.
68 Montiel, Proceso, p. 82.
69 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 Aug. 1987.
70 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 30 July 1992.
71 tageszeitung, 11 Aug. 1987.
72 tageszeitung, 14 Aug. 1987.
73 tageszeitung, 11 Aug. 1987. The lack of leather gloves is also mentioned in Montiel,
Proceso, p. 60.
74 tageszeitung, 12 Aug. 1987.
75 tageszeitung, 21 Aug. 1992.
76 tageszeitung, 11 Aug. 1987.
77 Tagesspiegel, 25 Nov. 1992. See also Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 Nov. 1992;
Welt am Sonntag, 22 Nov. 1992.
78 On the 1970s as a turning point in the history of the Federal Republic, see Anselm
Doering-Manteuffel and Lutz Raphael, Nach dem Boom: Perspektive auf die Zeitgeschichte seit
1970, Gottingen, 2008; Das Ende der Zuversicht? Die siebziger Jahre als Geschichte, ed. Konrad
H. Jarausch, Gottingen, 2008.
79 Florian Ilies, Generation Golf. Eine Inspektion, Berlin, 2000.
80 Horst Kohler, Die Ordnung der Freiheit, delivered 15 March 2005, accessed 7 Aug.
2007 under www.bundespraesident.de/Reden-und-Interviews/.
81 Suddeutsche Zeitung, 12/13 July 2008, p. 14.
82 Bild am Sonntag, 17 April 2005.