Thinking Small (26 page)

But if the Jewish people knew how other Jews were being treated, how could they bear to stay? To ask that question in hindsight is to have no right to ask it at all. Home is a word so close to the heart that it can transcend reason. Sometimes propelling yourself into a frightening and foreign landscape—especially when there is no clear place to go—and leaving all you’ve ever known, looks worse than suffering the possibilities of what might come by
staying. One cannot underestimate the connection humanity feels between individual identity and a particular geographical place. As Ranicki continues:

This is something that perhaps many of us can understand. Even if one disagrees with the politics and practices of one’s country, one still has faith in the overall place, and one can’t help but believe that things will take a turn for the better, somehow.

By all accounts, when war broke out, Ferdinand Porsche was in a state of shock. He had not believed the war would come, even though, in the Volkswagen town and factory, there had been numerous red flags. The elite housing of the Steimker Berg—the first area finished, and the one where the Nazi officials were to live—came equipped with reinforced basements in case of air raids, and bunkers had been added for the same reason. In addition, the Volkswagen
factory’s floors and walls had been specifically reinforced with heavy concrete at a great deal of extra
time and cost in order that they would be able to withstand bombing.

Even so, at the VW factory, Ferdinand was certainly not the only man stunned when the Second World War began. The factory itself had no specific war plan, and none of the major players in the town had ever discussed what they would do in the case of a war: Their only concern was with building People’s Cars. All the design, all the construction, all the plans for housing, all the relocations, all the hiring, all the money that had gone into the factory—all
of this stalled now as Nazi officers tried to figure out what to do with the place. For the first year or so of the war, up until 1940, it was more or less idle—everyone approached each day with the sense that the war would end soon and the hope that any day now they’d start making cars. Then, the German armaments department began to pressure the factory into doing small tasks for the military, simple things like fixing old vehicles or producing needed parts. But as the
war continued, that pressure grew greater. Soon the factory was on the verge of being an armaments plant.

Porsche was furious about this upheaval, and was not afraid to make that fact known. He refused to cooperate when he was told that the factory’s assembly lines needed to be rearranged to better aid the production of armaments. When a Nazi general came to visit him to talk about these new plans, suggesting that perhaps Porsche could dismantle the lines meant to make People’s Car parts and hide them in the woods nearby—Ferdinand exploded. He often
threw his hat on the ground and stomped on it when he was mad, but this time he was too angry even for that. He simply refused to deal with the man, demanding to speak to no one but Hitler himself. Eventually he took one of his cars out to Hitler’s Obersalzberg retreat in the Alps.

Until that moment, Hitler and Porsche had not discussed the war, though it wouldn’t be long before the two of them would be meeting to talk about military vehicles and tanks. Still, in 1940, Hitler continued to give Porsche the impression that the war would be a quick one and that it would not disrupt
all the Volkswagen plans they had made together. Perhaps Hitler was simply trying to please Porsche, or perhaps he really believed that idea
himself; perhaps he didn’t expect the war would hinder Volkswagen production or stop them from following through on their plans. In any case, on the day Porsche visited him in the mountain retreat at Obersalzberg, Porsche reportedly asked:
What am I supposed to be building? A car for peace or a car for war?

I believe we’ve only ever discussed the Volkswagen together,
Hitler said.

Porsche:
So I can assume that this plant is being built only for the Volkswagen?

I gave you the assignment for the Volkswagen!
Hitler reiterated.
Everything else follows from that!

The exact words of their conversation
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are unknown, of course, though the above is reportedly what Porsche related upon his return. In any case, Porsche was satisfied after his impromptu meeting with Hitler. He zoomed back to the factory and told all the Nazi generals there to go and see Hitler in Obersalzberg themselves if they had a problem: They were only to
build Volkswagens in this town.

In the nineteenth century,
when German-speaking tribes, kingdoms, and states united as an empire under one flag, Prussian war generals interpreted their new imperial colors—three long bars of red, black, and white—using the saying
“Durch Nacht und Blut zur Licht,”
“Through night and blood
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to light.” Night was falling in Europe. And too much blood would be spilled before it grew light again.

With Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and the subsequent Allied declaration of war, President Roosevelt
immediately called a meeting with his cabinet and the country’s top military advisors to discuss the United States’ position. On September 3, his voice streamed through the air: “Until four-thirty this morning,”
²
he said, “I had hoped against hope that some miracle would prevent a devastating war in Europe and bring an end to the invasion of Poland by Germany.” That miracle hadn’t come. So what was America to do? The horrors of the First World War had not been forgotten, and Congress had recently passed the Neutrality Act saying war would never again happen unless it was to defend a threat to America’s own soil. The act had been signed into law in 1936, and renewed and strengthened in subsequent years. Now, in 1939, Roosevelt and many in Washington’s conservative Congress were determined to stick to that pact and not get involved.

According to a military poll taken at the time, 94 percent of Americans were against entering the Second World War. This time no slogans of “making the world safe for democracy” were going to work, and yet it was exactly the idea of democracy that was under threat. As much as any Western nation might have wanted to be neutral, separating itself from Europe was no longer a true political or economic choice. Markets and nations were intertwined, and what hurt Europe eventually hurt America. And if Europe fell into the hands of a dictator, the consequences felt in America would indeed be vast. This was not as easy to see in 1939, however, and Roosevelt and his advisors hoped that by staying out of the war they would benefit from the needs and increased demands of Europe’s wartime economy without having to get directly involved or risking American lives.

The United States was in the midst of its own fierce inner conflicts at the time after all, and those conflicts were largely taking place through the medium of mass communication. Likewise, the new balance of power in Europe was in large part due to innovations in mass communication. Hitler made that clear. As Marshall McLuhan wrote in
The Mechanical Bride
: “That Hitler came into political existence
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at all is directly owing to
radio and public-address systems …” Hitler’s power was his voice and the image he presented, and radio and print made it possible for Germans to hear that voice, to experience collective images and rallying cries. The blurring between real news and “news as entertainment,” and between public relations and persuasion and manipulation, made it a confusing time to form a true opinion. In the States, this blurred communication battle was one between the government and private enterprise, not a new battle but a battle that had new tools. The Depression had weakened people’s belief in capitalism and the products being sold, and because programs like the New Deal had put the economy into government hands, those businesses now found themselves trying to “win back” the public at large.

Corporations wanted to restore consumer confidence in buying and selling again, which was something the government was also trying to do, but neither side understood that they were on the same team. Corporations made commercials warning of the perils of Big Government; members of the government warned of the perils of Big Business (sometimes also called Big Money and caricatured by men like Huey Long as “corrupt oil giants and millionaires”). It wasn’t as simple as the Democrats (represented by Roosevelt) being against oil executives and rich capitalists and the Republicans (or industrialists like Hearst, Rockefeller, and Mellon) being on the other side of the coin. In fact, it was all mixed up, and people were constantly switching sides. Underneath all the various criticisms of both corporations and government, however, all the groups professed a desire to see the same end, prosperity in America, and each of them blamed the other for putting the country in danger or damaging that prosperity. The media became the arena in which all these battles raged. And at the center of it was Edward Bernays. His clout had risen throughout the twenties, and with the crash of the thirties, he found himself working with American businesses to try to revive customer trust.

It was in this spirit that in 1939 Bernays became an advisor for General Motors, helping to dream up the Futurama ride and
the transportation zone at the New York World’s Fair. His work with GM was geared in part toward reidentifying democracy with capitalism in a positive way. The Fair’s popular GM transportation zone presented a vision of the future that linked progress to industry and the free market. But Roosevelt was also interested in using public relations to find better ways of connecting with the voters and their needs, though he was not a fan of the Bernays style of PR. In contrast, Roosevelt and his administration identified with a man named George Gallup.

During the 1930s, Gallup (and others) had started a new branch of public relations, one that he thought spoke more to the rational side of the human psyche. Rather than trying to figure out irrational desires and then covertly speak to them, one could simply ask the people what they needed and wanted and they would get a straight answer. Of course Bernays considered his style of public relations rational too, but his style was based on using rationality to speak to the irrational or unconscious desires of the masses. Gallup wanted to speak rationally to those masses, and he devised new methods of doing so. It was the beginning of surveys and polls. In these lists of questions, men such as Gallup were careful to try not to manipulate desires; the emphasis was on avoiding emotion rather than trying to stimulate it. It was more like science, they said; it relied on research and data.

Public relations was easily mixed up with advertising and with news: Men like Bernays, for instance, used advertising and newspapers as part of their public relations campaigns. And the surveys and research done by men like Gallup were used to make advertising campaigns or to create material for political campaigns. All this created a very blurry battleground for the public’s loyalty and attention. Depending on what station one tuned in to and what publications one read,
the American government was either saving the country or it was leading the country toward becoming an authoritarian state; big business was either manipulating you and stealing your money or it was bringing all kinds of beneficial products and opportunities into
your life. It was difficult to know what sources of information could be trusted. As Roosevelt said in another radio address, “You, the people of this country,
⁴
are receiving news through your radios and your newspapers at every hour of the day. You are, I believe, the most enlightened and the best informed
⁵
people in all the world at this moment … At the same time … it is of the highest importance that the press and the radio use the utmost caution to discriminate between actual verified fact on the one hand, and mere rumor on the other … Do not believe of necessity everything you hear or read. Check up on it.”

The world had to be wary of its sources of information. But the world had to be wary of government as well. In Nazi Germany, Joseph Goebbels could be heard openly praising Edward Bernays and his use of propaganda, but he could also be heard praising Roosevelt’s unprecedented government intervention through programs like the New Deal. In America, however, the government’s overall intentions were not the same as those of the NSDAP, nor were the corporations’ use of public relations and propaganda. In the States, while each individual group had its own agenda, the overall direction was one that championed checks and balances; thus while people were certainly greedy and power-hungry at times, there was a greater chance that those inclinations would be caught and culled before they could grow too large. But in Germany under the Nazi Party, there was no questioning of the government, and the government was now in charge of the businesses as well. There were no checks and balances. Still, it was the
intentions
rather than the methods that differed when it came to German and American use of the media. Hitler and Goebbels believed that the people were blind creatures who had to be manipulated into doing what was best for them, but to a certain extent, so did American men like Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. Roosevelt supported yet another view, namely that the people can think clearly and participate rationally in government by telling their leaders what they need and want. Hitler and Bernays thought new forms of mass communication spoke to the irrational side of humans.
Gallup thought it could speak to the rational side. Both were right.