Thinking Small (3 page)

The crew at DDB was a motley and roughish bunch, in no way typical of most advertising agencies in New York. In certain younger circles, DDB was considered one of the only ad agencies where a person could work on something different, something exciting, something “meaningful,” if you dared to use that term. Whereas other successful agencies at the time were full of serious-faced men in expensive suits, DDB was more like an experimental powwow. Art and
writing were respected as crafts within themselves rather than as the means to a financial end. DDB employees worked in teams; they communicated and sparred. Those who witnessed this process called it
creative,
in a way that the advertising world had never really seen before.

DDB was different, and different was exciting. But that didn’t mean the agency was going to leave its mark. In the larger scheme
of things, DDB was more likely to be beaten by the establishment than it was to change it. After all, in 1959, the majority of Americans had never encountered a DDB ad. When it came to the heavyweights of economics and industries, DDB was small: They didn’t have any of the accounts that mattered—no car
company from Detroit, no major tobacco brand, no national retail chain.

And there was something else, too. In business terms, DDB was often dismissed as a quirky place that did “ethnic” advertising,
¹
a crude way of saying that most people considered DDB a Jewish company that did “unabashedly, recognizably Jewish”
²
ads. Most of their clients were Jewish. Bill Bernbach was Jewish. And many on the staff were Jewish as well. Thus DDB’s success was a local success: advertisements for El Al airlines or Ohrbach’s department store caught the eye but had a limited scope, catering strictly to Manhattan and its boroughs. Bernbach’s shop was no more a threat to the established giants than were the strange beatniks and folk singers who had started
congregating downtown.

Advertising was incredibly lucrative in those days though, and the big agencies were prospering. Their ads showed beautiful and successful people enjoying a product, and upon seeing such stimulation, customers were supposed to be stimulated too. This underlying equation of “consumption equals happiness” had proven appeal: America’s culture of materialism was thriving, fed on eye-popping advertisements for big houses, big cars, big smiles, and big
words. It was the decade of dazzle, and yet as that decade entered its final year, some began to wonder if any of it had been real. The country’s foundations no longer seemed so solid. A recession eventually set in, and it wasn’t solely economic. The spirit of the country began to change; there was a sense of disquiet. As poet Allen Ginsberg wrote in the
Village Voice
in 1959: “No one in America knows what will happen. No one is in real
control.”
³
The country was begging for a shift in perspective, and that would mean taking risks and thinking strange.

And DDB epitomized thinking strange. Take Bill’s newest
choice of projects, for instance: a German car that, for more than one reason, looked like an impossible sale. Manhattan’s major agencies were making millions advertising the cars of Detroit: Buick, Lincoln, Chrysler, Mercury, Oldsmobile, Ford—these were the brand names Americans craved and bought. One such advertisement for Pontiac depicted a large crowd chanting,
“We’re everybody … and we want a Big Car …” Even the sound of the door closing had to be big. As the general manager of Chevrolet boasted in 1957, “We’ve got the finest door slam this year we’ve ever had—a big car slam.…”

The Volkswagen, a car Americans would later nickname the “The Beetle,” seemed to represent the opposite of such a desire. Though it had been trying to enter the market ever since that first transatlantic trip in 1949, its overall sales compared to the numbers coming out of Detroit were laughable, barely a blip on America’s automotive map. Some at DDB couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps Bill wasn’t wasting his time with
Volkswagen’s little car. Foreign companies just weren’t a market that big advertising agencies in the United States were courting in those days, and, lack of monetary gain aside, a Jewish advertising agency representing a German car just wasn’t the most likely combination. Nevertheless, Bill wanted Volkswagen’s business: He had a thing or two he wanted to say about the concept of bigness he saw many American corporations and advertising firms touting, and
he had no qualms about flying overseas to Wolfsburg and visiting a German car factory in order to have that chance. He soon found out, however, that few others at DDB felt the same way. More than ten years had passed since the end of the war, but some wounds had not healed and the anger it had fostered still simmered. Feelings had been held in, papered over. After all, this was the car that
The New York Times
had referred to as the “Baby Hitler”
⁴
in 1938, and while it’s been said that no baby is ugly, this one certainly had a unique face.

Trekking to a country that Americans had once hated about as much as anyone could hate a place, meeting with former enemies who had fought on the side of the Nazis during the Second
World War, having to find the good points about a car that, when people were being generous, was described as “a motorized tortoise” or a “pregnant roller skate”—needless to say, it wasn’t the most attractive account that Bill could
have offered his staff. Nevertheless, the men Bill eventually convinced to work on the account—a beatnik Jewish boy (Julian Koenig), a loudmouthed Greek who always seemed to be getting himself into hot water (George Lois), and a German American who had very unresolved feelings about his parents’ German past (Helmut Krone)—would come together and, in a moment of seemingly fated timing, set a fire under Madison Avenue, and the entire nation beyond.

Adolf Hitler’s eyes
were reportedly “bright blue—bordering on the violet.”
¹
In the psychological reports done on him in the 1940s by the OSS (a precursor to the CIA), there is mention of his “hypnotic glance” and the ability of his eyes to “bore through
people.” One policeman describes Hitler’s gaze as “fatal,” with an “irresistible glare.” But by other accounts, his eyes are “dead” and “lacking in brilliance and the sparkle of genuine animation.” Perhaps all of these descriptions are true. When I look at his portrait today, however, I have to admit that I don’t see an incomprehensible monster: I see a man who sensed the power available to us all, and then
violently abused it, brutalizing and destroying millions of lives, including his own. It’s hard to imagine living in a city that was founded by such a man, but every citizen in Wolfsburg lives with that legacy. Without Adolf Hitler, their town would never have been born.

The town’s original name wasn’t even Wolfsburg. At the time of its official creation, the town was being made to house the factory for a car, and the entire project was being funded by a
division of the Nazi German Labor Front (the DAF) called Strength through Joy.
²
Thus, in May of 1938, Adolf Hitler christened Wolfsburg
“The Town of the Strength through Joy Car,” the town of the
Volkswagen.
Volkswagen was a generic term being used in technical and automotive circles at the time to mean a car for the common man, something still thought impractical and impossible in Germany by most. The idea of a Volkswagen carried a lot of power: To speak of motorizing the population was to speak of giving people more control over their lives, an idea that evoked both awe and desire. As one
German automotive writer named Wilfried Bade proclaimed in 1938: “Until now the automobile has conquered the world. Now begins the true possession of the automobile by the people.”
³
The dream of the car, and the dream of the city being built for it, went hand in hand. Each spoke to the masses, each served as a symbol of unification, and each was directly linked
to strengthening the nation through industry—all major aspects of the Nazi conception of power that was taking hold of the country then.

Hitler’s Town of the Strength through Joy Car was originally created to be a “model German workers’ city,”
⁴
an urban and residential center that incorporated the Third Reich’s emphasis on unified work. Just as the People’s Car was supposed to be a car that
all
Germans would drive, Hitler wanted its city to be a
model on which all industrial towns could be built. It was to be a place of common purpose, where men and women worked together toward the realization of a singular goal, the ultimate point being the strengthening of Germany. Industry, alongside loyalty and labor, would structure the nation, make the Fatherland strong.

The hope for a People’s Car had been rising in Europe for over twenty years. It was a kind of leitmotif, in fact, recurring regularly though never resolved; automobiles were driven only by the rich and elite. Hitler was the first person to come to power in Europe who saw the mass production of automobiles as an essential industrial and national aim. He envisioned a great motorized nation, a nation that could expand and expand and expand.
Germany
needed more
Lebensraum,
more living space, he told the citizens. The motor car was a natural part of that plan.

Hitler came to power in 1933 with cars on his mind and his agenda, but the process was full of twists and turns and it was only five years later, in the spring of 1938, that it began to look as if his goal might be achieved. The first steps toward
Volksmotorisierung,
motorizing the people, were being made, and the erection of the new auto city was proof. Land for the enormous car factory had been found, and Albert Speer, the Inspector General for Building in
Berlin at that time, had approved the location. Plans had been drawn up, an engineer had been hard at work on prototypes of the car. It was time for the cornerstone of the factory to be laid, time to celebrate the coming wave of vehicles with pride, and on May 26, 1938, the Nazis planned an elaborate fête in The Town of the Strength through Joy Car.

The German Labor Front sent invitations to over 50,000 people, though they were not invited so much as ordered to attend. Trumpets blared. Long bloodred banners were unfurled. Twenty-eight special Town of the Strength through Joy Car–bound trains left from all parts of the country and carried the citizens to the grounds where they were promised the new industrial town was soon to rise. This place, the propaganda promised, would be better than any American city,
and Germany’s new car factory would be better than anything yet built by America’s automotive hero Henry Ford. Members of the Hitler Youth and the SS marched. The workers were on show: Bricklayers were given pristine white outfits and black top hats to wear; carpenters were decked out in black velvet and corduroy. Everyone raised his arm as Hitler appeared, arriving in the front seat of one of the prototypes of his Strength through Joy Car. People pointed at the new
automobile, and discussed it; perhaps they imagined owning one, too. For those who couldn’t make it to the opening ceremony, a radio show was broadcast, one of the first of its kind, detailing Hitler’s every move. It was supposed to be a day
of triumph, but spectators who were there would later report there was a strange tension in the air, a kind of growing apprehension.

Perhaps it was the chancellor’s aloofness that sent such an impression reverberating through the crowd. He certainly wasn’t himself
⁵
that day. In previous automotive events, Hitler had always been fervent, even joyful, as he talked passionately about this project’s potential. On the day of the ceremony, however, the car was no longer at the
forefront, or even close to the forefront of Hitler’s mind: By the spring of 1938, a new reality was setting in and other parts of his grand scheme were now in motion as well. Hitler’s focus was not on the People’s Car that day because he was preoccupied with the war that he knew was imminent. His desired moment had arrived. Already Austria had been annexed,
had come too willingly, some would say. And the pogrom of the Crystal Night
(
Kristallnacht
) was only six months away—that horrific and incendiary evening in which hundreds of synagogues were set on fire, Jewish shops and homes were destroyed and plundered, the shattered glass of their windows littering the streets, and around 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps or killed. The political air in Germany was toxic, but few were aware of the noxious fumes that surrounded them. The celebration for the car was in many ways a perfect
metaphor for the mood of the country: lush decoration slathered onto a deepening sense of unrest. People looked at the spectacle and tried not to notice the anxiety swelling underneath.