Thinking Small (57 page)

Volkswagen could now compete with the Big Three, selling as many as 500,000 cars
in a single season.
In the year the DDB
ad ran, sales of the Volkswagen increased 37 percent while other European carmakers experienced a 27 percent
decrease
in export sales. One year later the small car represented 46 percent of all automobile imports to the United States and Volkswagen became the third largest automobile manufacturer
in the
world.
By 1961, 5 million VWs had been produced, and Nordhoff and the factory in Wolfsburg were churning out as many as 1 million a year. At the height of production, Volkswagen would be producing one car every four seconds—a huge difference between the one car every 300 hours that had been the case when Nordhoff first came on board. By 1968 the Beetle had become the best-selling vehicle in
any
country anywhere. Five years later, it would also surpass Henry
Ford’s 15 million Model T sales record and be the first car to ever reach the 20 million mark.

For Volkswagen and DDB, it was a mutual success. Bill was soon known as the “prophet of Madison Avenue.” Young men and women flocked to join DDB and learn from him. In the world of advertising, the movement that formed around Bill became known as the “Creative Revolution,” and in the rest of America, the sixties had truly arrived. The wave of “thinking strange” that Bill Bernbach and Jack Kerouac and Bob
Dylan and others like them had felt building, and had helped to build, was finally breaking. As the tide of the 1960s washed over the country, both Bill and the Beetle became stars. Soon there wasn’t an advertising party in the city that Helmut, George, and Julian could go to without being asked for their “Bernbach stories” or their artistic advice.

Bill never changed a word of Julian’s Volkswagen copy; even when others in the agency objected to it, Bill stood by him. In an interview, Bill said: “What I try to do with a creative person
⁶
is to take the talent that is his—his, not mine—and then help to sharpen and discipline that natural gift to make it as effective as
possible.” But what Bill didn’t expect was that some of those creative people would eventually want to try to make it on their
own, and in some cases, that would mean having to leave him. In many ways, however, it would be this very “desertion” that would solidify Bill’s success.

In the course
of the 1960s, the Volkswagen became a symbol of the counterculture. Flowers and peace signs were painted all over it. It was taken to concerts and demonstrations. Along with its little brother, the VW Bus, it was driven to California and back on hundreds of freewheeling road trips. The hippies thought of it as a child, a friend, looking as “alive” as it did with its big headlights, soft
curves, and shy profile. As John Muir, a famous Volkswagen mechanic known for his ability to “heal” Beetles, wrote:
“While the levels of logic of the human entity are many and varied, your car operates on one simple level and it’s up to you to understand its trip.
¹
… The type of life your car contains differs from yours by time scale, logic
level and conceptual anomalies but is ‘Life’ nonetheless.” In that spirit, the garage had become the bedroom where the little car slept. By 1969, the time when Muir wrote those words, the Beetle was well established as an American icon, having grown up alongside its drivers.

The 1950s teens had been the first generation of kids to be wooed by companies and the media alike; the fifties represented the first time the young had real consumer power. This was the first generation in the United States to have the chance of owning a car
as young adults
and the first generation to drive those cars across the country to pursue their dreams—dreams of becoming a famous musician or poet, dreams of being the first in their family to go
to college, or just dreams of starting over someplace new. The generation that came of age in the sixties was more physically mobile than any that had come before, and
this newfound mobility and freedom automatically impacted their actions and decisions as well.

The incredible creativity that we now associate with the sixties (but which actually began with the mobility of the fifties) was a direct result of this expansion and movement. New forms of thought emerged through new interactions between races, classes, and nationalities, and this meant new forms of activism and politics. The change was also an aesthetic one—noticeable in the art, media, music, and writing that arose. As more ideas and people met and mixed, the
result was often a new sound, or a new form—like the Miles Davis record
Kind of Blue,
the poems and novels of “the Beats,” or, for that matter, the creative revolution in advertising. The specific change was hard to define cohesively, but whatever it was, it was all about asserting and exploring freedom, which no longer meant only physical freedom, but also freedom of the mind.

The Volkswagen ads were a kind of “emancipated advertising” in that they freed Madison Avenue from the rut in which it had (unconsciously) been stuck. But even more important, those VW ads asked people to be present, to pay attention to the details, to Think Small. Those ads spoke to people clearly, and in a tone of equality: They didn’t “talk down,” they just talked. And people responded because they were tired of being manipulated;
they just wanted to be treated like intelligent, important members of society.

Thinking small—seeing clearly and perceiving differently—was liberating. But it was not always easy. In fact, it was often quite difficult. The sixties were a time of awakening, but those years were also full of protests, struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam War, unnecessary losses due to drugs, and heartache over the murders of some of America’s most important (and controversial) leaders. Yet the overall effect—though it certainly
came with a price—was one of an acceptance of greater diversity in the country, and a desire to discuss and reevaluate old norms.

Which is why, to some degree, the Volkswagen became even
more of a “People’s Car” once it became the chosen car of the youth in the United States. Its very acceptance by them—the car’s journey from being a product of Nazi Germany to becoming an icon of the Summer of Love—showed that this new generation, confused as it certainly still was about many things, had at least figured out that transformation
is
possible and that there
is
worth in finding new ways to see. Tied to that search for a new perception was the ability to handle difference, to allow old definitions and categories to interact and connect. In that sense, the Beetle could be the car that your professor drove, the car that you drove, or the car driven by your mom and dad. It could also be a Disney character, or show up in a Kubrick film.
Playboy
could do an article on it advising
“If you are Jewish
²
and somebody should ask you what kind of car you drive say: ‘A VW, and I know, but it’s a helluva solid little piece of machinery.’ ”

Psychologist and philosopher William James once wrote that true genius is the ability to see things in an unhabitual way. It’s the greatest gift one human being can give another—the very essence of freedom—because in seeing things differently and sharing that new view, one opens up more space for communion, for confidence, and for love. Thinking small intensifies possibility, which in turn intensifies the experience and quality of one’s life.
The DDB ads for Volkswagen presented an unorthodox view both in the world of advertising, and in the world of the consumer. The habitual way of living in America at the time was to think big—to believe that more and bigger were the answers to life’s ills—and the ads turned that accepted “fact” on its head and thus ushered in a whole new era. Thinking big
and
thinking small are powerful, and need to work in harmony to be whole.

The great German pianist Alfred Brendel
³
has said something similar: He defines genius as the ability to combine things that have never been combined before. And what was the original Volkswagen if not a combination of things that had never been combined before? Both literally, in terms of Ferdinand Porsche’s
technical design, and
also metaphorically, in the way it combined ideologies and nationalities and ultimately transcended them all. In the words of Julian Koenig, “This was a distinct
⁴
car which demanded attention if only you let people focus on it, found a way for them to be aware that it was there.” And while the campaign was indeed based on honesty and truth, it wasn’t an
informative but rather a creative act that, in the end, was necessary to reveal that truth. What DDB understood was that information and truth do not convince alone—people can have access to all the facts in the world, but it’s only once they’ve connected with those facts on a human level, an emotional level, that the truth is finally obvious to them. Again, in Julian’s words, “With this car, there was no reason to resist the truth. All we had to do
was reveal its magic in a style that would strike a chord.” In the same way that a musical note on key is obvious to the ear, so too is a warm expression of the truth: Such things can mysteriously open our hearts.

Bringing the art
of Franz Marc to Wolfsburg in 1952 might truly have been one of the highlights of Heinrich Nordhoff’s life. Marc’s
Tower of Blue Horses
¹
had moved Nordhoff as a child, and as an adult, he was still moved by it, even though now, thanks to the Nazi campaign against
modern art, that very painting was lost. For those who knew Heinrich well, it was hard to think of a moment when he had ever been so innocently joyful or proud as he was on the day of the Franz Marc opening. He spent many hours at the show among Marc’s paintings, and he invited everyone he knew to come.

Nordhoff had been on the job for nearly five years when he brought Franz Marc to the town. It was also the very first art exhibition ever held in Wolfsburg. In his following seventeen
years as director of Volkswagen, he put a great deal of time, energy, and money into bringing as much art to Wolfsburg as he could. During the Nazi reign, all modern art had been banned. But Nordhoff—thanks to the success of the Volkswagen factory—found
himself in a position to be a patron. Among the artists with exhibitions in Wolfsburg in the 1950s and 1960s were Caspar David Friedrich, Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse, Juan Gris, Marc Chagall, and van Gogh. These shows briefly made Wolfsburg a kind of cultural center in Germany, bringing thousands of Germans to the town at a time, sometimes so many that there were often not enough hotel rooms to house them all. In 1961, for Wolfsburg’s sixth art show, a French Expressionist
exhibition, Nordhoff wrote the introduction in the brochure.
²
In it, he talks about how the town and the factory are an “indivisible unit” created by hardworking and attentive citizens: