Thinking Small (58 page)

The Franz Marc show was clearly the one that meant the most to Nordhoff, but of all the art shows Heinrich Nordhoff brought to Wolfsburg,
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many in the town today feel that the grandest was the show of 1967. It was an exhibit of the art of Vincent van Gogh, and it was the first time van Gogh’s work had been displayed outside of Amsterdam. For Wolfsburg,
and for Germany, it was a momentous occasion. More than 100,000 people from all over Europe came to see the exhibit. At the opening, as if coming full circle somehow, Nordhoff reminisced about Wolfsburg’s first art show, the “unforgettable” exhibition of Franz Marc. Sadly, the van Gogh exhibit was the last exhibit that Heinrich would attend.

By the time of the van Gogh exhibit, Volkswagen had become a multinational corporation selling close to 900,000 vehicles a year. In the past decade, the export ratio had climbed 57 percent, meaning that every second car exported by Germany was a Volkswagen. Wolfsburg had truly become the VW town and now had a population of 80,000. In fact, according to polls taken in the early sixties, more than 90 percent of car owners in the town drove a Beetle, and the primary worker
in nearly three-fourths of the city’s households worked for the factory. It was still a place of immigrants and refugees to a large extent: in the 1960s, thousands of Italians moved to Wolfsburg, and Volkswagen erected an “Italian Village” for them. There were also Greeks, Spaniards, Dutch, Austrians, Yugoslavs, and Turks. There were tensions, to be sure, but the city, the factory, and the car together had become a testament to reinvention.

Ironically, Wolfsburg sat just miles away from the East German border, a place that was the epicenter of the new divisions
and tensions created by the Cold War. Because of the factory’s position, because many workers at the plant were Germans who fled the Soviet Zone, and because Nordhoff had always been partial to the ideas and business models of the United States, he was not afraid to speak up about the tensions between these two worldviews.
More than once in his speeches in the United States, he talked of the responsibility of auto companies to communicate more directly with one another over borders, and to be more open to trade. He spoke about the necessity of keeping tariffs low and finding ways for Western countries to join in further economic agreements, and “economically unite the Free World.”
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The Marshall Plan, he reiterated, had been the first important step toward unification of Europe.

But Heinrich Nordhoff’s views about unity were not always popular. Nor were his ideas about what was best for Volkswagen. For a decade he’d been one of the most trusted and sought-after voices in German business, but in the 1960s he found himself questioned and challenged, embroiled in conflicts about how much of the company should be owned by the government, how much should be owned by private stakeholders, and how much should go to the public in stocks.
There was also heated debate about whether or not VW should expand its line, or buy other lines like Audi, for example. Nordhoff only wanted to continue making Beetles, even at a time when to many others it was obvious that Volkswagen needed more than just one kind of car. Up until that point, the Beetle and the VW Bus were their only two cars on the market, and as the sixties were coming to an end, many at Volkswagen felt they saw signs that the success of the original Beetle had
reached a plateau. New technologies and new safety concerns had surfaced, and many of VW’s board worried that other companies would soon pull far ahead of VW if they did not modernize their brand.

With the government, and with VW’s council and board, Nordhoff now found himself on the losing end of the arguments at times. Simultaneously, the German automobile industry, after an unprecedented boom in the 1950s, was tipping into its first
recession since the end of the war; indeed, its first recession since the German people had been motorized. Nordhoff took all of these problems and fights very personally, and his health began to suffer
as a result.

Nordhoff firmly believed there was an “organic harmony” between the workers and the management, an idea he’d adapted from the writings of Franz Marc. Nordhoff put his workers on a pedestal just as surely as they put him on one: He gave them higher wages and dividends (for the course of Nordhoff’s years of management, wages would be at least 5 percent higher than those at any other German automotive plant), he made them partners in the
company, and he told them again and again that they were an example of the best Prussian traditions of good quality work, discipline, selflessness, and modesty.

But Nordhoff’s philosophy was at times eerily close to the NSDAP’s idea of “working toward the führer”: He felt that he knew what was best for the company, that it should be he who made the final decisions, and above all, he demanded loyalty. Anyone who left the company, for example, was not allowed to return, and he was firmly against any unions or workers retaining any authority that could conflict with his own. Because he had taken
over the factory at a time when workplaces were undergoing the slow transition from the authoritatively installed sense of obedience to the new democratic one of individuality and choice, Nordhoff’s way worked through the 1950s and early 1960s. It also worked because he really did care about the workers and because he really did have their best interests at heart. But the balance in such matters can be precarious; by the late 1960s, many felt Nordhoff had too much power and
that he was no longer using it to make the wisest decisions.

After Nordhoff turned sixty-five—the age when most German executives retired—more and more people began to ask him to choose a successor and step down. Nordhoff delayed that decision for as long as he could. His ultimate plan was to retire in 1969, just as he turned seventy years old. But many wondered if
he would ever be able to actually leave. Here was a man who had given ten hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a week of his
life—for nearly twenty years—to the same company. Naturally it was hard for him to imagine leaving, or to separate his job from his own sense of self. Nevertheless, the role he played was just that: a role. And the role of manager of Volkswagen had to be filled by someone else, it had to go on without Nordhoff, and certainly he knew that. But nevertheless, he could not seem to let go.

In 1968, Nordhoff was finally pressured into agreeing to name a successor. At about just that time, his heart began to fail. He spent months in the hospital but eventually recovered enough to return to work (albeit cutting his time to forty hours a week). But when news came that the VW board of directors had voted to push his January 1969 retirement date up to March 21, 1968, it was one of the hardest blows of his life. He took it absolutely personally, and he did not
know how to cope. In his desperate moment, in an act of avoidance and panic, he zoomed off to Baden-Baden—the very same spa town where Ferdinand
Porsche had once been arrested by the French—and tried to conduct his business meetings there as if nothing were wrong. It was the Ides of March.

On the flight back to Wolfsburg, however, he collapsed. He was given oxygen and taken to the hospital as soon as the plane landed. A few weeks later, on Good Friday of 1968, Heinrich Nordhoff lay in his hospital bed and asked Charlotte, his wife of thirty-eight years, his best friend for nearly fifty, if she wouldn’t mind having a glass of champagne with him. He was feeling better, and he wanted to celebrate. She rushed home and got his favorite bottle of
champagne, and together with their daughter, Barbara, they sat in the hospital room in Wolfsburg and enjoyed a toast. Heinrich wrote out a few Easter cards and arranged to have gifts delivered to old friends. Then, late that afternoon, just before sunset, he died. Charlotte was there with him.

A few days later, Nordhoff’s funeral was held in one of Volkswagen’s giant factory halls. The workers all came, standing in a line that stretched down the long straight road running parallel to the factory, waiting to say their goodbyes. When his body was transported to the gravesite (in a cut-off Volkswagen Bus), the citizens of Wolfsburg crowded the streets, honoring him as he passed, saying their own silent goodbyes. Today, more than forty years after
his death, it’s doubtful there is a person in Wolfsburg who has not heard of Heinrich Nordhoff.

On August 15, 1969,
cars full of hundreds of thousands of young people jammed the New York State Thruway, causing the entire road to completely shut down for a time. The traffic was so heavy that people began simply abandoning their cars and walking the final miles toward their destination: the large farm that would forever be known as Woodstock.