The 'strength through joy car' is better known as the Volkswagen Beetle, and its extraordinary story encapsulates the history of western Europe in the 20th century
In August 1955 the millionth Volkswagen Beetle came off the Wolfsburg production line. The ceremony was watched by 100,000 people, said one witness, while "scantily clad ladies from the world famous Moulin Rouge swung their legs, South African negro choirs sang spirituals, 32 Scottish female highland dancers stomped around to the sound of bagpipes, Swiss flag bearers twirled their standards".
Bernhard Rieger's intermittently fascinating new book cannot in its latter half shake off the dullness of ideologically uncharged commodity history. The VW spreads around the world, is successful in Mexico, briefly takes about 3% of the US market as a "fun" second car for wives and golfers, and then becomes obsolete. But, of course, the first half of the VW's existence, from its origins in the Third Reich until around the time those highland dancers turn up in Wolfsburg, sets it apart from mere fetishised machinery, and here The People's Car is most interesting.
The term "Volkswagen" is perhaps the most enduring vestigial remnant of Third Reich terminology – "the people's car" once sitting alongside "the people's radio" and "the people's tractor", the "people" being non-Jewish Germans. Its origins lay in the struggle to create a genuinely cheap German car, a consistent theme of the 1920s and 1930s. The great Weimar film directors Fritz Lang and FW Murnau were both obsessed with cars (indeed Murnau would be killed in a Rolls-Royce) and films such as Spies and The Last Laugh have a memorably erotic attitude towards vehicles. Their original audience shared this yearning, but it was an unappeasable one. Nothing more vividly shows the ruin of the interwar German middle class than the painfully low levels of car ownership compared with Britain and France, but most overwhelmingly compared with the US. Rieger gives a figure of some 81,000 passenger cars in Germany in the early 1920s, compared with 15.4m in the US by 1925. German industrialists would visit that Jerusalem of car production, Ford's Michigan plants, and despair. Indeed, there were so few cars on German roads that early Nazi traffic regulations stated that drivers only had to drive on the right if there was oncoming traffic.
Reiter gives an entertaining account of the failed attempts to come up with a successful cheap German car – the Hanomag (the "rolling bread loaf"), the Opel "Tree Frog", the BMW "Dixi". Everything came to grief because there was simply not enough money in circulation to make car ownership plausible. Everyone grew up with the stories of Daimler and Benz, but the future belonged to Ford. Germans could turn out fabulous limousines and racing cars, but most roads remained nearly car-free in what was a golden age for bicycles, motorbikes and trams.
The German media was transfixed by Henry Ford, and Hitler and his entourage warmed both to his production methods and his antisemitism. Once he came to power, one of Hitler's earliest acts was to announce the goal of a "people's car", a four-door vehicle priced at 1,000 reichsmarks that could, at last, spread the joy of the open road for ordinary German families. Inevitably part of the specification was that a machine-gun could potentially be mounted on it.
Throughout the 1930s the problem remained that Hitler's diktat on price was far too low; if the VW had gone into proper production before war broke out, each car would have cost twice its selling price.
The VW was, like Hitler himself, substantially a Habsburg import. Ferdinand Porsche was a Bohemian German who had worked developing – in a parodic Habsburg combination – both luxury cars and heavy artillery tractors. The Hungarian Béla Berényi had designed the air-cooled rear engine that inspired the VW's key feature, the Austrian Erwin Komenda came up with the shape, and much of the hard work had been done by the Czech Tatra company, whose V570 looks suspiciously like the finished Beetle.
Porsche managed both to crawl to power in the most loathsome way, and somehow appear to be a disinterested technocrat. He harnessed Hitler's implacable state directive for a people's car to channel huge resources into a new Fordist plant in northern Germany. Opened by Hitler in March 1938, Porsche's new vehicle (first likened to a beetle by the New York Times) was christened the "Strength through Joy Car", the KdF-Wagen. An all-engulfing propaganda campaign, brilliantly described here, conjured up more than a quarter of a million enthusiastic savers by the outbreak of war, all of whom were to be cruelly disappointed when steel allocations were redirected to other ends.
Volkswagen was saved by the army. The cheery Beetle body was chucked away and the chassis toughened up to make tens of thousands of Kügelwagen, the German Jeep. The eastern front and Libyan desert proved ideal laboratories for ironing out glitches and making it into the truly robust car viewed with such affection in the postwar world. At the end of the war, the site, a mass of slave-labour barracks and factory-buildings embarrassingly under-damaged by Allied bombing raids, came under British control. The VW was turned out first as a green-painted Allied military vehicle and then, as it became clear that the cold war required a healthy West Germany, as the cheerful Beetle.
The People's Car is filled with interesting and varied material about Weimar and Nazi attitudes towards cars, and the author is extraordinarily good at digging out curious pieces of information. He has a bravura passage on some of VW's flailing 1950s rivals, such as the Glas Goggomobil and the amusing Borgward Lloyd 300, made from plywood mounted on hardwood with a two-stroke engine, which casts a very different light on the omni-capable German auto industry. So it is a shame that The People's Car then tapers off into mere production figures and Beetle hobbyist conventions.
At some point, a great, chilling book must be written about the epoch that solved the problem of the failed consumerism of the 1920s and 1930s and allowed us to enter a new historical period, gorging on metal, rubber and plastic goods fuelled by petroleum. The great factories like Wolfsburg perhaps bought social peace, but the price we may have to pay is only just beginning to sink in.
• Simon Winder is the author of Germania and the forthcoming Danubia. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.
In August 1955 the millionth Volkswagen Beetle came off the Wolfsburg production line. The ceremony was watched by 100,000 people, said one witness, while "scantily clad ladies from the world famous Moulin Rouge swung their legs, South African negro choirs sang spirituals, 32 Scottish female highland dancers stomped around to the sound of bagpipes, Swiss flag bearers twirled their standards".
Bernhard Rieger's intermittently fascinating new book cannot in its latter half shake off the dullness of ideologically uncharged commodity history. The VW spreads around the world, is successful in Mexico, briefly takes about 3% of the US market as a "fun" second car for wives and golfers, and then becomes obsolete. But, of course, the first half of the VW's existence, from its origins in the Third Reich until around the time those highland dancers turn up in Wolfsburg, sets it apart from mere fetishised machinery, and here The People's Car is most interesting.
The term "Volkswagen" is perhaps the most enduring vestigial remnant of Third Reich terminology – "the people's car" once sitting alongside "the people's radio" and "the people's tractor", the "people" being non-Jewish Germans. Its origins lay in the struggle to create a genuinely cheap German car, a consistent theme of the 1920s and 1930s. The great Weimar film directors Fritz Lang and FW Murnau were both obsessed with cars (indeed Murnau would be killed in a Rolls-Royce) and films such as Spies and The Last Laugh have a memorably erotic attitude towards vehicles. Their original audience shared this yearning, but it was an unappeasable one. Nothing more vividly shows the ruin of the interwar German middle class than the painfully low levels of car ownership compared with Britain and France, but most overwhelmingly compared with the US. Rieger gives a figure of some 81,000 passenger cars in Germany in the early 1920s, compared with 15.4m in the US by 1925. German industrialists would visit that Jerusalem of car production, Ford's Michigan plants, and despair. Indeed, there were so few cars on German roads that early Nazi traffic regulations stated that drivers only had to drive on the right if there was oncoming traffic.
Reiter gives an entertaining account of the failed attempts to come up with a successful cheap German car – the Hanomag (the "rolling bread loaf"), the Opel "Tree Frog", the BMW "Dixi". Everything came to grief because there was simply not enough money in circulation to make car ownership plausible. Everyone grew up with the stories of Daimler and Benz, but the future belonged to Ford. Germans could turn out fabulous limousines and racing cars, but most roads remained nearly car-free in what was a golden age for bicycles, motorbikes and trams.
The German media was transfixed by Henry Ford, and Hitler and his entourage warmed both to his production methods and his antisemitism. Once he came to power, one of Hitler's earliest acts was to announce the goal of a "people's car", a four-door vehicle priced at 1,000 reichsmarks that could, at last, spread the joy of the open road for ordinary German families. Inevitably part of the specification was that a machine-gun could potentially be mounted on it.
Throughout the 1930s the problem remained that Hitler's diktat on price was far too low; if the VW had gone into proper production before war broke out, each car would have cost twice its selling price.
The VW was, like Hitler himself, substantially a Habsburg import. Ferdinand Porsche was a Bohemian German who had worked developing – in a parodic Habsburg combination – both luxury cars and heavy artillery tractors. The Hungarian Béla Berényi had designed the air-cooled rear engine that inspired the VW's key feature, the Austrian Erwin Komenda came up with the shape, and much of the hard work had been done by the Czech Tatra company, whose V570 looks suspiciously like the finished Beetle.
Porsche managed both to crawl to power in the most loathsome way, and somehow appear to be a disinterested technocrat. He harnessed Hitler's implacable state directive for a people's car to channel huge resources into a new Fordist plant in northern Germany. Opened by Hitler in March 1938, Porsche's new vehicle (first likened to a beetle by the New York Times) was christened the "Strength through Joy Car", the KdF-Wagen. An all-engulfing propaganda campaign, brilliantly described here, conjured up more than a quarter of a million enthusiastic savers by the outbreak of war, all of whom were to be cruelly disappointed when steel allocations were redirected to other ends.
Volkswagen was saved by the army. The cheery Beetle body was chucked away and the chassis toughened up to make tens of thousands of Kügelwagen, the German Jeep. The eastern front and Libyan desert proved ideal laboratories for ironing out glitches and making it into the truly robust car viewed with such affection in the postwar world. At the end of the war, the site, a mass of slave-labour barracks and factory-buildings embarrassingly under-damaged by Allied bombing raids, came under British control. The VW was turned out first as a green-painted Allied military vehicle and then, as it became clear that the cold war required a healthy West Germany, as the cheerful Beetle.
The People's Car is filled with interesting and varied material about Weimar and Nazi attitudes towards cars, and the author is extraordinarily good at digging out curious pieces of information. He has a bravura passage on some of VW's flailing 1950s rivals, such as the Glas Goggomobil and the amusing Borgward Lloyd 300, made from plywood mounted on hardwood with a two-stroke engine, which casts a very different light on the omni-capable German auto industry. So it is a shame that The People's Car then tapers off into mere production figures and Beetle hobbyist conventions.
At some point, a great, chilling book must be written about the epoch that solved the problem of the failed consumerism of the 1920s and 1930s and allowed us to enter a new historical period, gorging on metal, rubber and plastic goods fuelled by petroleum. The great factories like Wolfsburg perhaps bought social peace, but the price we may have to pay is only just beginning to sink in.
• Simon Winder is the author of Germania and the forthcoming Danubia. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 hours ago.