Hiott’s VW book captures essence of old Beetle better than new one

Andrea Hiott has written an engaging and nuanced automotive history that transcends the usual “car guy” narratives. Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle offers a wealth of background about the political, economic and social culture that allowed the Beetle to become one of the most important cars of the 20th Century.

This is not, however, a dry scholarly book. Hiott has a particular eye for colorful detail, such as with character sketches of the Doyle Dane Bernbach mad men who cooked up VW’s groundbreaking ad campaigns (see further discussion here).

Also see ‘What died when the VW Beetle ended production?’

Thinking Small is as much the story about how key players made VW into what it is today as it is about the Beetle per se. As a case in point, the book offers an overview of the maneuvering between the Porsche and Piech families that led to VW’s takeover of Porsche in 2008.

Overview of New Beetle reads like press release

The weakest part of Thinking Small is Hiott’s discussion of the retro New Beetle. She argues that the car’s success was the result of having “kept the soul” of the original Beetle “intact, even as they changed its look” (p. 391; original italics).

Also see ‘What a simple modern car should look like’

I would flatly challenge that contention. The New Beetle was naught but a nostalgic styling exercise that carried over none of the original’s substantive qualities. Here we have a postmodern caricature so banal that one wonders whether VW management has largely lost touch with the values which drove its early success (for further discussion go here and here).

Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle

• Hiott, Andrea; 2012
• Ballatine Books, New York, NY

“The doors of DDB officially opened on June 1, 1949. It was a hot summer day in New York City. The air in the stairwell was thick, but the mood was light. ‘Nothing will come between us,’ Bill Bernbach said to his new partners, ‘Not even punctuation.’ And he meant it literally: The name they’d chosen was a name without a comma or a dash — Doyle Dane Bernbach, just like that. It was the first time the masthead had been written in such a way; a small difference, perhaps, but one already hinting at changes to come. Seeing that name appear in the directory of advertising agencies, Madison Avenue had to stop for a moment and scratch its head. Who were those guys? No commas between their names? Was that a gross mistake, or had they done it on purpose?” (p. 265)

“Mobility is as much about freedom and new vistas as it is about capitalism or the free market, and the young were taking up the former while the elder worried about the latter. Mobility in the 1950s meant prosperity, but it also meant the ability to communicate more widely, to be exposed to different lifestyles and different views, to get into a car or a bus and experience the country like Jack Kerouac’s character in ‘On the Road.’ Mobility brought adventure, both physical, emotional, and mental. By funding the building of national interstates, the American government was thus connecting the country in unexpected ways. And there would be consequences.” (p. 337)

“Nordhoff firmly believed that 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 of 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 fuhrer’: 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.” (p. 378)

OTHER REVIEWS:

New York Journal of Books | Publishers Weekly | AARP Entertainment | SFGate | Art Agenda | Amazon

This is an updated version of a mini-review originally posted January 1, 2019.