The ‘Good German’ Goes Global: the Volkswagen Beetle as an Icon in the Federal Republic

Fig. 1.

In August 1955 Volkswagen celebrated the production of the millionth Beetle, which rolled off the production line painted all in gold. This image was intended to convey the social unity at VW as managers and workers gather around the symbol of the ‘economic miracle’.

‘He runs and runs and runs’, proclaimed the headline of a one-page interview with Hans-Ulrich Wehler in Süddeutsche Zeitung in July 2008, hailing publication of the five-hundred-page survey on postwar Germany which brings to a close his monumental history of German society since 1700. By referring to Wehler’s ability to ‘run and run and run’, the journalists did more than admire his stamina; they expressed their respect in terms befitting the subject matter of Wehler’s latest book, which, among other things, treats the Federal Republic as a success story. ‘Runs and runs and runs’ is the well-known tagline of a 1960s advertisement for the Volkswagen Beetle, one of the most potent symbols of West German success.

Fig. 2.

This ad from the early ’60s coined a phrase that has entered colloquial German. It praises the Beetle’s sturdy reliability as the cause of its phenomenal success, proclaiming ‘it runs and runs and runs’ (‘und läuft . . .’).

That slightly incredulous reference to Wehler’s staying power was not the only the allusion to Volkswagen’s fabled product. As Wehler denounced the GDR’s repressive politics, praised the stability and wealth of the Federal Republic and warned against rising social disparities in unified Germany, a central inset photograph from 1957 provided a light-hearted counterpoint to his observations. It depicted a family picnicking peacefully in the sunshine of a forest clearing in front of their parked VW – an idyllic scene invoking the simple pleasures of incipient affluence in West Germany. Running and resting, work and leisure, production and consumption – these themes can readily be summoned up by alluding to the Volkswagen Beetle. The circumstance that neither Wehler nor his interviewers ever mentioned the vehicle in their conversation was by no means unusual.¹ Volkswagen’s most famous product has been called upon as a symbol of the Federal Republic with such frequency and regularity that it seems superfluous to Germans to spell out how exactly this automobile stands for the postwar order. Former West Germans in particular see in the Beetle much more than yet another car. To them it is a much-loved, multi-layered and uncontroversial icon of the Federal Republic.

That this car would secure such prominence in postwar German culture was by no means a foregone conclusion. Like many a popular material object, the Beetle has taken numerous twists and turns over its long life as a commodity from Nazi Germany to the present. Rather than remaining a merely functional object, the car came to articulate and communicate a broad range of sentiments that, given its prominence, highlight key aspects of West German collective identity. A large number of people including politicians, engineers, line workers, management executives, advertising agents, car dealers and, last but not least, countless ordinary drivers played important roles in making this vehicle an exceptional success that gained symbolic significance despite inauspicious beginnings.² In 1945 the Volkswagen was burdened by its origins in the Third Reich, an ambivalent legacy that might well have obstructed its adoption as the new republic’s talisman. Both in Germany and abroad, it was common knowledge that the car’s main design features – its round shape, its torsion-bar wheel suspension, its air-cooled rear engine – stemmed from the 1930s. It was also well known that Ferdinand Porsche had secured Hitler’s support to develop an inexpensive, robust family vehicle as part of the dictator’s plans to advance mass motorization so as to demonstrate National Socialism’s purported commitment to creating a classless, racially pure ‘national community [promoted as the Volksgemeinschaft]’ in the sphere of consumption. Finally, it was common knowledge that the Nazi regime had...