Bernhard Rieger,The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle

Reviewed by: Valentina Fava, University of Helsinki, Finland

In this fascinating, well-constructed volume, Bernhard Rieger leads the reader on a journey across continents and decades, tracing the global success of the German people’s car. The Beetle was designed by Ferdinand Porsche under the aegis of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and still produced right up to 2003 at the Puebla factory in Mexico. Those years saw the world change dramatically and the ‘product of the century’ changed with it, not so much in its technical features as in the meanings it embodied over place and time.

Recently the protagonist of a post-modern nostalgia campaign, the Beetle was, respectively: the icon of the Federal Republic’s 1950s economic renaissance; an extraordinarily profitable export ‘hit’ in 1960s America; an identification object for 1970s US counter-cultures; and, finally, in the1980s–90s Mexico, a symbol of both capitalist inequality and industrial development.

Rieger gets straight to the point: how could this car transcend its origins deeply rooted in Nazi propaganda, to become a veritable global commodity, politically neutral and ready to embody different values according to the ‘needs’ and socio-economic and cultural conditions of its diverse hosts?

Its technical properties, its sympathetic design (although the author suggests Porsche might have borrowed more than he created himself) do not fully explain the Beetle’s longstanding and ubiquitous success. Perhaps, Rieger suggests, its international imprinting or ‘transnational facet’ allowed this round-shaped car to benefit from the contradictions of twentieth-century history. While seeking the secrets of the car’s versatility, the author reviews key historical debates, raising questions that dig deeper than merely explaining Volkswagen’s commercial success.

Rieger’s journey begins in interwar Germany: he vividly describes the economic, cultural and social reasons for the Weimar Republic’s initial resistance to mass motorization and production. Artisan production methods coupled with the high cost of car maintenance amid heated debates about innovation in American production increased the desire for automobiles without creating enough commercial demand to change the industrial landscape.

The call for universal car ownership became a triumph of Hitler’s propaganda: he commissioned the design of the people’s car, reduced taxes on automobiles, promoted automotive competitions and launched a new Highway Code and a plan to build highways. However, despite huge investments in resources, the regime’s infrastructural project fell short of Hitler’s promises. The Volkswagenwerk, under the wing of the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, manufactured more Kubelswagen, the jeeps of the Nazi army, than people’s cars; and most of its workers were forced labourers kept in inhuman conditions.

In the aftermath of the war, the British occupation forces’ choices, the public administration’s desire for cars and the limitations of the de-nazification process paved the way for the survival of the facility that would become the main site of civilian automobile production. Under the guidance of Heinrich Nordhoff, Volkswagen motorized the Federal Republic and provided its citizens with collective object identification, representing a break as well as continuity with the past. The former Lager factory and purpose-built town of Wolfsburg became a test centre for the collaborative industrial relations that put Germany’s social welfare capitalism on the map; its product became the epitome of the trustworthiness, solidity and culture of achievement on which the Federal Republic rested.

As a symbol of Germany’s post-war recovery, Volkswagen’s car soon disembarked in the United States where it was given its popular nickname ‘Beetle’. Rieger analyses the brave internationalization strategy which enabled Volkswagen to win over the American automobile market, thus overcoming the European automotive industry’s deep crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. The author describes how this small German car, originally launched in the US as a niche product to appeal to women and fit families’ need for a second car, ended up being ‘humanized’ and appropriated by hippy communities and alternative subcultures.

Rieger’s journey continues to Mexico. There the Vachito became the national carro del pueblo, and this despite trade unions and intense opposition to the German multinational as well as Volkswagen’s failure to compensate local farmers for the expropriated land on which the Puebla factory was built.

This highly commendable volume successfully combines different historical approaches and multiple sources to reconstruct the ‘life’ of a beloved object. The narrative reproduces the complexity of industrial creation from design to advertisement, underlining the influence of the broader political and social context on both the production process and commercial success of a product. It highlights the contradictions of globalization and multinationals’ activities, shedding light on firms’ strategies and their impact on the economy, industrial relations and politics of the host country. The reader, however, is left puzzled by the ‘easiness’ of historical ‘carwashes’, the power of marketing and the strength of a shrewd long-term and nationally based and supported multinational strategy.