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

2015; German Studies Association; Volume: 38; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/gsr.2015.0017

2164-8646

Andrew Denning,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Reviewed by: The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle by Bernhard Rieger Andrew Denning The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle. By Bernhard Rieger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. x+ 406. Cloth $28.95. ISBN 978-0674050914. Bernhard Rieger’s The People’s Car offers a new history of Germany’s twentieth century from behind the wheel of the iconic Beetle. Rieger reads the automobile itself as a text to produce a remarkable book that is at once a corporate history of Volkswagen, a cultural history of technology, and a history of globalization. These strands unite in a compelling, readable, and at times surprising history of material culture. Rieger locates the roots of the Beetle in the despondent Weimar years, when German mass motorization was but an enticing dream that promised a pathway out of economic crisis and social division. For Hitler and the Nazis, the “Kraft durch Freude-Wagen” was a prestige project that would demonstrate the ability of the regime to improve Germans’ quality of life by manufacturing an affordable, mass-produced automobile while simultaneously jumpstarting a German form of Fordism. The KdF-Wagen, they believed, would navigate Germany’s “Third Way” between American capitalism and Soviet communism by creating a state-disciplined, socially productive form of consumption. In reality, the KdF-Wagen never went into production as a consumer commodity, and the massive factory in Wolfsburg (née KdF City) produced vehicles for the war effort using imported forced labor. Ironically, it was the democratic Federal Republic that fulfilled the promise of German mass motorization, as the little Beetle came to represent the reliability and solidity not only of German industrial products but also of West Germany itself. Rieger uses the long history of the Beetle to call attention to continuities in German history across the “zero hour” of 1945, highlighting the fact that it was the Nazis who both ignited the German lust for mass motorization and laid the technical and material foundations for Volkswagen’s postwar success. The postwar Beetle made Hitler’s dream a reality while paradoxically legitimizing Germany’s place in the Cold War political order as a productive nation and a global good citizen. As Rieger expertly demonstrates, the enduring popularity of the Beetle emanated from its uncanny ability to be all things to all people. From a symbol of the Volksgemeinschaft to an icon of the Wirtschaftswunder, this commodity proved remarkably malleable to changing political winds. Rieger improves upon previous histories of [End Page 206] Volkswagen by tracing the tracks of the automobile across the globe and through its many lives. The Beetle was “the people’s car,” a category that included not only members of the Volk in the 1930s and West German consumers in the 1950s and 1960s, but American housewives and hippies who sought alternatives to Detroit’s colossal, powerful vehicles in the 1960s, and members of the nascent Mexican middle class from the 1970s onward. The People’s Car is an exemplar of transnational history, arguing that, from its roots in the Nazi era, this quintessentially German commodity synthesized American production practices from Ford’s River Rouge Complex; technical discussions of small, economical vehicles in the French automotive press; and aesthetics reminiscent of automobiles produced by the Czechoslovak manufacturer Tatra. After the war, Volkswagen lay in the British occupational zone, where it benefitted from tepid denazification efforts and “trusteeship” policies honed in imperial Africa. Unorthodox American advertising campaigns amplified the Beetle’s cachet in the 1960s, and the opening of a factory in Puebla, Mexico, in 1967 secured new markets in Latin America while allowing the corporation to take advantage of global wage inequalities. Thus, Rieger challenges a historiography that often equates globalization with Americanization in the twentieth century. He demonstrates instead that the postwar order of international economic exchange and global culture was, in important and enduring ways, “Made in Germany.” In the process, Volkswagen aided in the postwar rehabilitation of the Federal Republic insofar as the world came to consider its citizens as reputable and trustworthy as the Beetle. Rieger’s great triumph lies in demonstrating the role of commodities as agents in history. He...