Thinking Small (12 page)

If Hitler didn’t read this exact article, he certainly read one saying something like it. They were easy to find in automotive journals of the time. The powerful car companies might not have been interested in making a Volkswagen, but ideas of industrial progress in connection to the automobile were being talked about openly in print and even in German universities. In his inaugural speech as the rector of the University of Karlsruhe, Herr Kluge suggested the
need for a new spatial design and consciousness that took the automobile into account, saying that “right of way in the literal sense
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must be introduced … even the middle-size cities will sooner or later have to undertake street construction, open up thoroughfares, build over- and underpasses …” For many academics who
studied progress, it was clear that the car’s next step would be in the direction of everyday use. New inventions start in small circles, usually at high prices and requiring a lot of expertise, and then slowly
become more familiar, more accessible, finally ending up in everyone’s home or on everyone’s desk. The washer and dryer are one example; the computer is another. In the years of Hitler’s rise in Germany, the car was silently going
through just such a change.

Even so, on the whole, it was a small percentage of German citizens who would have read or heard such a thing, and an even smaller percentage who would have believed it. To say that the average German could have “speed” in his or her control was like a fairy tale. But Hitler knew all of this, and like the color red, the swastika, and the democratic vote, he would adopt the idea of a People’s Car and twist it into something toward his own ends.

When Hitler emerged from Landsberg Prison on December 20, 1924, Jakob Werlin had come through for him. Hand-delivered, waiting by the road, Hitler feasted his eyes on a brand-new shiny Mercedes. He’d gone to jail feeling defeated and depressed but now, a little over a year later, he was riding away with an entirely new image of himself. Remarkably, however, Hitler could not actually drive his new car. He did not have a driver’s license, and he never would.
As much as he loved cars, Hitler never actually powered one. Perhaps even he didn’t completely trust himself behind the wheel.
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As luck would have it,
just as Hitler was making his entry into German politics, Ferdinand Porsche was preparing to leave Austria and take up his first job in the German automotive world. He had been creating cars for Austro-Daimler—cars such as the Model 27/80, which he designed for the Prince Henry trials—for most of his adult life, over fifteen years. By 1916, he had moved up to become the
company’s managing director, a
position in which he felt he should be able to determine what kinds of cars the company chose to make. But Porsche and the other executives at Austro-Daimler did not agree about the future of car development. Porsche may have been idealistic, dreamy, all those traits that get caricatured under the term
artistic,
but he was also simple, practical, and severe; this combination of impatience and idealism became such a
volatile combination for him that by the spring of 1923, he had to leave Austro-Daimler.

It was less than six months before Hitler’s Beer Hall coup when Porsche took his new engineering job at Daimler-Benz.
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The company was in Stuttgart, Germany, a prominent old town in the southern part of the country. His new job had no relation to the one he was leaving behind in Austria. Though the names were similar, the German Daimler was a whole new
company, and that meant a whole new executive board, and a whole new philosophy about small cars, or so Porsche hoped. And so, as the buds were swelling and bursting into green, Porsche and his family eased along the curving and chaotic roads of the German countryside, spring weather streaming through their cars, preparing to start over once more.

Porsche had not left the Austrian company on good terms. His feuds with the executives and the board became extremely uncomfortable for all involved. Some at the Austrian company found Porsche too hard to work with: He wanted too much, and he was too impatient, they said. He might be a genius, but he made impossible demands. First there was the idea of a small car. Second, Porsche was adamant that the company should have a strong representation in racing, a strong
marquee. By modern terms, race-car driving had now become a popular sport. Entire towns often turned out to watch or to welcome home their returning drivers. Spreading a car company’s name through winning such races was not a bad marketing idea. But Austro-Daimler was not quick to see Porsche’s point. Porsche wanted time and money to build an increasing number of racing cars, and when it came to such things, it was either his way or
no way at all.
Porsche was stubborn: When he wanted something, it was very hard for him to let any circumstance stop him from getting it. Arguments heated the air for months before exploding during a board meeting, which ended when Ferdinand rose in anger and left. The company no longer wanted him. Lawyers would be called in to settle the rest.

Relocating to Stuttgart so that Ferdinand could take his new job was not easy for the Porsche family. Austria and Germany were very different worlds at that time. In Germany, the Porsches were considered foreigners. They had a strange accent and unusual ways. Upon signing his name, and including the initials of the bestowed Austrian professorship, Ferdinand Porsche was told the new initials attached to his name would have to be taken off: The degree from Vienna was not
legitimate in Germany.

Things were no smoother for the rest of the family. Ferry found he didn’t fit in with his classmates so well, and they ridiculed him. Louise was set on art school back in Vienna. Aloisia and Ferdinand thus put great efforts into building the family a special home, the “Porsche villa” they would call it, though it
was more like a modest country home. Porsche designed part of it himself, and the house felt good to them all. It would
become the center of their lives, a place of comfort and warmth.

Porsche too had a bit of a rocky start at work. The men at the Stuttgart factory (which Porsche insisted on calling a “workshop”) were not used to the boss being so hands-on. Paul Daimler, the man who had been their boss before Porsche, was a behind-the-scenes manager and had rarely shown his face on the floor. But Porsche was almost always in their midst. Stuttgart was a place where distance was a part of the work environment and certain lines were just
not crossed. Porsche crossed them. The engineers in their clean white coats were offended when the plump little “professor” climbed under their test cars and growled at them for not having figured out things he could see quite clearly. They had to get their hands dirty, he said, and stop all this standing around.

Porsche was used to eliciting a strong response. He had no time to waste, however, and those who didn’t see his point were simply left behind. Some found him self-absorbed and rude, and whispered about his lack of education and his rough, country ways. Others, however, thought he was an inventive sage of some sort and respected him immensely, men who would follow Porsche anywhere. One such man was Karl Rabe.

In 1913, the twenty-year-old Rabe had been working at Austro-Daimler when he impressed Porsche by coming up with a solution to a design problem that had had everyone in the design office stymied for months, a problem having to do with how to provide adequate “claws” on the sides of military vehicles to help get them out of mud. The gentle, bespectacled Rabe came up with a beautifully simple design, and Porsche soon made him one of his right-hand men. But
it was just this kind of behavior that made it easy for some to find fault with Porsche. He did not follow protocol. When Rabe was only twenty-four years old, for instance, Porsche promoted him to departmental chief of design, a position many older and more experienced men in the office felt belonged to them. But Porsche liked Rabe,
and he trusted him. When Porsche left Austro-Daimler, Rabe had to stay in Austria for the time being, but the two would surely meet
again.

Arriving in Stuttgart in the first half of the 1920s, Porsche soon realized that it was not a good time to be doing business in Germany. Inflation was making life difficult, to say the least. It took so much money for his son Ferry to pay his streetcar fare to school that the boy could not even carry it all alone! To pay the men at the Daimler-Benz factory, the bills had to be brought over from the bank on a gigantic lorry. The entire world was on the brink of the
Depression, but there was a brief moment of calm before the storm. Not long after Porsche arrived in Germany, some began to talk of recovery and hope. The introduction of a new currency in 1924, the reichsmark, created a new stability and the stirrings of an optimistic spirit. A man named Gustav Stresemann was leading Germany on a new course, finding ways to juggle the difficult demands still in place from the Treaty of Versailles. In 1926, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for
his efforts. Germany was welcomed into the League of Nations, a sign that Europe was ready to accept it again.

But as usual, depending on which class and political group you were part of, there were at least two realities. There was Hitler’s party (and others) who were blaming the Weimar Republic for all the harsh conditions imposed after the First World War, and there were those who believed in what the new government was trying to do and saw real and visible strides there. On top of all this, there was the experimentation and creativity of Weimar Berlin. In Berlin,
culture and art were flourishing in ways they never had in Germany, as some of the world’s most inspiring and controversial people were gathering in a frenzy of music, writing, and art. This was a time when it was hard to walk ten steps down Berlin’s main tree-lined street (the Kurfürstendamm) and not see some important writer or artist sitting in one of the myriad cafés. Playwright Bertolt Brecht was easy to spot, for example, and people were often on the
lookout for the artist George Grosz.

The city of Stuttgart was much more traditional and conservative compared to Berlin, and it took Ferdinand almost a year to win its respect. He did get their attention, though, by designing a race car that blew the competition away. In fact, there are few times on record when the town of Stuttgart came together to welcome home a hero that can outshine the day in 1924 when race-car driver Christian Werner returned as victor of the Targa Florio with the Mercedes that
had been designed by Porsche. The main town square was filled with people smiling and cheering. The mayor even gave a speech. Porsche was asked to sign his name in the great golden book of the town (a bit like being offered the “key to the city” in the United States), and he was also awarded an honorary German doctorate from the technical college. The award was dedicated to Porsche “in recognition of his outstanding merit
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in the field of motor car construction and particularly as designer of the winning car in the Targa Florio 1924.” Stuttgart was offering Porsche a home.