Thinking Small (13 page)

It was a shining moment for both Stuttgart and Porsche, but as the years passed, even as Porsche designed some of the world’s best racing and luxury cars, the same old problems began cropping up: The German Daimler was no more interested in giving Porsche funds for trying a People’s Car than the Austrian company had been. It was only after years of negotiations that Porsche managed to proceed with several designs he had for a smaller car, and was able to
produce thirty test samples.
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But he was not happy with his work. He had tried to make a scaled-down version of a typical luxury car; but to build a Volkswagen, he would have to throw out these old blueprints and start from scratch.

Porsche was impatient, and once again, some executives at the company were frustrated with him, exhausted by his tirelessness, his constant demands for more money to build new kinds of cars. After Daimler decided to merge with Benz in
1926, Porsche found himself in yet another fix. Take a vacation, his bosses said, go to America for a while, have a look at the industry there, and when you come back, perhaps we can find another place for you, something
other than head engineer. Never a man to compromise, Porsche knew he had to find another job. The work he eventually found was for Steyr, a company in Austria, which meant the family would have to move countries once again. The family was able to keep their house in Stuttgart, however. Germany was not through with them yet.

Austria received Porsche back into their fold as though he were a hero coming back from war. But the Depression was close at hand now, and Porsche would be affected by it quickly. At the Paris Exhibition of 1929, thirty years after he’d shown his first car there, he exhibited his new Steyr models to a warm reception. He went back to his hotel room that night feeling confident, but as soon as he saw the evening paper, that feeling vanished: A main bank in Austria
was closing its doors. Unfortunately, the bank that was failing was Steyr’s bank, and the bank that was surviving—there were only two at the time—was the bank of Austro-Daimler, the very company Porsche had left with such angry words years before. Porsche knew what this meant: Steyr would soon be bought out by Austro-Daimler. And there was no way Porsche could work for Austro-Daimler again. It seemed there was no company where he truly belonged.

It was not an easy time. Here was a man who had designed some of the best luxury and racing cars in the world, and yet he didn’t own even one of those cars or designs: They all belonged to the companies for which he worked when he made them. None of the cars he’d designed for production carried his own name. He was almost fifty-five years old and weary from trying to work for others. It seemed the only option left to him was the option of striking out on
his own.

During the 1920s,
another young man was coming of age in Berlin: slender, blond, blue-eyed, with one of those oddly attractive gaps between his two front teeth, Heinrich Nordhoff was finishing his technical studies and looking for work. He’d set his hopes on finding a job in the United States. It was an unusual decision for a young man in those days, but by going to America, Heinrich felt he’d learn the
most about modern methods of automobile production and design. Like Porsche and Hitler, he too was an admirer of Henry Ford. But unlike them, Heinrich was equally energized by the ideas of the market economy and its role in industrialization. He was taken by Henry Ford’s ideas of service. Ford had motorized a population, but he had also been the first to pay his factory workers a high enough wage so that they too could participate in the marketplace and aspire to buying cars
and owning homes of their own. Hitler would make use of this in terms of propaganda; Nordhoff was interested in the literal possibilities of innovation and growth.

Heinrich came into the world on January 6, 1899, born just one year before the Paris Exhibition where Ferdinand Porsche received accolades for his electric automobile. He was the second son of a banker in a small German town called Hildesheim. Heinrich was eleven when his father’s company failed and the family, suddenly penniless, moved to Berlin to start a new life. It was a difficult time for the young boy, made even harder when, shortly after they’d
settled in Berlin, his mother fell ill and never recovered. Her untimely death left the three boys and their sister to be cared for by their father alone.

Throughout those years of his boyhood and adolescence, Heinrich watched as his father gave every ounce of energy to his work and his family, rising from bankruptcy to become the director of an insurance firm. His commitment left a deep impression on Heinrich, as did his father’s earnest Catholic faith.
Heinrich developed a religious sense of order and reverence, parts of him that only deepened with the loss of his mother and his encounter with
the First World War, a war that he would experience firsthand. Just before his sixteenth birthday, Heinrich stopped his studies and became a private in the army, where he was sent into battle and wounded in both knees. Unable to walk, he was sent home to recover, which he later did in full.

As much as Heinrich respected his father, he’d decided early on that he did not want to follow in his footsteps and become a banker or an insurance man. Heinrich wanted to study mechanical engineering instead. After the war, he enrolled in a technical high school and upon graduating, moved on to the Technical University in Berlin. By then, the 1920s were roaring and Berlin was a city of such culture and experimentation that any artistically inclined young man
could not help but be affected by the outpouring of emotion and expression. Heinrich was still living with his father, but the family had moved into an apartment that was in the heart of Berlin’s “Museum Island.” The streets he
walked each day were streets packed with galleries, theaters, and museums. Heinrich had a sketch pad that he carried with him, often drawing what he saw and taking notes on his surroundings.

There was one young artist in particular that made a deep and lasting impression on him. It was just after his mother had gotten ill. He’d wandered into a nearby museum and soon found himself standing in front of a painting called
Tower of the Blue Horses
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by Franz Marc, a near-cubist rendering of a family of blue horses stacked one behind the
other in a landscape of yellow and red. In Marc’s painting, the horses look stern, tender, and vulnerable all at once; their faces are basking in the light on the page, but they also appear nearly blinded by it. The painting radiates power, a natural animalistic power, sweet and disarming all at once. In the years before and during the war, museums throughout Germany had to protect Marc’s blue horses and other paintings from people who wanted to destroy them, enraged by
the feelings they conjured.

Heinrich stared at the painting of the blue horses for a long time that day. And he went back to look at it again and again. Something changed for him with that painting. He started reading the writings and letters of Franz Marc, writings about the power of the natural and animal world and about mankind’s need for a renewal of feeling. Reserved and quiet with most, Heinrich only wrote about these things in long letters to a childhood playmate of his named
Charlotte. She was his best friend, a girl he had met and become close to shortly after moving to Berlin. In his letters, he wondered if perhaps it was only in nature that beauty could be truly perceived in its full and honest form: “not halfway, not dishonest, not unfinished”
²
is what he said.

Franz Marc fought in the same war that Heinrich fought in, but Marc died on the battlefield in 1916. In one of Marc’s letters home dated June 21, 1915, the artist writes: “No one should pride himself
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on the belief that he is closer to ‘essence’ than others are. I prefer to have faith in others rather than in
myself … The
time of this world war is not more evil than any time of profoundest peace; within the loveliest peace, there is always a latent war; but the individual can free himself and can help others to do the same.”

Heinrich, in the midst of reading Marc’s work and thinking of him during this time, was inexplicably saddened by the news of the artist’s death. What had been an emotional, adolescent attraction for Marc’s work became something mature and rich for Heinrich now. Later, in his twenties, he would continue to think of Marc as he studied engineering, finding that the intrinsic power and design of natural forms also applied to technical and engineering
ideas. Streamlining, for instance, was a process that looked to animals and insects for the principles of movement and speed, and these were then applied toward designing the shape and curves of the motor car.

Streamlining was a hot subject in industrial circles at the Technical University in Berlin, and debate about the upcoming “machine age” was another. Heinrich had one exceptional teacher toward whom he gravitated regarding these topics. His name was Georg Schlesinger, and he was a Jewish professor and designer acutely interested in how factories and machines could be integrated into the human side of labor and work. Schlesinger wondered at how an excitement
for mass production could be understood and appreciated without the loss of man’s soul: he feared that mass forms of communication and transportation were moving so quickly that if one did not stop to consider their sociological implications, the results could be economically disadvantageous and take a dangerous toll on the human spirit. Factories were not new, after all, and neither was industry: what was new was the relationship between men and the way they thought about
their work. The new problems were psychological ones. As Schlesinger saw it, they stemmed from the effect of industry on a human’s sense of worth: if people were beginning to be thought of as “the mass,” where did that leave the individual? It was in such discussions with Schlesinger that Heinrich began to ponder the harder questions intrinsic to his various
interests and beliefs. He began to think seriously about the intersections between
machines, technology, ethics, and his Catholic faith.

Schlesinger had studied the type of assembly line that had been invented and introduced in the United States by Henry Ford; he was aware of the immense benefit and profit the moving assembly line was bringing to America (it would increase efficiency 25 percent, and between 1920 and 1929 the number of cars bought and sold in the United States would increase by 2.6 million), but he was equally aware of the problems the United States now had when it came to labor issues
and discrimination. In Detroit, even with changes like Ford’s five-dollar day, workers often found themselves stuck in monotonous jobs with no rights or voice in regard to the conditions of the factory or the amount of heavy labor they were expected to do. Workers’ unions were struggling to form, and it was a battleground at times, with people getting beaten or even shot. Strikes became commonplace as workers tried to find and assert their own human rights in a machine
age but were denied legal unionization. And business owners struggled to balance the new demands of the industrial world, one that (seemingly) required that more be produced for less.

It was one of the immediate problems that Fordism created. With the moving assembly line (started in 1913), Ford could produce many more cars at much cheaper prices, and the demand for cheaper cars was certainly there, but this required huge amounts of human energy. With the surge of customers, Ford needed more workers, but because the conditions of the factories were designed to maximize production, the conditions were unregulated and thus quickly became deplorable.
Workers could not bear it for long; thus, in response, Ford had decided to double the average factory salary at that time, announcing that workers would now get a proper wage that in turn allowed Ford to run three shifts at the plant and workers flocked to get the high pay. Still, it wouldn’t take long for them to demand better
working conditions as well. In raising wages, Ford had only addressed one side of the problem. Nevertheless, it was the beginning of
the modern American middle class—now workers could buy the inexpensive cars they were producing, and own their own homes. But it was also the beginning of a new consciousness about what workers were entitled to, and what work meant. And many of those workers were immigrants from Europe: In fact, in the early 1900s, the most common ethnic background to be found at Ford was German, and English came after that. It was this influx of foreign workers that allowed such rapid
industrialization to take place. And it was also yet another factor adding to America’s new sense of unrest.