Authors: Andrea Hiott
In the Tate Modern
in London, a museum that sits on the south bank of the River Thames, it’s possible to walk in for free, ride up the escalator, and see a Paul Klee painting called
Walpurgisnacht.
This painting is a wash of swirling blues, adept but playful, and after looking at it for a moment, the dancing eyes of spirits materialize, tucked between its thick strokes. Klee’s title,
Walpurgisnacht
(Walpurgis Night), refers to a kind of “Day of the Dead” or Halloween-like holiday celebrated by some people in Germany. But Walpurgis Night is not a time for costumes and candy; rather it’s a night that celebrates the coming spring, a time for communing with nature, a time when spirits and fairies and witches might haunt the night. Observed mainly in the mountain towns of Germany now, people gather together to build bonfires and
dance. It’s a potent night in German literature, playing a role in Goethe’s
Faust
as well as in
The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann.
Walpurgis Night is also the night before the 1st of May (May Day). May 1 has a long history, having been previously celebrated in Wilhelmine Germany as “International Workers’ Day”; but the holiday took a bloody turn in 1929 as workers’ parties clashed and over thirty people were killed. Capitalizing on the split in workers’ parties at the time, the NSDAP used the disturbance to gain more support. Once the Nazis came to power, May 1
was transformed into an official national holiday, and was renamed “Day of Work” by Adolf Hitler. The Nazis made it into a mass event. Today, it is still called “Day of Work” in Germany, but it’s hard to say what the event is really about anymore. In
Berlin, for example, there are usually riots that start on Walpurgis Night; in my experience, they have a young, anarchist feel, charged with energy, but vague in intent. One thing
is certainly clear, though: While work was, and is, important in all countries, Germany has had an especially long history of meditating about it
as an idea.
A big part of this is well articulated by the close tie between Walpurgis Night and May Day; together, the two holidays are a matter of both spirit and body, and the line where they meet. Walpurgis Night is ethereal and easily romanticized, but May Day speaks to an inner, stolid self-reliance, a belief in the
individual’s right and responsibility to contribute to his or her community. This contribution was an essential and uncompromising part of the German idea of labor, and every party that has come to power in the country has understood as much, especially the NSDAP. As it so happens, the evening of the day Adolf Hitler killed himself was the start of Walpurgis Night (April 30, 1945), and the following day was May 1, the Day of Work. And three years after his suicide,
Hitler’s legacy had come to weigh heavily on Germany and its industries.
Heinrich Nordhoff was experiencing this for himself at Volkswagen. He’d been on the job for five months, was still sleeping in the factory, and the problems were as numerous as ever. Wolfsburg and the plant were plagued by a lack of housing, a lack of raw materials, a lack of men, and a lack of motivation and unity. Because of all this lack, sometimes cars that were started could not even be finished; rubber door seals might suddenly be unavailable, or there
would be a shortage of side panels to install. At one point the entire upholstery line had to shut down because there were no springs for the front seats. Some months, the turnover rate was more than 90 percent. The town, and the work, offered little incentive for people to stay.
In part, this was because inflation had made money practically worthless, but there was also an imbalance in what Karl Marx called a “metabolism with nature,” the symbiosis between a person’s productivity and his or her inner experience of labor and work between the manual and the spiritual, body and mind.
Nordhoff knew all about the problems that could arise when such a balance was off. He’d first studied the possibility
of such complications in his days with Schlesinger, then had followed them from afar by paying close attention to the news about the labor and union fights at the leading factories in America (especially GM, as he was technically one of its employees). Now, he found himself face-to-face with them in his own factory. Nordhoff knew the VW factory workers were missing this: They had no real connection to the factory, the country, or the job.
The very words “labor” and “work” had accumulated all kinds of connotations over the years, having been explicitly associated with the revolution, with Communism, and most recently with socialism and the Nazi regime. Work was still deeply important to Germans, but the relationship of that work to authority was tenuous. As Ivan Hirst had found upon his arrival, many workers were so used to being told what to do that taking initiative on their
own did not come easily, and yet, there was also a lack of respect for authority, a lack of trust. The real difficulty faced at Volkswagen and elsewhere in the country was no longer how to mass-produce or whether mass production was necessary—the past ten years had made those things obvious—but rather how to do it
in Germany again.
How could German workers take pride in their craft? Feel a sense of loyalty without hurting anyone or being hurt? Would Germany
ever again be able to think of itself as a positive contributor to Europe and the Western world? Because of Hitler, Germany was no longer respected or trusted by much of the Western community, and the situation was still volatile. Totalitarianism had been defeated in the war, but it was not necessarily dead. As the right-wing graffiti at the Volkswagen factory showed, that extremist tendency was still there, and it could rise again. The trick was figuring out how to ease into healthy
forms of leadership instead. Tied up in that was the fact that government and industry needed to develop a responsible relationship; not only would they have to coexist, they would have to help one another to grow.
Heinrich thought about such things, and worried over them. With prominent German publications like
Die Zeit
insinuating that the Volkswagen factory was still under Hitler’s dark cloud, with umbrellas still being used throughout the plant to shield workers and staff when it rained, with cars being made mainly for the occupying forces, and with new bids and the threat of possible takeovers in the air at every step, the potential for
following through on the original idea of the Volkswagen and motorizing the population looked grim. Germany was a poor country now. And for those who did have money, the Volkswagen either conjured uncomfortable images of Nazi times, or else was written off as a product of “the Allies’ plant.” The British had saved the Volkswagen factory. But saving the factory and getting it to run smoothly as a German company were very different things.
On top of these concerns, Nordhoff also found the factory itself strikingly inefficient. When he arrived, he calculated that it was taking the workers at least 300 hours to build just
one
car. This inefficiency was due to a great lack of communication, both between the men on the line, between different areas of the company, and also because there was no standardization of the actual assembly procedure, with the machines laid out chaotically on the factory
floor. Nordhoff had seen enough of Detroit to know that proper arrangement was necessary for maximum efficiency. He reshuffled the lines and machines, slowly putting the puzzle together again, restoring and augmenting Porsche’s original floor plan. The station for the final assembly of the car’s body, for example, was shifted so that it was in the same area as the paint shop (which was the car’s next stop), and both these stations were placed in Hall 3. The press
shop, where the outer chassis of the car was made, was placed in the preceding hall, Hall 2. He also divided tasks and streamlined assembly so that each worker had a very clear outline of what he was supposed to do and how to quality-check that specific task.
There was no Technical Development Department before Nordhoff decided that a much greater emphasis needed to be
placed on improving and developing the inner workings of the car. This was the kind of necessary initiative that Ivan Hirst had found lacking in Hermann Münch, the man who led the plant before Heinrich arrived. Nordhoff was also constantly on the lookout for new kinds of machinery and made steps toward bringing in new equipment as
soon as possible, so that the teams working to improve and innovate the car had all they might need. The war had actually destroyed many old procedures and obsolescent equipment, thus moving production forward was not always a matter of rebuilding so much as it was of finding new, fresh methods. The situation
required
creativity, and Nordhoff noticed this early on and took advantage of it, giving workers the feeling that they were starting something new together, and being
clear about his desire to rearrange the plant in a way that would raise the quality of the product while simultaneously reducing costs.
But that wasn’t the only reshuffling that was done. Nordhoff also reconfigured the budget; 1949 was the first year the factory was given a firm fiscal plan based on selling 40,000 vehicles. Each individual department within the larger company was aware of this plan and of the part it must play. This kind of clarity had a very big effect on the change in efficiency at the plant. Expenditures were now accounted for, as was every piece of machinery and every tool
within the plant. The attention to such details paid off considerably: Manufacturing costs of the Volkswagen car had been 3,312 DM at the start of 1949 and by the end of that same year they were 3,072 DM—more than 200 DM under budget, an amount that quickly added up. And that was for cars sold within the country. Exported cars also came in below their budgeted cost, the new fiscal plans resulting in a decrease of 138 DM per car. The budget was also set up so that a quarter of
all profits went back into the factory to be used for updates and repairs. Looking all day at destroyed walls and crumbling roofs was not good for the psyche: To work as a whole, the optics needed to be whole too.
All these changes carried over to the management staff as
well. Heinrich wasted no time in reconfiguring the power structure and delegating new people to new tasks, a rather unpopular move, but one he felt had to be done. In the postwar chaos, positions had been filled in a feverish dash. Now it was time to reevaluate. If things were going to work on a long-term basis, Nordhoff thought, there needed to be a structure based on skill. While he would
always need the previous managers and the Works Council more than he liked to admit, as the months passed Nordhoff weaned himself from them as much as possible, putting aside the temptation (or some might say, the responsibility) of trying to please former executives and office staff. According to historians Mommsen and Grieger, a kind of “industrial feudalism”
1
ensued as Nordhoff created a management that revolved around himself.
In this new structure, much of the decision-making power was located with him, the general manager. Beneath him, much like the organization of General Motors that had been developed by Sloan, there were the heads of the departments such as production, personnel, and technical development. While such structure is common today, it revolutionized the Volkswagen factory and introduced a very modern and new kind of organization into German industry, one pioneered in the
country by Opel under GM. But at the time of all this new structure, the factory was still an occupied organization, and though they now stepped far into the background, the British board remained at the helm: Heinrich was ultimately accountable to them.
Nordhoff was a complicated mix of Germany and America; he’d learned a great deal from both countries. From Germany, there came a desire for quality work and austere order, but so too there came a belief in authority that was not always neutral. From America, there came the innovative ideals of taking care of the customer and the worker, of service and attention to the conditions of labor within a plant—ideas that Heinrich often
implemented more sincerely than their American originators once had. Nordhoff believed, for example, that Henry Ford’s initial practice of respecting the workers and giving them a good quality of life—allowing them the opportunity to be customers of the products of their own labor—had been the secret behind Ford’s success. But he could also see how such practices fall apart, the workers themselves becoming power-hungry and losing track of their own
best interests and goals. Ford had revolutionized working conditions in large part to solve the problem of attrition, of the large turnover rate. This decision had been praised as an act of good will—and it
was
an act of good will—but because it was also an act with an eye to maximize profits, it wasn’t long before the profits became the sole focus and the workers again had to fight to keep and improve their rights.
Nordhoff didn’t want unions and strikes and violence. To avoid them he’d have to try to give his workers what they wanted and needed before they even knew they wanted or needed it, and he’d have to do it with more awareness: Reciprocal altruism worked, as Ford’s early years had proven, but it would last only if it truly took care of both sides (management and workers) proportionately. Thus, Nordhoff not only made radical moves in terms of
payment and benefits for the workers, he also saw to more personal reformations, like ensuring that his workers’ homes were equipped with real beds (up until May 1949, many individual workers slept on wood-shaving-filled sacks).
Nordhoff also noticed the conflicted feelings his men had about being occupied, and thus about the British staff, and he was able to capitalize on those feelings: He was “one of them,” a statement that could generate great feelings of loyalty in those days. Nordhoff understood the need many had for an authoritative figure—much as Ivan Hirst himself had noticed when he arrived—and Heinrich was in a position to use that feeling to inspire a new
sense of cohesion between the staff and the management of the plant; in essence, between the workers and himself.
It was exactly what the factory needed: a figure of authority who believed in American-style business ideas but nevertheless was grounded in a German idea of work. An American could not have done it. But nor could a German who was still looking to the models of his country’s past for solutions for the future.