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This was a disturbing change for British men like Colonel Radclyffe and Ivan Hirst, who had devoted themselves to the factory for the past three years. They found it very difficult when they were told it was time for them to leave. Nordhoff wrote a warm letter to Colonel Radclyffe.
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In his letter, Nordhoff thanked Radclyffe for laying the foundation that saved
the plant, and for the energy and spirit he had shared with Germany. He wrote the letter in English, and signed it “I am, dear Colonel, sincerely yours.” The elder Radclyffe died just months after returning to England. It’s been said that the change broke his heart.

On the other hand, Ivan Hirst was still very young, but he suddenly felt directionless. Those early years of urgency and perpetual emergency were giving way to a more peaceful, ordered time. Before Nordhoff came, before all the new laws and reforms, Hirst had felt like he was sailing in a violent storm. Suddenly, the waters were calm, and he was at a loss. The British
assigned him a new position in Hamburg, assisting with the zone’s transition
from British to German hands. The factory workers wanted to make a special VW for Hirst, as both a thank-you and goodbye, but he would not allow it. So they gave him a handmade miniature Beetle instead, a little model he would keep with him for the rest of his life.

Oddly, Nordhoff was quite cool in his farewell to Hirst (and would grow all the cooler in the following years, as Hirst tried to stay in touch with the VW plant). He’d written to Radclyffe in English, but with Hirst, Nordhoff wrote in German and the tone of the letter was formal and austere. Perhaps the reason is obvious, if ugly: Hirst had been a threat to Nordhoff’s power, a young and able man whom the workers liked. He’d been a constant presence
at the plant over the past year, while Radclyffe, operating in the executive offices many miles away, had not. Perhaps it was evidence that no matter how neutral Nordhoff tried to be, and no matter how good he had been to the workers, he certainly was not above insecurity and jealousy. After all, it was to Ivan Hirst that the factory owed much of the success it was now experiencing. But it was probably exactly that which Nordhoff found so hard to accept.

“In Manhattan
last week, newspapers ran double-truck ads with the word ‘Go’ in fifteen-inch-high type,”
¹
Time
magazine reported in September 1954, printing an entire story to commemorate the day Ohrbach’s department store left its “at-the-heels
quarters” on 14th Street and slid twenty blocks north to join the big fish uptown.
Go—
that was all the ad said, and yet everyone knew what it meant even before they took time to read the small print. DDB’s language was a language New York City was starting to understand.

Ohrbach’s was prospering, competing with Macy’s head-to-head. Its growing popularity was, at least in part, thanks to the ads coming from DDB: Its campaign had the whole city thinking Ohrbach’s was the best-kept secret in town. The day Ohrbach’s opened its new store, it made half a million dollars in profits. That was the same amount of money DDB had brought in for its entire first year! But DDB was growing in both profits
and popularity. Though they were not in the same league as agencies like J. Walter Thompson, which could bill $130 million in a year, DDB was holding steady at just under half that amount, but it was alive and on the move.

Nathan Ohrbach was still their primary customer. And they were doing well by him. DDB’s elegant and intelligent ads made shoppers feel they could “bargain-buy” with their heads held high, seeing through the façade of shopping at an overpriced store. “I found out about Joan,” one such ad read, going on to relate how the high society Joan had been spotted coming out of Ohrbach’s: Oh! So
that’s
how she
affords to look so good! Today the idea of bargain shopping is pretty standard, but back then it was the first time such an idea had been raised. DDB catered perfectly to the 1950s obsession with shopping, all the while cutting through the usual lies and somehow getting to the heart of the matter. Everyone wants to look like they are wearing the best clothes, but it didn’t matter how much the clothes actually cost. DDB was not only calling out the game of
keeping up with
the Joneses,
it was also (rather than asking them to give up the game) giving shoppers a way to do so intelligently. The ads generated an immediate sense of community, making customers feel like they were simply getting some good advice from a benevolent friend.

That same style and element of communality would carry over to other ads at DDB. Take Levy’s Jewish Rye, for example, an early client of theirs that would mature into one of their most celebrated accounts. The Levy ads took the fact that it was a Jewish product—something that could have seemed limiting in terms of the “focus group”—and spoke clearly and directly about just that “limitation,” transforming it into the
product’s
greatest strength. Getting on the subway, commuters looked up and saw Asian or Native American faces munching happily on Levy’s, and underneath the pictures were the words “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.” It just made sense, but it was also witty and fun and unpretentious—all qualities that people could instantly relate to. “Say something meaningful
²
—and say it in a fresh, provocative way.” That was how a later VP of copywriting summarized DDB’s overall approach, an approach that applied as much to the art as it did to the copy. It applied to the style and the copywriting, but it was also a new and risky way of thinking about the art. In the Levy’s ad, for example, there is a great deal of white space, and only one
image (the person munching the bread) is present to catch the reader’s eye, and the overall effect is certainly one of humor, but not in a sneering or unintelligent way: The ad invites empathy, it doesn’t “make fun.” It’s neither cruel nor sentimental; it’s real.

Such ads stood out like sore thumbs in the 1950s, and they caught the attention of many young writers and art directors in New York. DDB started getting résumés by the hundreds, and it was Phyllis Robinson, hair cropped short, wearing trendy, thick black-rimmed glasses, who mainly took on the job of hiring them. She knew what kind of people Bill wanted. It wasn’t a matter of big credentials or fancy degrees. Take Helmut Krone.
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Before he came to DDB, he wasn’t exactly a rising star. In his own words, once Phyllis and Bill hired him, he more or less copied Robert Gage and his work until he could find a voice of his own. Helmut was never a very confident man, especially not in his early years. He took everything personally. He could be extremely hard on himself, and excessively scrupulous. As Gage would
later say of Helmut; “He had the capacity for infinite pain.”
⁴
Nearly everything about him—from the language he used in daily conversation, to the style of the art he did—was geared toward precision, toward stripping things away, getting to the most essential. And rarely did he feel good about the result. At times it was as though he wanted to
erase himself from the face of the earth.

Born in a German enclave of Manhattan called Yorkville in
the summer of 1925, as a boy, Helmut Krone was surrounded by a community of people reluctant to integrate. They spoke German. They talked of the Fatherland. And when Hitler came to power, many of them rejoiced. Helmut would later admit that his mother had been “very right wing,” and somewhat “sympathetic with the Nazi Party.” Helmut was sent to a Wagnerian camp in
Long Island—Camp Siegfried—that was German-run and bore a close resemblance to the youth camps the Nazis were setting up for children in the Third Reich. Helmut would tell Julian Koenig that he’d been brought up as “a little Nazi,” but that wasn’t quite true. Helmut had always had a mind of his own. He distressed his mother, for instance, when he decided that Camp Siegfried simply was not for him; he had himself discharged and boarded the
train back home on his own, just like that.

Amazingly enough, Helmut’s parents were born in Germany very close to where Wolfsburg is today. They left Germany in the late twenties and his mother, Emilie, was pregnant at the time: Helmut was born just one month after they’d arrived on American shores. As Helmut grew, his parents told him many stories of Germany and their Lower Saxon village. But Helmut, as he would later say, always felt there was something about those stories that made the whole
country seem unreal.

Helmut had a complex relationship with his mother. His classmates would remember how much he’d loved her, but she was not always easy on him. In fact, on more than one occasion, Helmut’s mother told him he was worthless. Of course, in the very next sentence, she’d be telling him about all the great things she expected him to grow up and do. Around relatives and family friends, she would praise her son to the heavens—clearly smitten and
proud—and yet Helmut always felt a heavy pressure or stress when he considered his mother’s big dreams for him. In adult years, when talking about his childhood, Krone would often say
“A German son is always wrong till he’s proved himself to be right.”
⁵

Helmut’s father was the one who doted on the boy, at least when Helmut was a child. As he grew up, however, the two
grew distant: Otto watched his son sitting inside on sunny days and drawing and he criticized him for being too solitary:
Why don’t you go out and play with the other kids your age?
His father thought he needed to toughen his son up, make a man out of him. But when the Depression hit, Helmut’s father found
himself out of work and out of motivation, his health slowly deteriorated, and in 1939, just before the World’s Fair in fact, Helmut’s father died in his son’s arms. Emilie had gone out to get pain medication for Otto when it happened. Helmut was the only one home with his father for those last moments of his life. Helmut was twelve, and suddenly he was the man of the house.

At school, acting on the advice of one of his teachers, Helmut began calling himself Bud; his own name felt far too German and sinister. As he matured into his teens, he styled himself a bit like a character from an Oscar Wilde play, wearing full suits to school, sometimes even accenting them with elegant leather gloves and a porkpie brimmed hat. All those days of drawing had also paid off and he was accepted into the elite High School for Industrial Art. His classmates
there thought he was arrogant, but those closest to him realized it was only his deep and earnest struggle
to be clear
that made him appear as such. Even back then, he was always struggling to get to the meaning of things, frustrating himself with his inability to put things in the most crystal clear of terms. Arnold Burchess, one of “Bud’s” teachers who saw this inner struggle, recommended that Bud have a look at the work of the artists who had
comprised the Bauhaus school in Germany.
⁶

His teacher was right: Helmut was intoxicated by the art of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, and of the German Bauhaus as soon as he saw it, and that inspiration would lead him to study design and attend lectures at the “Design Laboratory” of Alexey Brodovitch’s New School classes in Manhattan. But once there, Helmut could never quite seem to own the inspiration he felt. He spent time in the East Village, just wandering pensively. During World War
II he was drafted into the navy and served time in the Pacific. Upon returning, he tried an ad job at
Sudler & Hennessey and eventually got fired. His work was good, but it was only when he made it to DDB that something extraordinary began to flower in him. Robert Gage and Bill Bern-bach were men he felt comfortable with, men he looked up to and respected. Bill’s openness freed him, Gage’s seriousness and deep appreciation of the Bauhaus
resonated with him. And there was of course that one essential link: Before being hired, in his interview with Phyllis Robinson, when Helmut was asked to name three people who’d had the most influence on his work, his answer was: “Paul Rand, Paul Rand, Paul Rand.”

The first time
Charlotte Nordhoff saw her new home in Wolfsburg, she burst into tears. She and the girls had been shuffled around so many times by then that she no longer expected their
lives to proceed any differently. She hardly remembered what it was like to have a real home, and it’s easy to understand why. When Heinrich finally felt ready to have his family join him, after nearly a
year of separation, Charlotte did not go with high hopes. She’d not heard good things about Wolfsburg. She knew it was still little more than a factory surrounded by a rough construction site.