Thinking Small (59 page)

Those three days of music and communal life still live on in the nation’s collective psyche, even for the many generations born long after Woodstock took place. Over the years, the festival has taken on a somewhat mythical aura; it has solidified in America’s collective memory as one of the most definitive statements
of the American counterculture, the zenith of the hippie movement, that iconic place where Jimi Hendrix’s guitar
half-sang and half-wept the national anthem, expressing the tumultuous experience of a country that was torn, having just experienced one of the worst years in American history,
¹
a year in which both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been shot.

Today, attending large concerts or festivals is something many of us have done, but such events were not a common occurrence in 1969. And even by today’s standards, Woodstock remains an awesome mass event. Today, at capacity, Madison Square Garden in New York City can hold about 19,700 people. With around 500,000 attendees at its peak, Woodstock had approximately twenty times that amount of people coming together (and living together!) on the same plot of land
for three days, one of the first times so many had come together to commune through music.
²
At a time of great conflict and pain in America—alongside the murders of King and RFK, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated earlier in the decade, and the war in Vietnam raged and divided the American public to a degree that had not been seen since the Civil War—the
youth came together in a spirit of celebration, love, and hope. And the country noticed: Woodstock was the moment when the people in America who had once been considered misfits began to transform into the very people whose voices would endure.

Woodstock could not have happened without the revolutions in transportation and communication that had taken place over the previous twenty years. The Woodstock festival was held on a piece of farmland that could be reached only by car. Pictures taken by people on their way to the festival show roads dotted with Volkswagen Bugs and Buses. True to the dream out of which it was created, the Volkswagen had become the first car to motorize the German population, but it had
also become the first car for many young people in other countries, including America, as evidenced by the driving choices of the generation that created and attended Woodstock. But the car had also been embraced by Americans of all ages and all walks of life. In fact,
it was America that first named the car the Beetle: the
New York Times,
viewing the car in 1938, had called it a “beetle,” and years later, once the car began to sell in the
States, the name stuck. Later, it was even translated to German and officially adopted by Volkswagen; the car was called “
der Käfer
” (beetle) there, too. Ferdinand Porsche’s design had not only endured; it had become the symbol for a whole new generation. And it still looked almost exactly the same as it had in those early sketches that had littered his workshop’s floor.

But just as Woodstock was the climax of a revolutionary decade, 1969 was the year when the original Beetle design reached the climax of its tremendous popularity. That climax was both a kind of ending and a moment of new beginnings. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died in 1970, and Jim Morrison followed them in 1971. The war in Vietnam came to a close. The Civil Rights bill (passed in 1964 thanks to the support of President Lyndon Johnson) was coming into effect, and
desegregation and a newfound respect for diversity slowly began to take root. The political youth movement dwindled, changing form. The country began to stabilize, to recover from the aftermath of the war and the deaths of many great political leaders and cultural icons, but the voices that had defined the sixties would persist. Over time, the memory of those influential men and women gave the
country new strength and inspiration; their unnecessary deaths at such
young ages motivated others to search for greater clarity. Many legends would emerge from the 1960s, and in its own small way, the Volkswagen Beetle would be among them.

Throughout the 1970s, the original Beetle design would become known as one of the most versatile pieces of technology (especially automotive technology) in the world, with its engine being used to power everything from the Zamboni ice resurfacer to the landmark rotating Mercedes-Benz sign that sits on top of the Europa Center in the heart of old West Berlin. That same design had also led to the creation of the beautiful Karmann Ghia, a coupe and convertible that was
produced from 1955 to 1974 by VW, which used the basic mechanics and chassis of the Beetle.

In total, 21.5 million Beetles had been sold by 1979, having surpassed the Model T’s sales record as early as 1973. But as the seventies came to a close, the new market of small and affordable cars that had sprung up in response to the Beetle’s popularity—alongside new technology, new regulations in emissions and safety standards, and the switch to using unleaded gasoline—slowly eased the original VW out of production. Wolfsburg introduced a
new staple car—the Volkswagen Golf. The generation that grew up in the 1980s in Germany is sometimes referred to as the “Generation Golf,” because so many of them bought the car, which was modern and fresh with state-of-the-art technology. Thus the old Beetle vanished quickly from the German market. And although the Golf didn’t sell well in the United States (where it was known as the Rabbit), as Germany slowed and eventually stopped production on the
original Beetle, it soon disappeared from the American market as well. The last original Bug was sold in the United States in 1979.

The Beetle was born in Germany and became an American star, but it was in Mexico that it got its last and perhaps sweetest
farewell. Though it was no longer sold in Europe or the States, the original design continued to be produced in Mexico and Brazil until 2003. But at 9:05 a.m., on July 30, 2003, the very last Volkswagen of the original Porsche design (number 21,529,464) rolled off the assembly line to the sound of a mariachi band. As the
musicians played
“El Rey”
(“The King”), preparations were made for the car to be transferred to Wolfsburg where it would live the rest of its days in the Wolfsburg Auto Museum. The last original Beetle was painted a sweet Aquarius blue, and its headlights looked surprisingly large underneath all the flowers that were placed on its hood that day.

In many ways, the Beetle was Mexico’s first People’s Car too—its presence there was and is very strong. Because the people were so sad to see the original little Beetle go, a whole campaign was created to say goodbye to it. One of the television ads showed a very small parking space. Each big car that tried to fit into the space failed and had to leave. Finally, the words
Es increíble que un auto tan pequeño deje un vacío
tan grande
(It is incredible that a car so small can leave such a large void) fill the screen. A memorable print ad showed a 1964 Beetle on one side of the page and a 2003 Mexican Beetle on the other. The 1964 Beetle was the very model that was made the year the factory had opened in Puebla, and the 2003 Beetle was the last original Beetle to be produced there. Underneath the first car were the words
Erase una vez …
(Once upon a time …) and
underneath the second car
Fin
(The end).

But was it?

When Franz Marc
(the young artist who had made such an impression on the adolescent Heinrich Nordhoff) was fighting in the First World War, he wrote in a letter home: “An observation
that has
¹
plagued me through my military life is the eternal return of the same types of people. I often feel that there exists only a limited number of individual human types … In the same sense, ‘events’ are repeated unbelievably often if one has a somewhat somnambulistic feeling for this and ‘sees’ them … It is not an idle thought, for it reaches deeply into the secret of artistic creation; perhaps it is even its explanation … The True has always been true.… ”

Many economists, politicians, mathematicians, writers, philosophers, and artists have spoken of this idea of repeating events and reincarnations; for example, Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence, Jung’s studies on archetypes, or Ernst Haeckel’s biological analyses and drawings collected in
Art Forms in Nature.
Indeed, when looking at many of the themes that reverberate through the VW story—the destruction caused by war, the idea of “making the world safe for democracy,” discussions about the free market and capitalism, the balance between manipulation and persuasion, and struggles over human and civil rights—it does seem that these motifs have recurred again and again in different ways and at different times throughout the history of civilization itself.

Toward the end of the 1990s (when I was a teenager), a lot of the music we listened to, the clothes we wore, and even the ideas we had about politics and peace and war were recurring from the 1960s, a decade whose narrative we’d all somehow absorbed. We were attracted to that narrative for reasons we didn’t really understand but that had to do with things teenagers instinctively hunger for—exploration, acceptance within a group, something to take you outside of yourself and connect you to a bigger picture—and our ideas of Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, The Doors, John Lennon, Miles Davis, Andy Warhol, and the reverberating legacies of men like John F. and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., became ways for us to connect to that bigger picture: They might’ve represented the spirit of the 1960s, but that spirit was alive and potent for us.

As Thomas Frank writes in
The Conquest of Cool,
many
Americans who became teenagers in the 1990s “understand ‘the sixties’
²
almost instinctively as the decade of the big change, the birthplace of our own culture, the homeland of hip, an era of which the tastes and discoveries and passions, however obscure their origins, have somehow determined the world in which we are condemned to live.” As 1990s teenagers, we were different from teens of the 1950s, and the notion that had changed us was what the 1960s had come to represent: As young people, we were more collectively aware of the power that
the people
can have, especially young people, and of the complex responsibility that such freedom entails.

With the 1990s being so linked to the 1960s in its recurring themes, it’s no surprise (in retrospect) that the ’90s were the decade that gave the Beetle new life. Just about anyone in the 1990s would have said the primary image—and often the
only
image—that came to mind when the word “Volkswagen” was heard was the Beetle. Yet the Beetle was no longer for sale, and hadn’t been for over ten years. Two young designers, J Mays and Freeman Thomas, who were working for the Audi Volkswagen design studio started to ask: Why?
Why
wasn’t there a Beetle? In the years since the original Beetle had gone off the market, the car’s reputation had only grown; it seemed it could be possible to bring back the Bug or to make a whole
new
Bug. The very idea was thrilling, and Mays and Thomas worked earnestly on a new design for the car. The style they came up with was basic and geometric; in profile, it looks like just three semicircles: one big one (the body) placed on two smaller ones, which represent the wheels. The design carried all the simplicity and playfulness that people remembered and loved from the original Bug. Many comments were made about how soft and feminine it was; Ferdinand Porsche’s grandson, Ferdinand Piëch (the man who would eventually succeed Carl Hahn as chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen), even described it as “womblike.”

The concept car for the New Beetle (called Concept One) was created in the early 1990s and first shown at the 1994 Detroit Auto Show, but with utmost secrecy, as Germany had not yet committed to producing it. Many doubted they would ever commit. But the response in the United States was huge. People were ecstatic over the car. There was clearly a desire for Concept One to become a reality; the American people wanted a New Beetle. Word about Concept One spread fast after the show, and car magazines went wild discussing it, speculating about whether it would ever be built. Major publications like the
Wall Street Journal
even put the car design on their front pages. For such a small car, the New Beetle was a very big deal.