Book Review: "The People's Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle" by Bernhard Rieger

The Volkswagen Beetle is the car that got me interested in Volkswagens, when I was four years old and rode in one owned by the mom of one of my friends.  I owned a 1972 Super Beetle when I was in my twenties.  What fascinates me about the Bug is that it means so many things to so many different people that it doesn't have a single history.  Oh, there are the basic facts about this basic car - designed by Ferdinand Porsche, championed by Adolf Hitler, saved by the British occupiers of northwestern Germany, a global phenomenon, an American icon, its long run ending in Mexico.  But the story has so many facets that you can read so many variations of the story and never get tired of it . . . or read the same history twice.  Bernhard Rieger's "The People's Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle" is yet  another fascinating take on an old tale.

Rieger, a university professor based in London, does a great service to the reader to explain how Germany was behind other European countries as well as the United States in mass motorization and how the example of Henry Ford's Model T led to the efforts in Germany to produce a "people's car" long before the Nazis assumed power.  The car's transformation from a symbol of fascism to a symbol of postwar West Germany's "economic miracle" is well documented and shows that, contrary to exhortations that Germans saw it as just a car that came and went, it symbolized rebirth and renewal for the Federal Republic and its people.  Rieger offers some surprises in his book - explaining how the British, who got Volkswagen up and running after World War II, largely ignored the Beetle when it began selling in the U.K. (even as it became the heart of the small-car market in the U.S.), or how it became a symbol of toughness and reliability in Mexico, where it was produced from 1967 to 2003. The Beetle, Rieger explains, ceased being German once the world embraced it.  And anyone who already knows how over-reliance on the Beetle almost led the VW company to the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1970s will find out just how close it came to collapse . . . and how the psychological impact of such a possibility on an already slowing West German economy then haunts the re-unified Germany to this day.

The book is not without its flaws.  In the penultimate chapter, Rieger writes that Volkswagen "morphed from a highly centralized multinational with a rigid global hierarchy between production centers into a transnational company in which the German headquarters retained firm control but whose product range and manufacturing operations took into account far more flexibly global demand and initiatives" in the 1990s, then spends the remainder of the book repeating this fact to drive the point home.  Carl Hahn, who was responsible for Volkswagen's success in the United States (and hired advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach to sell VWs to Americans) as president of Volkswagen of America and who laid the groundwork for the company's transnational character as its CEO in the 1980s, barely gets a mention - referring to his role in between as head of sales.  Also, the New Beetle of the late 1990s is discussed but not the current Beetle that replaced it.  But the book is a fast-paced page-turner that illustrates just how the Beetle evolved over the years and assumed multiple identities, becoming a microcosm of automotive history itself.  Among other VW Bug histories, only Andrea Hiott's recently published "Thinking Small: The Long Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle" is up to par with it.  (I'll review that later.)