The 'Good German' Goes Global: the Volkswagen Beetle as an Icon in the Federal Republic

Abstract

Drawing on company and legal records as well as the West German press, this article employs the Volkswagen Beetle for a study of how West Germans made sense of their country and its place in the world after 1945. First, it examines how the public adopted the car as a prominent symbol of dynamic reconstruction during the Fifties and Sixties. Despite wide knowledge about its Third-Reich origins, the Volkswagen soon emerged as an icon of the new domestic order because, by advancing mass motorization, it satisfied previously unattainable consumer dreams. Moreover, its attractiveness hinged on its technical dependability, which contemporaries read as an indicator of the solidity of a postwar order built on affluence. Second, West Germans took the car’s success abroad as a signal of their country’s acceptance within an international, American-led order that assigned the Federal a secondary role. That the Volkswagen concern developed into a multinational company wielding considerable power in Latin American countries like Mexico left no imprint on the Beetle’s iconography in Germany. Interpretations of Beetle thus supported conceptions of West Germany as a small, affluent country with limited international economic power that continued to inform German debates on globalization in the new millennium.

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