author, journalist - Phil Patton

Chicago Sun Times
September 1, 2002
THE UNSQUASHABLE BEETLE
By Roger K. Mlller

The Volkswagen Beetle, Phil Patton says in Bug, is kind of like Zelig, the odd little nebbish in Woody Allen's mock documentary of that name, who magically appears in scenes with many key 20th century figures and has the chameleonlike ability to morph into representations of the people around him.

Or perhaps it's more like the boy in Guenter Grass' novel, The Tin Drum, who turns up at various points in German history, refusing to grow up yet subtly changing and maturing, and incessantly banging away on his drum.

At any rate, some combination of the two peripatetic images would neatly encapsulate what is expressed in the subtitle--The Strange Mutations of the World's Most Famous Automobile--of this generally winning book. In traveling the world, the Beetle has been both observer and observed, has affected cultures and been affected by them, has changed, yet, like The Tin Drum boy, remained essentially the same.

And more. Bug is both a history of the development and production of the vehicle and an analysis of its meanings and influences. In essaying the latter the author necessarily descends into the murky depths of socio- and psychobabble favored by admen and their ilk, but mostly he treads those waters well. Occasionally, as when discussing German history, he gets in over his head, but little harm is done to the overall theme.

The Beetle is, as the author says, "the best-known car of all time." More than 22 million have rolled out since 1941. Though VW halted production in Germany in 1978, it continued to be made elsewhere. It is still made in Mexico--where there are more Beetles than anywhere else in the world-- alongside the "New Beetle" of 1998.

Such facts and statistics are no minor attraction of the book. It is interesting to learn that Adolf Hitler--who as much as anyone was the impetus behind the Volkswagen, or "people's car"--thought "it should look like a beetle" for streamlining. And that the affectionate names Beetle and Bug sprang up spontaneously not just in German (Kaefer), but in other languages as well--coccinelle in French, fusca in Portuguese.

Relating only statistics, however, can be as fatal to a book as to a review. Fortunately, Bug covers much analytical and discursive territory, too.

Though the Beetle has been virtually a worldwide phenomenon, the focus here is primarily on Germany and the United States. It is oddly fitting that America took "Hitler's car" to its heart, just as it once did Henry Ford's Model T, because Hitler had been inspired by Ford's idea of a universal, inexpensive car. (They shared other, less benevolent notions as well, including virulent anti-Semitism.)

It was not trumpeted as Hitler's car, of course; for a long time there was not even a mention of the word "German." Sales did not begin to take off here until the second half of the 1950s. Then, after 1959, the launch date of "the most famous ad campaign ever," sales soared.

Patton covers the campaign well, showing how a relatively small ad agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, got the effects it wanted by tapping several wellsprings, particularly a counter-Detroit sentiment. That DDB was a "Jewish agency," with a Jewish founder and Jewish clients, helped disarm the Hitler connection.

In the United States, as in other countries, the Beetle tended to mutate slightly to fit its environment. The author likens it to Richard Dawkins' "selfish gene" concept: mutation or evolution to ensure survival, since survival is everything.

Let the military example stand for countless others. In World War II the German Wehrmacht adapted the Beetle as the Kubelwagen, roughly analogous to, though lighter than, the American Willys Jeep.

California, in the 1960s, produced a kind of Kubelwagen in the VW dune buggy, which Charles Manson at one point outfitted as a war-type vehicle. VW tried to tap into this market with The Thing. Finally, coming full circle, the Chenowth company transmogrified the dune buggy into almost literally a Kubelwagen for the Gulf War.

This thread of adaptability runs through the book. What the original Beetle and New Beetle, polar opposites mechanically, had in common, Patton writes toward the end, is "the suggestion that manufactured products might become mobile entities that attached themselves to human needs--things that used the people who used them."

By that not totally farfetched analysis, then, we should see the people's car give rise to the car's people. Could happen. After all, the Beetle, Patton says, has always rolled through history on "wheels of irony."

Roger K. Miller, a former Wisconsin newspaper editor who writes and reviews for several publications, has owned three Beetles and wishes he still had at least one of them.

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