The Real Mad Men by Andrew Cracknell Page B

written would never have been created.
    The task was utterly daunting; to sell a small, basic, ugly, economical, foreign car to a market enthralled with huge, chrome-finned, gadget-stuffed, home-built gas guzzlers. Initially, a number of the people who worked on the Volkswagen (VW) account had misgivings. With the revelations of the full horrors of the Holocaust little more than a decade old, Bernbach, although clearly not bothered himself, had to make considerable effort to persuade his agency to take the account in the first place. As George Lois said, “We have to sell a Nazi car in a Jewish town.” Lois’ parents had emigrated to the US from central Greece before the war, and he was implacable in his opposition; tales of Axis behavior in Greece hadn’t endeared him to any idea of cooperation.
    Additionally, the business was at DDB only as a sprat to catch a mackerel; one of Bernbach’s attempts at talking Lois around was to tell him, “We’ll take it for just a year and use it to get GM.” It’s probable he meant it too; it seems a perfectly reasonable business decision, if a little cynical. And itworked later in a different category—their much lauded campaign for El Al netted American Airlines in 1962.
    Lois remained unpersuaded, but international events took a hand. He was sitting in his office one day: “It had those fogged glass windows and I could see Bill lurking outside. Then he opened the door a crack and stuck his head round the corner, like in The Shining —’Heeeere’s Johnny!’—and said, ‘Look at this’. Then he shoved a newspaper through the gap and held it up so I could read the headline; ‘Germany sells fighter jets to Israel’. He said ‘It’s alright, see?’ So eventually I agreed.”
    Discontent rumbled on though. Lois remembers one prank when he made a small “flip” book with a VW logo on the bottom of the first right-hand page. As you flipped the pages, the legs and arms of the VW symbol quickly and neatly rearranged themselves—into a swastika.
    He was showing it to a bunch of creative people when Bernbach walked by. “Hey Bill, Bill, hey, come here, have a look at this.”
    Bernbach watched the little dance of digits, expressionless.
    â€œVery funny George—now burn it.”
    Lois went to work on the station wagon, the even less glamorous variant and only alternative to the basic “saloon.” “Basic” is the operative word for the then very alien VW.
    THE BEETLE —although not referred to as such by VW until the late sixties—already had a toehold in the United States, thanks to US servicemen returning from Europe. It was originally designed by Ferdinand Porsche as the KdFWagen ( Kraft durch Freude Wagen , literally “Strength through Joy Car”) in 1933, under the patronage of no less than Adolf Hitler. By September 1939 mass production had still not started, and then with the outbreak of hostilities across Europe, the VW Wolfsburg factory was converted to wartime vehicle production. It wasn’t until the war was over that the first models started to leave the plant, when the factory was restored to car manufacture under the management of two British army officers, Colonel Charles Radclyffe and Major Ivan Hirst, producing cars for the transportation of the occupying forces.
    As a concept, it was a good one. The objective was a car designed to be uncomplicated, reliable, and inexpensive. It was to be within the reach ofevery German family, to enjoy the new freedom of the burgeoning autobahns of the 1930s. The engine was air-cooled, as simple as a contemporary motorcycle engine. Mounting it in the back avoided the need for a transmission and the hump of a transmission tunnel on the floor between the rear seats, which made the car even simpler. It also created more room inside a comparatively small cabin. The floor pan, chassis, and suspension