Wirtschaftswunder

This week marks the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which has me thinking about where and when the VW 1500 Karmann-Ghia got its start and about its historical significance.

The are many different reasons that people are drawn to the 1500 Ghia. Some appreciate it for its relative rarity. Others see in it an opportunity to own an affordable and reliable coachbuilt classic. Some just like the unique lines. For me it's all of the above, but I'm also interested in what the Ghia meant in its historical context. In a symbolic way, its design was an interesting automotive example of the so-called "German economic miracle," or Wirtschaftswunder.


["People's Dream Car," Hobby magazine, December 1961]

Nearly fifty years on it's easy to lose sight of the context in which the 1500 Ghia was developed. Germany was still a recently defeated, divided country that was the front line of the Cold War, and tensions between East and West were very high, the two Germanys representing the geopolitical conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union by proxy. While the new VW 1500s were being unveiled in Frankfurt in late 1961 the Berlin Wall was literally under construction. It was a tense and dangerous time for the world.


[East German workers building the Berlin Wall, November 1961. From Wikipedia Commons.]

Against this backdrop of competing political ideologies, a related competition between economic theories was playing out. The Wirtschaftswunder was the rapid economic recovery that West Germany experienced after the war, the result of both U.S. economic aid under the Marshall Plan and the revaluation of its currency. By the late 1950s, just over ten years after the widespread destruction and defeat of the war, West Germany was experiencing a surprising prosperity. While East Germany, under Soviet influence, attempted to separate itself from the horror and shame of its recent past through the creation of a socialist society, the West chose a kind of amnesia through all-out consumerism. A growing middle class found itself with money to spend and suddenly there were a lot of things to spend it on—fully stocked supermarkets, consumer electronics, modern furniture, and of course a wide selection of automobiles.


[A spotlessly modern VW/Porsche showroom in Karlsruhe with mid-century American furniture and abstract expressionist art, from VW Informationen no. 50, 1960]

It was into this cultural environment that the VW 1500s were introduced. Basic transportation—the immediate postwar need that the Beetle and other small cars addressed so effectively—was no longer sufficient. There was consumer interest in larger, more comfortable, more style-conscious cars, with design that pointed optimistically toward a bright, modern future and away from the horrific past and the potentially apocalyptic present. The original Karmann-Ghia is an early example of this tendency, but the larger, more luxurious 1500 Ghia, with its flamboyant, American-influenced styling, was an even more pointed rejection of both the past and the East. The fact that it was also a Volkswagen, with the attendant connotations of everyday transportation for all, underscores the point with a touch of irony. This was a different kind of "people's car" for a newly confident, wealthier, and more materialistic people.

Type 3 engline lid graphics

As a followup to a recent discussion among Type 34 Ghia owners about how to reproduce the "auf/zu" graphics that appear on every Type 3 engine lid, I've created high resolution vector pdf artwork based on direct scans of an original 1963 lid that Everett Barnes supplied. This version of the graphics was used from 1963 until sometime after 1966, when the letters O and C were replaced by the words Open and Closed. The pdfs can be downloaded and used in a number of ways to recreate the graphics.



[Everett's engine lid scans]

The easiest way to do it would probably be to have a sign shop use their plotter to cut a graphic in black vinyl (matte black vinyl would probably look best). As a reference for position, the dashed line triangular shapes on the graphics correspond to the recesses for the handles, though placement was probably a little different on every car. The files are actual size. If you're not familiar with how to apply vinyl graphics your sign shop should be able to advise you. I would recommend dry application.

A sign shop could also make the graphic as a stencil that you could apply to the surface if you would rather use paint. Another suggestion was to have wood blocks laser cut and use them to block print the graphics with printing ink. I suppose rubber stamps could also be made and used the same way.

Click the images below to download the pdfs, and if you try using them to make graphics for your car please let me know how it goes.

In order to form a more perfect Notchback

Jason Weigel (a.k.a. Notchboy) is embarking on a comprehensive detailing project on his low-mileage, all-original and already nearly perfect '63 sunroof Notchback. He started a video blog thread on thesamba.com so we can follow along on his progress.



You can follow the thread here.

VW 1500: der große Personenwagen

Similar to another scale model that I wrote about a couple of years ago, this bus model carries an ad for the VW 1500. I'd like to think that ads like this were all over the streets in West Germany in the early '60s. Are models like this based on documentary photos of street scenes?

[image swiped from an eBay auction]

Factory-style key tags

Jeff Grant (a.k.a. "Anchovy" on thesamba.com) has started offering these cool reproduction aluminum key tags stamped to order with your VIN for just $12.



When VWs were originally delivered the keys came with an identifying tag like this. Our '65 Squareback's keys still had their original tag—lucky for us, as most were discarded by the original owners. Though the tags became increasingly thin and more crudely stamped as the years went on, the '58 tag Jeff modeled his reproduction on was cut in a nicely rounded shape from heavy-gauge aluminum.

It's the perfect key fob for your set of original keys. Go here to order yours.

'41 Tatra joyride

A couple of weeks ago Jonny Lieberman sent me a text message from the back seat of a Tatra T87. He had gone to a meeting of the local Citroen club and met Paul Greenstein, owner of many interesting and unusual cars including the T87, and he said I needed to drop everything and head over to Echo Park right away to see it. About 10 minutes later I was standing in front of Paul's immaculately restored 1941 Tatra, which recently returned to Los Angeles from the Czech Republic, where it was on display in the Tatra Museum. Incredible car—larger than you might think from photographs, the black teardrop coachwork with its central fin and three headlights suggesting some sort of art deco Batmobile from an alternate future. Paul asked if we wanted to go for a ride, and we were like...yeah!



Here's Jonny's cameraphone shot from the back seat as we made our way around the Silver Lake reservoir. The T87 felt right at home on the neighborhood's twisting 1920s hillside streets, the suspension surprisingly well-sprung and smooth for a nearly 70-year-old car. The rear-mounted aircooled V8 had a deep, throaty burble, not the VW-like clatter that I would have expected. Probably the most remarkable thing about the drive was that nobody on the street seemed to give the car a second look. No double-takes for a Tatra? Are we Angelenos really that jaded? Apparently so.

You can read the full story of Paul's T87 on Mike Bumbeck's great site Clunkbucket.




Thanks Paul and Jonny!

Car and Driver on the VW 1500 gray market

How did so many VW Type 3s find their way to the United States before the VW 1600s were officially introduced to the American market in the fall of 1965? Conventional wisdom says that the cars were brought over individually from Germany by servicemen and tourists, or brought over the border from Canada, where the 1500s were available from their introduction in 1961. While there's no doubt that many 1500s found their way here through those channels, there was also a more formalized gray market supplying 1500s to the U.S. market in the early '60s. There were companies that acted as semi-official importers, supplying dealers with nearly new "used" Type 3s outfitted with sealed-beam headlights, MPH speedometers, etc. This allowed even authorized VW dealers to sell Type 3s years before they were officially imported (as seen here and here). VWoA tolerated the gray market, though when speaking on the record they were against it.

This great article from the April 1964 issue of Car and Driver on VW's reasons for not bringing the VW 1500 to the American market explains how these gray market importers brought VW 1500s into the U.S., including how they set up special "Americanizing" factories in Germany just to prepare 1500s for export. The article posits that VW didn't interfere with the gray market because it was actually a profitable way to sell more cars here indirectly without upsetting the official balance of trade between Germany and the U.S. If VW had increased its export volume by expanding its range of models in the U.S. it could potentially have lead to trade sanctions—after all, a trade dispute between Germany and the U.S. just a few years earlier resulted in the U.S. government slapping a retaliatory $257 tariff on all German trucks, including VWs. The gray market was actually a win/win/win for VW, the gray market importers, and American consumers.









Walter Henry Nelson's Small Wonder and the February 1964 issue of Mechanix Illustrated magazine are other good sources for information on the VW gray and black markets that were thriving in the early 1960s.