Author: Walter Henry Nelson
Publisher: Volkswagen
ISBN: 9780837601472
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 418
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Book Description
Chronicles the history of the popular German automobile the Volkswagen Beetle up to 1970, including its origins, its favor in the Nazi party, and the involvement of Britain and the U.S. in its production and marketing.
Author: Walter Henry Nelson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780091079703
Category : Volkswagen Beetle automobile
Languages : en
Pages : 303
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Book Description
First published in 1965, "Small Wonder: The Amazing Story of the Volkswagen Beetle" is the most successful book of all time on the Beetle. Originally selling over 1.2 million copies, "Small Wonder" is often quoted as the source by many subsequent histories. Now, Bentley Publishers is releasing this new edition, with new foreword by the author, in honor of the new Beetle and the renewed interest in the original Beetle. Given complete access to Volkswagen archives in both Germany and the U.S. at the time of writing, author Walter Henry Nelson gives a highly detailed account of the Beetle's development and success. Nelson gives many behind-the-scenes details and glimpses into the people who shaped the company, providing a rich picture of how and why Volkswagen and the Beetle evolved as they did. Filled with numerous personal tributes and valuable insights, "Small Wonder" provides the reader with a better understanding of the Beetle's "cult car" status.
Author: Andrea Hiott
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345521447
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514
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Book Description
Sometimes achieving big things requires the ability to think small. This simple concept was the driving force that propelled the Volkswagen Beetle to become an avatar of American-style freedom, a household brand, and a global icon. The VW Bug inspired the ad men of Madison Avenue, beguiled Woodstock Nation, and has recently been re-imagined for the hipster generation. And while today it is surely one of the most recognizable cars in the world, few of us know the compelling details of this car’s story. In Thinking Small, journalist and cultural historian Andrea Hiott retraces the improbable journey of this little car that changed the world. Andrea Hiott’s wide-ranging narrative stretches from the factory floors of Weimar Germany to the executive suites of today’s automotive innovators, showing how a succession of artists and engineers shepherded the Beetle to market through periods of privation and war, reconstruction and recovery. Henry Ford’s Model T may have revolutionized the American auto industry, but for years Europe remained a place where only the elite drove cars. That all changed with the advent of the Volkswagen, the product of a Nazi initiative to bring driving to the masses. But Hitler’s concept of “the people’s car” would soon take on new meaning. As Germany rebuilt from the rubble of World War II, a whole generation succumbed to the charms of the world’s most huggable automobile. Indeed, the story of the Volkswagen is a story about people, and Hiott introduces us to the men who believed in it, built it, and sold it: Ferdinand Porsche, the visionary Austrian automobile designer whose futuristic dream of an affordable family vehicle was fatally compromised by his patron Adolf Hitler’s monomaniacal drive toward war; Heinrich Nordhoff, the forward-thinking German industrialist whose management innovations made mass production of the Beetle a reality; and Bill Bernbach, the Jewish American advertising executive whose team of Madison Avenue mavericks dreamed up the legendary ad campaign that transformed the quintessential German compact into an outsize worldwide phenomenon. Thinking Small is the remarkable story of an automobile and an idea. Hatched in an age of darkness, the Beetle emerged into the light of a new era as a symbol of individuality and personal mobility—a triumph not of the will but of the imagination.
Author: Walter Henry Nelson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Machinery industry
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
Author: Bernhard Rieger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674075757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
At the Berlin Auto Show in 1938, Adolf Hitler presented the prototype for a small, oddly shaped, inexpensive family car that all good Aryans could enjoy. Decades later, that automobile—the Volkswagen Beetle—was one of the most beloved in the world. Bernhard Rieger examines culture and technology, politics and economics, and industrial design and advertising genius to reveal how a car commissioned by Hitler and designed by Ferdinand Porsche became an exceptional global commodity on a par with Coca-Cola. Beyond its quality and low cost, the Beetle’s success hinged on its uncanny ability to capture the imaginations of people across nations and cultures. In West Germany, it came to stand for the postwar “economic miracle” and helped propel Europe into the age of mass motorization. In the United States, it was embraced in the suburbs, and then prized by the hippie counterculture as an antidote to suburban conformity. As its popularity waned in the First World, the Beetle crawled across Mexico and Latin America, where it symbolized a sturdy toughness necessary to thrive amid economic instability. Drawing from a wealth of sources in multiple languages, The People’s Car presents an international cast of characters—executives and engineers, journalists and advertisers, assembly line workers and car collectors, and everyday drivers—who made the Beetle into a global icon. The Beetle’s improbable story as a failed prestige project of the Third Reich which became a world-renowned brand illuminates the multiple origins, creative adaptations, and persisting inequalities that characterized twentieth-century globalization.
Author: John Heitmann
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 147663002X
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 292
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Book Description
Now revised and updated, this book tells the story of how the automobile transformed American life and how automotive design and technology have changed over time. It details cars' inception as a mechanical curiosity and later a plaything for the wealthy; racing and the promotion of the industry; Henry Ford and the advent of mass production; market competition during the 1920s; the development of roads and accompanying highway culture; the effects of the Great Depression and World War II; the automotive Golden Age of the 1950s; oil crises and the turbulent 1970s; the decline and then resurgence of the Big Three; and how American car culture has been represented in film, music and literature. Updated notes and a select bibliography serve as valuable resources to those interested in automotive history.
Author: Michael Thad Allen
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780807856154
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
Examines the Business Administration Main Office of the SS, which built up the slave-labor system in Nazi concentration camps.
Author: Tim Blackmore
Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press
ISBN: 1771124229
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 388
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Book Description
Gorgeous War argues that the Nazis used the swastika as part of a visually sophisticated propaganda program that was not only modernist but also the forerunner of contemporary brand identity. When the United States military tried to answer Nazi displays of graphic power, it failed. In the end the best graphic response to the Nazis was produced by the Walt Disney Company. Using numerous examples of US and Nazi military heraldry, Gorgeous War compares the way the American and German militaries developed their graphic and textile design in the interwar period. The book shows how social and cultural design movements like modernism altered and were altered by both militaries. It also explores how nascent corporate culture and war production united to turn national brands like IBM, Coca-Cola, and Disney into multinational corporations that had learned lessons on propaganda and branding that were being tested during the Second World War. What is the legacy of apparently toxic signs like the swastika? The answer may not be what we hoped. Inheritors of the post-Second World War world increasingly struggle to find an escape from an intensely branded environment—to find a place in their lives that is free of advertising and propaganda. This book suggests that we look again at how it is our culture makes that struggle into an appealing Gorgeous War.
Author: Glenn Yago
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521256339
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
An examination of the social, political and technological forces that shaped our cities and their transportation systems.
Author: Hans Wilhelm Gatzke
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674353268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
A discerning statement about Germany and other nations, this book reevaluates for the general reader and the historian the impact of rapid industrialization, the origins of the world wars, the question of war guilt, the decade of Weimar democracy, and the rise and fall of Hitler. Gatzke looks anew at the economic miracle in West Germany and the consequences of making prosperity the cornerstone of a new republic.
