the iconic volkswagen beetle --2/2/2026

02 Feb 2026

the iconic volkswagen beetle --2/2/2026

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Today's selection-- from Empty Vessel by Ian Kumekawa. In the 1960s, from a massive factory on the river Ems, the humble Volkswagen (aided in no small part by the groundbreaking “Think Small” American advertising campaign originated by Doyle Dane Bernbach) powered the German economy:

“One morning in 1988, lights flickered on in a newly refurbished factory measuring 1.5 million square feet in Emden, West Germany. Sparkling new assembly lines hummed into life for the first time, heavy metal parts clanking as workers carefully fitted them together to create new machines. At the end of the line, the finished products rolled out of the plant into vast parking lots. Eventually each would be driven onto waiting cargo ships moored at a nearby dock. There they sat: rows upon rows of Volkswagen Passats, destined for dealerships across the United States and Canada. As shifts at the factory ended, workers began to clock out and make their way home. Many headed to homes in and around Emden, a clean and tidy small city of about fifty thousand people. But hundreds of others boarded corporate shuttle buses bound for a nondescript "hotel ship" floating in the harbor, very close to where the Passats were loaded onto freighters. That hotel ship was the Vessel—the Bibby Resolution—freshly arrived from the Falkland Islands via Britain. The Vessel had traded its cargo of soldiers for a load of factory workers.

“When Volkswagen opened its sprawling production plant in Emden in December 1964, the company was the number one global car exporter. Its signature product-the Type 1, or Beetle—was soaring in popularity. Nowhere was this more the case than in the United States, the world's largest auto market. American consumers, according to a 1963 Sports Illustrated article, were in the midst of ‘a romance with a plain jane’: the Beetle. In the Beetle, VW offered Americans a product entirely different from the massive four-door sedans being hawked by the Big Three automakers in Detroit. It was small-cute, even—and fuel efficient. As a result, VW's U.S. sales had grown by 20 percent each year, from 1960 to 1963. In the boom years of the 1960s, Volkswagen was one of West Germany's most important industrial exporters: 55 percent of its output left the country in 1963, and 70 percent in 1968. By comparison, the engineering conglomerate Krupp sold less than 20 percent of its output outside of Germany.

1965–1966 Volkswagen Käfer

“The Emden assembly plant, located just across the muddy and brackish river Ems from the Netherlands, was constructed specifically to serve the growing export market. Volkswagenwerk Emden was built to be the last stop for cars leaving West Germany, the assembly site for a production process carried out across the country. As a VW publication put it, it received ‘bodies from Wolfsburg [site of VW's headquarters], engines from Hanover, gearboxes and frames from Kassel and axles from Braunschweig.’ Only the seats and the wiring harnesses were produced in Emden itself.4 When it opened, the plant produced five hundred cars per day. Within two years, that number had more than doubled. The finished vehicles rolled off the assembly line and directly into a company port facility on the Ems, where they were loaded onto freighters for shipment to ports in the United States and Canada. Few places embodied the export orientation of West German industry more than Emden.

“Emden is the largest city in East Frisia, a region tucked away in Germany's northwest corner. It is a bucolic, pastoral place, a region stereotyped within Germany for its somewhat provincial attitudes. Emden is surrounded by miles of pancake-flat fields, with dikes and levees holding the North Sea at bay. Huge windmills dot the landscape, descendants of the great powerhouses of the past that helped drain the land. The city itself is a neat collection of brick, peaked roofs with cobblestone streets clustered around an old harbor near the mouth of the Ems. Four centuries ago, Emders diverted part of the river, drawing it into a moat around the town's defensive wall like a protective blanket. Like so many other places the Vessel had stayed, Emden is oriented toward water.

“Standing in the center of the town, the salt air mingling with the aromas of nearby cows, it is easy to forget that one is in the midst of an industrial center. But Emden is industrial; out of its fifty thousand residents, a full eight thousand work at the VW plant. Volkswagen is far and away the largest employer, not just in the city but in the region, as well. Without it, the people of East Frisia would be considerably less comfortable. As it is, Emden is affluent. With a per capita GDP of well over €70,000, it is significantly wealthier than the German average.

“Emden had been an important trading center for hundreds of years before VW arrived. In the seventeenth century, as Gustavus Adolphus was founding Gothenburg on Sweden's west coast, Emden prospered as a free city under the protection of the Dutch Republic. When it was annexed by the Prussian King Frederick the Great in 1744, it became Prussia's first port on the North Sea. As such, it was the home port of a shore-lived state-supported trading company—the Emden Company founded to foster Prussian trade with China. At the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to a new canal network, Emden became the principal seaport for the Ruhr River valley: the heartland of Germany's coal and iron industries. Heavy industry came to Emden itself around the same time; in 1903, a major shipyard—the Nordseewerke—opened just south of the city center. The city's industrial and military importance led to it becoming the namesake of Admiral Ludwig von Renter's flagship, the SMS Emden, from which he orchestrated the scuttling of the German fleet in the Scapa Flow in 1919. Volkswagen, which opened its own plant in the city in the boom years of the 1960s, built on Emden's combined industrial and commercial legacy.

“Over the 1970s and 1980s, Emden grew into an ever more important linchpin of Volkswagen's export-oriented corporate strategy because of its convenient access to a deepwater port, able to accommodate ships with ten-meter drafts. Emden’s port is not dominated by the great cranes that tower over other harbors. The reason is that its principal cargo–VW cars–are not lifted, but rather driven onto waiting ships, one unit at a time. Emden is not a container port. The overwhelming majority of its surface area is given over to vast parking lots. There, tens of thousands of sedans, sports cars, and SUVs coming from the nearby plant and from a constant flow of arriving trains are parked in orderly rows, grouped according to their destination. The parking lots do not so much culminate as simply end at the water, where land meets riverine coast in a reinforced concrete edge. The port is a liminal space. It is German territory, but still retains a British military presence: an enduring legacy of World War II. The quays are technically owned by the local state, Lower Saxony, but they are incredibly narrow strips. All the land around them has been owned by Volkswagen since the plant’s beginnings.

“In 1973, with manufacturing just beginning to cool in western Europe, Volkswagen converted its Emden plant to a more efficient, state-of-the-art hanging assembly line and installed new computer systems to rationalize workflow. After the final Beetle built in Germany rolled off the line at Emden in 1978, the plant shifted to assembling the make’s new flagship car, the Passat, a large sedan designed especially for the U.S. market. As before, the units produced in Emden were all destined for foreign buyers. Exports drove Volkswagen's impressive growth in the 1980s. In 1978, the VW Group sold about 900,000 vehicles in Germany and 1.5 million abroad. A decade later, it was selling slightly fewer vehicles in Germany, but significantly more—well over 2 million units—abroad. North America continued to be important for VW, but new developing markets in other parts of Europe and in East Asia were fast becoming central to the company's business. Growing wealth in the Global South was shaping corporate strategy.

“It was the importance of the changing global export market that brought the Vessel to the river Ems. More markets meant more demand. And in 1988, Volkswagen again began refitting the Emden factory floor in order to fully automate production of its export destined Passats."