Over the past two decades or so, histories of individual commodities—from bulk goods such as sugar or coffee to branded items such as Coca-Cola—have proven an effective means of tracing the many underappreciated connections that have increasingly knitted together the modern world. At the same time, historians of the twentieth century have assembled a vast literature on the rise of the automobile and its crucial role in shaping politics, economies, lifestyles, and the built environment across ever-larger parts of the globe. Bernhard Rieger's excellent new book sits at the intersection of these two broad themes. The “People's Car”—better known as the Beetle—was, after all, not only a key component of mass motorization on three continents, it was also one of the twentieth century's most renowned and iconic products. This study represents the first wide-ranging account of its history from the drawing boards of interwar Germany through its embrace in distant homelands to its remarkable renaissance amidst the contemporary taste for retro design. It does much more than simply chronicle the tale of an amazingly long-lived and versatile product, interesting though this is. Ultimately, it offers a vivid illustration of the close interweaving of politics, economics, values, and technology in the expansion of commodity culture.

Following what is essentially a chronological structure, the story starts with the voluble calls during the Weimar years for an affordable, mass-produced car along the lines of Ford's famous Model T. Although pioneering German manufacturers such as Benz and BMW remained very good at producing luxury cars, Germany's battered middle class presented a diminutive market for cars (in the latter 1920s the per capital vehicle ratio was 1:196 in Germany, compared to 1:44 for Britain and France and 1:5.3 for the United States). When the Nazis took power, they quickly recognized the political potential of this huge reservoir of unrequited automobile desire. One of the first pledges made by Hitler, himself a car enthusiast, was a motorization program comprised of support for the auto industry and an extensive road-building campaign. By the late 1930s the “KdF Wagen” was paraded as a symbol of a motorized “national community” in which all racially desirable Germans would partake of the good life it embodied. As is well known, the unfortunates who entered the advance savings scheme launched in 1938 never received their promised car. During the war, the new factory near Fallersleben was too busy producing the sturdy “Kübelwagen”—the Wehrmacht's jeep—which was based on Ferdinand Porsche's original chassis design and was assembled in large part by forced laborers brought from across occupied Europe. After the war, the challenges facing the plant therefore included not only dire material shortages but also Allied denazification efforts. But given both the relative lack of bombing damage as well as the desperate need for vehicles as part of economic reconstruction, the “Volkswagen,” as it increasingly came to be called, was well poised for take-off as the West German economy recovered. In August 1955, 100,000 onlookers watched as the millionth Beetle rolled off the assembly line at Wolfsburg, followed by a week-long series of celebrations marking the event.

This part of the story is perhaps the most interesting, for as Rieger clearly shows, the Beetle played a central role in the history—political, economic, and cultural—of the fledgling Federal Republic. In the context of German division and in the wake of the Nazi catastrophe, the VW—the very embodiment of the “economic miracle”—was an important collective symbol in the absence of acceptable national iconography. While at one level it signified many of the same ideas as cars elsewhere—leisure, mobility, speed, personal freedom, modern technology—at another level it exemplified the core values of the new postwar society that Germans were trying to build: practicality, solidity, reliability, durability, and hard work. Remarkably, these positive associations proved more powerful than the negative undertones that attached to the Beetle's origins as a Nazi pet project, as well as the dark story of forced labor at the Wolfsburg plant. In some ways, indeed, the iconic status of the Beetle in postwar Germany derived in part from its salvaging of certain elements of Germany's recent past. By turning an ugly legacy into an astonishing success, it served as an allegorical ideal for the wider postwar project.

As the Beetle left Germany from the 1950s onward it soon acquired different roles and took on new meanings. In Europe and the United States, its fortunes broadly mirrored the relations of individual countries with its West German home. Whereas in the United Kingdom it symbolized the unwelcome threat posed by the manufacturing power of a resurgent Germany, in the United States it was broadly accepted as the offspring of a valued and successfully ‘Americanized’ protégé. Within these societies, too, it of course meant different things to different groups, ranging from countercultural symbol to practical second car for the increasingly affluent suburban household. What gave the Beetle its extraordinary longevity was both its adaptability and adoptability. Despite finally succumbing to the 1970s oil crisis in Europe and North America, in Mexico the beloved “Vochito” remained in production until 2003—by which time, despite its recognized German origins, it had long since been appropriated as a genuine national symbol.

In short, the twentieth century produced precious few things—whether products, ideas, or people—that could boast a career as long, varied or wide ranging as the VW Beetle. Its story, as Rieger tells it, epitomizes the importance of what Appadurai long ago called “the social life of things.” By tracking how this inimitable, oddly beautiful, and technically ingenious thing took on new lives as it circulated among human societies, this meticulously researched and elegantly written study invites us to think much more carefully about how the stories we might regard as distinctly German were also bound up with much broader ones.