The first VW Golf rolled off the assembly line 50 years ago. What does the cornerstone vehicle of the social democratic decade represent?
The VW Golf 1, 1974 Photo: Jan Walter/imagebroker/imago
The company's stubborn patriarch rejects all changes. He has been using the same product for 20 years. Only his death allowed a new beginning: the company dared to create a product that broke with habits and became a great success. What seems like the plot of a somewhat clichéd novel from the business world became a reality at the automobile manufacturer Volkswagen in the early 1970s.
The first VW Golf left the assembly line on March 29, 1974. The Golf I broke with conventions, marked the history of design, weighed barely 800 kilograms and was a fairly cheap car, just under 8,000 marks for the version. simple. If inflation is added, today it would only be 13,500 euros; the current base model of the Golf costs twice as much.
Wolfsburg's new car looked like an angular box with someone cutting off the unnecessary ends with a knife. A radical step: until then, car design was still based on wagons, with a lot of overhang at the rear and front. Quite inconvenient in terms of use of space. Although the Golf I was lower than the Beetle, it offered more interior space.
The final version of this Protestant and sober-looking car was created, precisely, by an Italian. Giorgio Giugiaro, who also invented the Fiat Panda, said in a 1999 report Mirror-Interview: “The car is a container. You see, the container embodies the maximum rationality in the use of space, that is logical. Simply make a ball and a cube of the same diameter. The cube offers more space. The same goes for cars. The rounder they are, the tighter they are.”
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The Golf: the authentic car for left-handed people
The first Golf also marked the long-awaited end to a questionable automotive era. VW grew up with the Beetle, the model that emerged from Hitler's order to develop a “strength through joy” automobile to bring mobility to the people. Heinrich Nordhoff, head of VW from 1948 to 1968, was the “leader of the military economy” at Opel during the Nazi era before being able to smoothly continue his career at VW after 1945. Not only Nazi ideas influenced the company for decades. post-war society, but also in his prestige project, which Nordhoff stubbornly maintained until his death. The Beetle, with its air-cooled boxer engine in the rear, was technically completely obsolete by the 1960s: the weak engine sounded like a gasoline lawnmower and consumed an absurd amount of fuel.
Interestingly, the Beetle later became a popular vehicle among leftists. Ulrike Meinhof drove it through the streets of West Berlin before it became illegal; Californian hippies also enjoyed driving the Nazi creature. But the car that really went away was the Golf. The old dream of connecting academics and progressive workers materialized in him. The foreman played golf, but so did the high school teacher and the architect. The spirit of the time was clearly left-wing. Two years before the arrival of the Gulf, Chancellor Willy Brandt's SPD won 45.8 percent in the federal elections.
Without this spirit of the time, the success of the first Golf (according to VW, 6.8 million units left the factory) would not have been possible. It was a time when distinction, status symbols and downward differentiation were frowned upon. The lack of classes was demonstrated and the functional and minimalist design became popular. It is no coincidence that the first Ikea branch in Germany was opened in 1974.
VW launched a suitable advertising campaign for the Golf, which was downright daring for the quiet company. “A car for a wide variety of people” was the slogan of one advertisement: an ambiguous allusion to the fact that, compared to the time, the car was quite wide for its class, but it was also a real people's car. The advertising slogan “Golf, the new popular sport” was even more blatant, a mockery of the upper-class pastime. The message was: it is no longer about emulating those up there, but about doing your own.
Advertising of this type would be unthinkable today. Now it's about distinction and family values: dad, mom and their children, filmed against the light, happily get into their new vehicle. VW company historian Dieter Landenberger describes the Golf I in the following way: “The Golf dressed everyone appropriately, the rule was: where the Golf is parked, the middle class of society lives.”
The leftist zeitgeist had already been broken by the time the first Golf left the factory. The wildcat strikes of 1973, then started by the so-called guest workers, showed that classlessness and equality were not entirely correct, because the ruling SPD had forgotten about the migrant workers, who worked for less money. than their German colleagues and did a dirtier job.
The trend reversal
A month after the birth of golf, left-wing icon Willy Brandt fell as chancellor; The pragmatic and cold Helmut Schmidt took over. The euphoric spirit of optimism disappeared and the reform policy was stopped. Politics now revolved around pure viability: historians speak of a “change of course.” New social movements were still emerging and leftist subcultures were emerging. But the majority of society no longer wanted to have anything to do with experiments.
And VW did what every capitalist company does when it has a successful product: it diversified. Later, the Golf GTI was presented as a high-power sports version and the Golf Cabrio was created as a second car for the upper-middle class. There was no longer a Golf for everyone. Many other model series (the Golf 8 is already on the market) have become increasingly interchangeable in terms of design, which is no longer angular at all.
The last Golf I rolled off the assembly line in 1983, the same year that the CDU's Helmut Kohl won his first federal election. That's fitting: it was the year in which the left's decade finally ended.