From Hitler to Hippies: The Volkswagen Bus in America

Abstract

This is my Master's thesis, completed in 2004 for a degree in American Studies from UT Austin. The paper presents a cultural history of Volkswagen buses, beginning in Germany in the late 1940s and extending to present-day America. My primary goal is to explain the vehicle's astonishing transformation, during the period from 1950 to 1970, from a post-WWII work truck into the vehicular icon of the American hippie movement. In doing so, I describe how the vehicle's practicality and quirkiness made it ideally suited for its countercultural purposes. A wildly successful advertising campaign in the 1960s and 1970s reinforced this dual emphasis on practicality and personality, creating the ironic effect of big-business mass media inadvertently helping to turn a big-business automobile into an antiestablishment icon.

Keywords: Volkswagen, hippie, Germany, counterculture, advertising, Doyle Dane Bernbach, automobile, van, bohemian