Abstract
AbstractStarting with the author's own experience of ghostliness in the archive, the article explores the political meaning of the postwar Volkswagen in West Germany as embodiment of the country's “economic miracle.” The investigation follows the uncanny in texts and images about the Volkswagen between 1945 and 1960 and argues that the car carried with it a “public secret” as a “debris” from the Nazi empire that silently transcended the 1945 divide. This reading of the Volkswagen as well as the methodological path toward it highlight a phenomenon that postcolonial scholars have described as “haunting”: a confusion about the relationship between past and present that also bears on those who study the past. Taking this analysis as an encouragement to revisit the powerful myths and “miracles” of postwar consumer cultures in the West from a new angle, the article calls for historical genealogies of these myths that conceive of the postwar West as a—not yet—postcolonial space and that cross the 1945 threshold.
Highlights
I had all but forgotten about the joke until a few years ago. It popped into my mind again like a ghostly apparition after I had begun to study the cultural meaning of the Volkswagen during the 1950s in West Germany.[1]
Metaphors, and images used in the postwar period that may have incited such expressions of discomfort about the Volkswagen? And what can those cultural scripts tell us about the hidden meanings of the car that eventually transformed into ghostly apparitions? When Spoerl identified the car with the German man in Der Stern, he took up an existing narrative
These examples indicate that the perception of how Germany was seen from the outside fulfilled a crucial, if not decisive role for the Volkswagen to emerge as the quintessential object of postwar national pride and as the symbolic center of the evolving miracle narrative
Summary
How many Jews fit in a Volkswagen? Five hundred. Two in the front, three in the back, and the rest in the ashtray. Someone at school told it to me in my schooldays in Westphalia, West Germany. The memory is both distinct and vague. I had all but forgotten about the joke until a few years ago. It popped into my mind again like a ghostly apparition after I had begun to study the cultural meaning of the Volkswagen during the 1950s in West Germany.[1]. “To study social life, one must confront the ghostly aspects of it” writes the sociologist Avery Gordon.
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