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g’morn

i know this is an opportunity to pile on Apartheid techbro, but am not even exaggerating when i say that, as a historian and “culture critic”, #Boomers embrace of the OG #Nazi car ―the VW Beetle― is one of those research things that keeps me up at night.

hand-waving it away as a feat of marketing doesn’t explain how one of Adolf Hitler’s prized cars, for the tech developed with it, became a symbol of white American youth radicalism, aka #hippies

h/t mindly.social/@DamonCrowley/11

Peter Bloem

@blogdiva I don't know how this was experienced in the US, but in Europe, I think the boomers saw the grudge against Germany as something of their parents' generation. In a way it was a bit nationalistic to blame the current generation for the actions of the previous.

Also, Brandt's West Germany was very left-wing, and devoted to acknowledging the horrors of the war.

As such, I think they associated the Beetle much more with (then) modern West Germany than with the Nazis.

@pbloem @blogdiva Volkswagen was a peace project designed by the allies to help for peacetime reindustrialization after the Second World War. The car design was old but the modern VW is a west German peace project. At least growing up in NY the Mercedes was viewed as the most Nazi car (Adolph's personal vehicle)

@jessetmccann @pbloem @blogdiva I'd always associated VW with Hitler and Porsche. Reviewing the Wikipedia page, VW was a Nazi project with Hitler laying the cornerstone for the factory. But post-war it was reinvented by the British occupying forces, and then West Germany continued the project.