The Little Car That Could

The remnants of the Porsche firm by this time were under public trusteeship in Gm�nd, and they, too, were gradually eroding when Ferry returned, cleared of political charges, in July 1946. Any kind of large-scale production was out of the question, since Gm�nd did not even have a railway connection, but at least the firm stayed alive. It was under these primitive and inauspicious circumstances, in the winter of 1947-48, that the first of Dr. Porsche's cars to actually bear his name took shape: the Porsche Type 356, the forerunner of all the models of today.

Ferry was the man who launched it, harking back to a prewar design for a VW sports car with a 1,131-cc. engine. Ferry saw the future clearly in a sports-car-conscious world, though in what crystal ball he saw it no one at the time could say: certainly Austria was not a market, Germany even less so, and elsewhere in Europe the rancors of war still militated heavily against even the best of German products. Nonetheless, production of a prototype went ahead against formidable difficulties. Travelers to Switzerland, for instance, were asked to bring back spark plugs in their pockets to help out in the acute shortage of any kind of parts; and by the spring of 1948 the first car, an open two-seater with a VW engine tuned to produce 40 horsepower, was ready to drive.

That car was sold in the fall to a Swiss buyer for 7,000 francs, or less than $1,650. It probably was one of the best buys any Porsche owner ever made. The car ran in Switzerland for 10 years, after which Porsche bought it back for the company museum.

That first Type 356 roadster was followed immediately by a closed coupe model, and this one was test-driven by the Automobil-Revue, a Bernese sports car magazine, in Switzerland. The resulting write-up brought an almost embarrassing number of orders: 20 from Sweden, 50 from Holland, 15 from Portugal (with an offer to trade Porsches for sardines should there be any trouble with the Austrian government about export licenses for the cars). Ferry had only 300 people working for him at the time and still no railway connection; nonetheless, by the winter of 1948-49 Porsche was producing five cars a month. The bodies were hand-beaten out of sheet metal on wooden dies by a specialist from Wiener Neustadt whom Ferry had known in the Austro-Daimler days. When he was good, he was very, very good; when he went out on the town in Gm�nd, everybody in the place held his breath until he sobered up again.

It's a long road from those early Porsches to the 911s and 912s of today, and every mile of it is studded with racing successes. "It isn't that racing is in our blood," said Ferry recently in the paneled office from which he now runs things in Zuffenhausen, "but it is a basic part of our philosophy. In our second lifetime, since the war, we have always built pure sports cars—not touring cars modified and tuned to sports-car performance, but sports cars from the ground up. My father used to say that there must not be one part on any of his cars that does not have to be there, and I hold to that. And this, I believe, is the root of the safety problem: one must start with a safe car. It must be safe because under all conditions it will do what the driver wants it to do, impeccably and instantly. Knockout windows, instrument-panel padding, collapsible steering wheels—all those are secondary factors. Road-holding, brakes, suspension, steering—those are primary factors, for they answer the primary question: what can I do to my cars to prevent accidents?"

To Ferry Porsche, every Porsche on the road today is proof that racing does improve the breed—and if this is indeed so, then few men have contributed more to the Porsche reputation than its racing director, the ubiquitous Huschke von Hanstein.

By character as well as capabilities, Von Hanstein was peculiarly well equipped to carry Porsche's name abroad. Not only was he a lifelong motoring enthusiast who had won national and international honors after graduating from the motorcycles of his boyhood; he also knew intimately the problems of starting a new life when not even the ruins of the old are left. The scion of a German noble family, he was born with enough silver spoons to choke any normal infant. From the windows of his nursery in the family ch�teau on the little Werra River near Kassel, he could see the twin towers of Burg Hanstein, a crumbling 9th century ruin from which his early ancestors fought their way to fame and fortune. There were family estates in Pomerania and Poland, and on his mother's side there was Germany's oldest and most prosperous seed business. He polished his impeccable English at Oxford in the early 1930s, and he learned his driving as a private entry in races all over Europe in a variety of cars. He did so well that in 1938 he was offered a professional career as driver of one of the big Auto-Union Grand Prix cars (this was also one of his first contacts with the elder Dr. Porsche); but before he could make up his mind about it, his life fell apart. Driving back one night from a race in Switzerland, his mechanic missed a curve on a mountain road; the car spun and hit the retaining wall, and Von Hanstein was thrown out into the abyss.

"That accident," Von Hanstein now recalls, "turned out to be a key event in my life. Until then, I had been undecided what to do, whether to devote my life to automobiles or to the law and international diplomacy. But in the year I spent in the hospital, my father died and left me as the responsible heir to the family businesses. My law professor was arrested by the Nazis for political unreliability, and my doctor's thesis, which I had just finished, wound up not worth the paper it was written on. I had chosen as my theme the status of the Memelland—that little piece of German territory in Lithuania which after World War I had been put under international trusteeship—and in 1939 Hitler brought the Memelland 'home to the Reich,' as he had done with Austria and Czechoslovakia. No more Memelland; no more doctor's thesis—and I came out of the hospital with a withered left arm."

The war brought more disasters. Von Hanstein was an obvious 4-F, and when Poland was overrun he was sent there to administer the family's estates. After a couple of years of this he was arrested by the Gestapo for being too easy on his Polish help; to ponder his iniquities he spent a year in the Gestapo jail on the Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. This was followed by assignment to a punishment battalion on the Russian front near Leningrad. In 1945 the Red Army overran his unit, and Von Hanstein departed for the south. With the help of false papers he made his way to Bavaria, winding up in American-held territory when the war ended.

Back home in the family ch�teau on the Werra, meanwhile, things were building up to another and even more fateful climax. The Werra River, that cheerful little stream in which Von Hanstein often paddled as a boy, now suddenly loomed as large as the Rhine: it had been fixed, in this area, as the border between the Russian and American zones of occupation, and all of the Von Hanstein property wound up on the wrong side of it. "I realized that this was serious," Von Hanstein said not long ago. "I had been on the Russian front once, and I wasn't going to wind up there again. So one night I piled a lot of stuff into a little truck and drove across the Werra for the last time. A couple of days later the Russians arrived, and today everything I ever had there belongs to the government of East Germany."