Nodding Dogs
Dashboard Deco: What is on display inside a car can say a lot about the driver's personality. An all-time German favorite: the plastic dog. (Photo: Michael Kretzer)
By Sascha Lehnartz
FRANKFURT. The numbers are unsettling: more than half a million people in Germany drive around with a plastic puppy dog of "multifaceted breed" sitting behind the rear window of their cars. No one knows why. Perhaps it is one of those typically German cultural idiosyncrasies hard to comprehend for foreigners.
Roughly as many people again decorate their dashboards with a "Swiveling-Elvis" -- a plastic model of the King that can be attached to the windshield with a suction cap. Fixed to the top of the dashboard with a tiny spike, it swivels its hips in tune to the movement of the car.
Television is to blame, superficially at least, but nesting and parenting instincts also play a role. A television advertisement for the Aral gas station chain revived the fortunes of the "nodding dog," as he is known to Volkswagen drivers, while the plastic Elvis trend came out of nowhere in the spring after being featured in an Audi television commercial. Initial demand was so great that Audi had 15,000 hip-swinger copies of the King produced.
Since then, more than 500,000 copies have gone over the counter at the Ingolstadt headquarters, with just as many imitations sold and a similar number still on the shelves in gas stations across Germany. Swiveling-Elvis has already exceeded his sell-by date as a trend product, and it is doubtful whether he has the staying power ever to experience a revival and become a classic like the chronically nervous nodding dog.
That old puppy was actually considered to be out by the early 1970s when the introduction of the Volkswagen Golf robbed him of his "natural habitat." The Golf, successor to the Beetle, had a parcel shelf that lifted automatically when the trunk was opened, causing the nodding dog to fall onto the backseat -- and onto the threatened species list as far as car decoration was concerned.
Nearly at the same time, other items previously considered de rigueur by German motorists also began to die out. Witness the crocheted toilet roll cover -- a sanitary accessory that presumably sprang from the zeitgeist of an era in which Germans doubted that there were usable toilets beyond the borders of their own country: "Paris was beautiful, but those squat toilets. ..."
After 1973, another endangered species was the cushion cover embroidered with the owner's car license plate or some slogan indicative of locality, for instance a regional brewery. This particular fashion accessory was often used as a practical cover for the standard first-aid kit. That an accident would transform the first-aid kit sitting on the parcel shelf into a missile that -- cushion cover or no cushion cover -- could break your neck before you got around to using its contents to take care of your cuts and bruises, was a realization that sank in only slowly over the years.
Around the same time, driving instructors began to stop telling their students that, during a crash, they could keep their left hand on the wheel and stretch out their right arm to stop their passenger from going headfirst through the windshield.
The elegant flower vase, developed by Karl Meier, on the dash of the VW Beetle disappeared (reappearing 30 years later with the advent of the New Beetle), only to be replaced in the 1970s by the fox's tail fluttering from the car antenna. Whitewall tires were pushed out by alloy rims or at least plastic imitations of the same. Coziness was out, the sporty look was in. Instead of hats, drivers now wore rally driver seat belts -- just in case they rolled the car while escaping police checkpoints. You never know.
Moreover, the automobile industry fueled the trend toward aggressive male driving behavior with the development of a type of car that, in the United States, was described none too subtly as a "penis car" and in Germany was embodied by the Opel Manta cult. Nowadays this "boy-racer" ideal, though under threat, more often takes the shape of an illegally parked BMW Z3 in downtown Munich. Fans of this type of car like to purchase products from mail order catalogs to "individualize" their vehicle -- as psychologists call the attempt to add a personal touch to a vehicle that rolls off the production line in the millions. Valve caps shaped like dice; green-tinted taillights; or "ignition cables in the latest trend colors" are only some examples of attempts to project an individual message.
"The car is always both living room and shop window," says Florian G. Kaiser, a professor of social psychology in the Dutch city of Eindhoven who has long studied the inner life of the car driver. During his research, Mr. Kaiser discovered that many car drivers have a stronger emotional attachment to their vehicle than to their fellow human beings. "The car satisfies a need for security and movement, conveys pride of ownership and a sense of belonging," says Mr. Kaiser.
Customizing one's car strengthens the emotional attachment to the vehicle while at the same time sending a message to the outside world, he says. According to this theory, those with a Diddlmaus -- a cartoon mouse -- on their sun visor are the funny sock wearers among car drivers. "Look at me, I'm a really funny guy," screams the mouse desperately from the rear windshield, just as Snoopy does from the socks.
Similarly, the Swiveling Elvis driver is demonstrating: "I know what's been in until recently." However, Mr. Kaiser is still not sure what the message of the crocheted toilet roll cover means. But one possibility is: "I know how to crochet."
Hans Walter Hütter, deputy director of the House for History in Bonn and curator of the museum's car collection, says he cannot make any sense of the toilet roll cover phenomenon either.
"With the vase, the message was clearly 'we can't just afford a car, we can also afford fresh flowers' -- but the toilet roll cover is a mystery to me," he says.
That is not the only unsolved question regarding
compulsive car decoration: Urgently in need of
clarification is the phenomenon of more than 10 million
people a year hanging a pine-scented Christmas tree air
freshener in their cars.
-- Anonymous, November 28, 2001