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In 1937 Ferdinand Porsche, father of the Volkswagen Beetle, traveled to Detroit to study Henry Ford's vast River Rouge factory, hire men, and buy machines to build an equivalent plant for Adolf Hitler. In 1997 Otto Ferdinand Wachs, a top Volkswagen executive, visited Las Vegas and Disney World to analyze two current American specialties: theme parks and branding. The result of Porsche's trip was the mile-long factory in Wolfsburg that built the Beetle. The result of Wachs's trip opened on June 1: Autostadt ("Autocity").

Part Niketown, part Legoland, Auto-stadt resembles a miniature world's fair, with gardens and water parks, an auto museum, a Ritz-Carlton hotel, and pavilions devoted to seven of the nine brands under the Volkswagen corporate umbrella. The 62-acre theme park, located adjacent to the Wolfsburg plant, opened in connection with Expo 2000 in nearby Hannover, but it will continue after the fair ends. Some 1.2 million people are expected to visit each year. Tickets cost 24 DM (about $12).

"It's a way to show the soul and spirit of the company," says Wachs, Autostadt's exuberant director and former head of VW public relations. "We want it to serve as the company's platform for service and communication." Autostadt suggests the degree to which automakers have taken on the manners of show business. Today they don't just want to sell cars, they want to bond with their customers. As Michael J. Wolf, author of The Entertainment Economy, proclaims: "There's no business without show business." Toyota has built an amusement park in Japan, Saturn welcomes buyers to its Tennessee factory, and both Ford and Chrysler have small museums near Detroit. But no car company has undertaken as ambitious an effort as Volkswagen to polish its brand image.

The high point of the trip to Autostadt for many visitors will be the delivery of their new vehicles, ordered at local dealers but stored in one of two glass and steel towers, each 20 stories high and packed with 400 cars. Visually the towers are the centerpiece, echoing the smokestacks of the factory's power station. About a thousand visitors a day are expected to watch as mechanical arms move up, grab a car, then lower it to the base of the tower. Vehicles are fed through an underground tunnel to the customer center and waiting buyers. The whole process resembles a gigantic vending machine. (There's even room for four more towers-a future visual pun on a six-cylinder car engine.)

This contraption is just one of the elements that could make it easy for brand-savvy Americans to laugh at VW's efforts at showmanship. "To watch Germans do marketing," one commentator says, "is like watching elephants dance: even if done clumsily it is fascinating to watch." But Volkswagen's U.S. division is a marketing success story. Beginning in 1995 the "Drivers Wanted" campaign created by Arnold Communications generated buzz for the brand even before the arrival in 1998 of the New Beetle, designed by J Mays and Freeman Thomas at the company's California studio. But what VW did there is inspiring them to attempt the same thing globally--and they should not be underestimated. No one 50 years ago thought the Germans could outdo the Americans in manufacturing, but the facility that Porsche modeled on River Rouge became the biggest car plant in the world. "Larger than Monaco," the tour guides like to say.

The idea for Autostadt arose in 1995, when Volkswagen was asked to participate in the Hannover World's Fair. "It was an opportunity to show our face to the world," says Robert Buechelhofer, head of sales and marketing for VW. But for all the showbiz, "this is a place about selling without selling," says Gunter Henn, the chief architect of Autostadt, who directed a 260-person team during its construction. His Munich-based firm, Henn Architekten Ingenieure, specializes in buildings with unique technical demands for high-tech and other industrial clients.

Americans like to think of themselves as the most car-obsessed people on the planet, but Germans easily rival them. "The car is like a member of the family," Wachs says. It's a tradition in Germany to pick up cars at the factory, fresh off the assembly line. Sixty percent of Porsches sold there are delivered to buyers where they are built, in Stuttgart. Mercedes buyers take direct delivery of some 200,000 vehicles at three "customer centers" in Germany. (In the 1960s, when the dollar was all-powerful, American buyers of Beetles would come to Wolfsburg to pick up their cars and, with the money saved, enjoy a two-week trip through Europe.)

Although they can come by car or boat, most visitors are expected to arrive by rail, after an hour's ride from Berlin or Hannover on the high-speed train. From the station they cross a sweeping footbridge that cuts diagonally across the Mittelland Canal, once used for coal and steel deliveries. They enter the KonzernForum--a boxy welcome center with a glassed-in piazza containing Cafes at one end, and interactive computer terminals and 360-degree film projections at the other. A display called Gyroballs allows visitors to take the place of crash dummies, strapping themselves into a vehicle that rolls down an inclined track into a barrier. Children can clamber through a 40-foot-high glass engine while their parents take a virtual-reality trip down the Pacific Coast Highway.

The nearby museum is made up of two joined buildings. The Zeithaus ("House of Time") is the most interesting piece of architecture at Autostadt. One half is a rectangular, five-story glass bookshelf, or "rack" as Henn describes it, holding 80 vintage cars--not just VWs, but Cadillacs and Mercedes as well--placed in nooks like models in a vitrine. It's faced by a softly curved aluminum structure housing interpretive exhibits. The two structures are joined in the middle by bridges that represent an architectural dialogue between the two halves of the brain.

Outside stand the pavilions, which Henn calls "embassies" and Buchelhofer, the marketing man, "temples." Each brand is represented symbolically by architecture. The Volkswagen pavilion is a cube, with a sphere visible through a glass wall; the simple geometric shapes evoke VW's timeless virtues: quality, safety, value. The Audi building is shaped in the form of interlocking circles, echoing the rings of its logo. The Bentley pavilion, a Ray Hole-Furneaux Stewart collaboration, is built into a hillside--almost completely underground--and covered in the same granite as the nearby Ritz Carlton Hotel to suggest a shared quality of luxury. Inside, the focus is a huge 16-cylinder Bentley crankshaft. Skoda is centered on a dome with glass walls that fan out in a vaguely cubist way. Henn says the Seat building (designed by Alfredo Arribas), with extravagantly curved walls, reflects a Spanish "rambla festival."

After Lamborghini became part of the VW empire two years ago, it was also assigned a pavilion. An executive of another brand in the VW group recalled how managers at Lamborghini were called to a meeting and asked to define the "core values" of their brand. The Italians showed impatience with the whole process. After much hesitation and head-scratching, one blurted out, "Sex. Is sex."

What they got for their pavilion is a dark cube expressing what the architects describe as "pure emotion" and "impetuous power." Visitors follow a twisting passage through the building as distant music segues into the amplified heartbeat of a bull--the totem of the car--then escalates into the roar of a powerful 12-cylinder engine that makes the whole cube shake. They finally arrive in a room where a Diablo sports car hanging on the wall glows an unearthly red, its engine in full cry.

The ultimate stop for most visitors at Autostadt will be the customer center, where they will pick up cars after having toured the plant next door. Watching the vehicles emerge from the underground tunnel is retail theater--a grander, more heroic version of the translucent tubes at Niketown, through which new Air Jordans go shooting. Indeed Autostadt in many ways seems an expanded, more serious variation of that. "Romancing the brand" was the phrase Nike executives loved to use in the early 1990s. "The idea behind Niketown," says Gordon Thompson, who directed its design, was "to make the retail exchange of money for goods more exciting." Thompson was inspired originally by the great 1939 New York World's Fair. The lukewarm response generated by the Hannover event, of which Autostadt is an adjunct, suggests the degree to which theme parks and retailers have coopted the magic of world's fairs.

Today corporate theater requires a mix of history and brand honing. Niketown was about deploying the subbrands of the mother-corporation in miniature environments, from Air Jordan to All Conditions Gear, Tiger Woods golf equipment to Mia Hamm soccer shoes. At Autostadt, pavilions play the same role that rooms do in Niketown. But the latter is a wholly more playful place. Thompson calls the shoe-tube delivery system "a totally Spacely Sprocket product." Volkswagen seems to have seriously decided to be playful, rationally decided to be emotional. That Autostadt builds on the company's American success is suggested by its logo: three joined arcs blurred by apparent motion, a variation on the New Beetle emblem. The New Beetle changed VW's image and led to the company's revival. But the car's enthusiastic reception came as something of a shock to VW's German executives, helping to set in motion the ideas behind Autostadt.

Volkswagen's CEO, Ferdinand Piëch, distinguished the New Beetle as an "emotional" model different from the company's other "rational" models, such as the Golf. The original Beetle was a triumph of rationalized mass production. The New Beetle represented a feat of design, style, and marketing; it helped convince VW executives that as cars approach each other in quality and manufacturing costs, design and marketing will make the difference. It's an American lesson.

But theatrics like Autostadt do not come naturally in Wolfsburg. Americans, after all, dreamed up the New Beetle in a California studio; Wachs looked outside the company for talent to design Autostadt. For restaurant design, he turned to New York-based Tony Chi and Associates, and Jordan Mozer and Associates, in Chicago. The Lagune restaurant and coffee shop by Tony Chi (Zen Palate, Harley Davidson Cafe) serves cuisines from regions where the company has factories. The metaphor of a car expanded to the scale of a restaurant lies behind Cylinder, Jordan Mozer's diner-theme eatery, where the front wall of the kitchen suggests an instrument panel and the chef is the driver. Andrée Putman designed the interiors of the Ritz-Carlton, whose curving shape fronts the old factory. She has used brick to mirror the original factory buildings next door, which she compares admiringly to "a woman unaware of her own natural beauty."

Wachs also hired Jack Rouse, who in the 1960s came to Wolfsburg to pick up a Beetle (something Americans cannot yet do at Autostadt). Rouse, whose Cincinnati-based firm has designed exhibits and rides for Universal Studios, Six Flags, Legoland, and Kellogg's Cereal City USA, handled many of the interiors and exhibitions for Autostadt. "Volkswagen very much wanted to be perceived as an open, service-oriented company," Rouse says. "Now they know it's not enough just to tout their technology."

Although Wachs insists that Autostadt "looks forward--it's not a monument," it is difficult not to see it as an implicit celebration of the company's recent revival. Since Piëch took over as CEO in 1993, VW has gone from an annual loss of $1 billion to a $2 billion profit in 1999 by increasing quality and efficiency. Piëch, who had previously turned around Audi, put Wolfsburg's workers on a four day workweek and revived Seat, its Spanish arm, and Skoda, the Czech division. He also built the VW group into an empire of star brands, buying bankrupt Bugatti, which hadn't produced cars in 60 years; Lamborghini; and Bentley, his apparent favorite. (He commutes from his home in Braunschweig each day in a blue Bentley.)

Piëch is regarded as a brilliant engineer--he created the engine for the legendary Porsche 911--but an impatient, even cruel manager. His grandfather was Ferdinand Porsche; his father, Anton Piëch, managed the VW plant during World War II and was imprisoned for two years afterward along with Porsche. Ferdinand Piëch's presence is a reminder that Autostadt carries risks: for VW to delve into symbolism and history is to tread on very uncertain ground. Like Piëch and Porsche, Autostadt is not a new name here. Wolfsburg, Volkswagen's company town, began life in 1938 as Hitler's planned Kraft durch Freude Stadt ("Strength through Joy City"), a model Nazi-worker town planned by Peter Koller, a disciple of Albert Speer. But the locals simply referred to it as the car city, Autostadt. Wolfsburg was a name borrowed from a nearby castle by British occupation authorities in 1945.

The ground on which the new Autostadt stands was most recently a coal and oil storage area. But during World War II it was identified in U.S. Air Force photos as a "hutted encampment"--the site of barracks housing some of the 15,000 forced workers who, under SS guards, turned out weapons and vehicles at the plant. The workers included concentration--camp prisoners, Polish and Russian slave laborers, and Soviet POWs. A concentration camp stood just to the north of the site.

Although Autostadt's glass-and-metal architecture speaks of a bright future, highlighting the symbolism of "brand heritage," Volkswagen's wartime past inevitably casts darker shadows. The museum displays "the only Beetle convertible built in 1938." If that's true, then some visiting Bug buffs will surely identify it as the car Hitler rode in with Ferry Porsche after groundbreaking ceremonies for the VW factory.

In a poll of experts last year Piëch was named auto executive of the century; Porsche, auto engineer of the century. If for Piëch the New Beetle matches the achievement of his grandfather, then Autostadt may be a means of putting to rest the legacy of his father, the plant's wartime manager. VW is one of the participants in a recently signed agreement providing about $5 billion in compensation to the estimated 12 million slave and forced laborers used by German enterprises during the Nazi years. (Only 2.3 million are estimated to still be alive.) In 1998 VW established its own $12 million fund to compensate forced laborers, but survivors are demanding more. One current suit was filed by Anna Snopczyk, a 79-year-old Polish woman, whose 2-month-old child died in 1945 of gross neglect in the infamous VW Kinderheim child-care center, where infants born to forced laborers were systematically starved to death. (The head of the Kinderheim was hanged in 1947.)

In a bunker inside the factory, the company this spring established a monument to workers who suffered at the hands of what Wachs calls "those criminals" who ran the factory in the 1940s. That one of those criminals was the father of his boss seems to give him no pause. In 1986 VW's then CEO, Carl Hahn, commissioned Hans Mommsen, one of Germany's most important historians, to write a history of the company during the Third Reich. Hahn was head of U.S. operations in the late 1950s and the man responsible for hiring Doyle Dane Bernbach to produce their groundbreaking advertising campaign in the 1960s. Married to an American, Hahn was perhaps more conscious than his colleagues of the need for VW to come to terms with its Nazi past.

By the time the book was published in 1996, Piëch had succeeded Hahn as CEO. And although the book's treatment of his father was fairly gentle, the younger Piëch was not pleased. According to Mommsen, Piëch has refused to provide the funds that VW had promised to translate the book into English. "He's the kind of man who sees conspiracies," Mommsen says.

The past is inescapable at the factory itself, where Nazi-era stone bas-relief images of idealized labor still stand at the entrances. Although greatly expanded to the north, the original factory is essentially unchanged. Its most dramatic feature is the power plant, near Autostadt, and the 21 entrance towers that march along the canal in a formation as martial as any of Speer's designs for Nuremberg or Berlin.

Recently a visitor noticed that someone had covered the bust of Porsche in the town center with a plastic bag and graffiti. Indeed tensions are palpable there among longtime residents, foreign-born workers, and former East Germans. And because Wolfsburg was so carefully planned as a Modernist vision of the new Germany, a city of white geometries and neat streets, any discordant detail is jarring.

The same is true for Autostadt, which calls on visitors to consider every detail of the environment and invests so much in making it symbolic. Little in its design has been left to chance. The park grounds are meticulously landscaped. An appropriate tree has been planted near each pavilion: Bentley has an English oak; Skoda, a Bohemian lime; VW, a "cheerful yet tough and pioneering" birch; and Lamborghini, a sweet chestnut (the "most Mediterranean" tree that can survive in Wolfsburg's climate).

A feng shui expert was even consulted. The expert advised planners to "ground" the theme park by planting oaks and weeping willows at its entrance: one has powerful roots that connect it to the earth, the other has light limbs that embrace the air. Autostadt managers followed the advice but renamed the willow. In German the weeping willow is called trauerweiden-literally "sorrow willow." But at Autostadt it will simply be called a willow. "Sorrow," said a VW publicist, "is not a word we use at Autostadt."

Phil Patton is the author of Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret Word of Roswell and Area 51.