Dhe neighbor was none other than the first Federal President, Theodor Heuss, who spent his retirement in a small bungalow here in Stuttgart. A miniature golf course now adjoins the garden of the villa, followed by the facilities of the Weissenhof tennis club, the organizer of the Stuttgart tennis tournament. It is one of the most expensive and historic areas of Stuttgart where Wolfgang Porsche grew up. And the Villa Porsche, up here halfway up on the Killesberg, between the city center and the Porsche headquarters in Zuffenhausen, is perhaps the most historic residential building in the German automotive industry.
Porsche’s grandfather Ferdinand Porsche had it built, and it was here that he developed the car for the Nazis that later went down in history as the Beetle. If you want to understand what the IPO of Porsche is all about, you should also take a look at the history and the eventful relationships between Porsche in Stuttgart and the VW Group in Wolfsburg, which have existed for almost a century and are older than Wolfsburg itself. Because when VW brings Porsche to the stock market in a few weeks, it’s not just about billions or showing investors why the VW group is undervalued. It is also about the Porsche and Piëch families once again securing a direct say in Zuffenhausen via their holding company, Porsche SE.
They want to buy a 25 percent stake and one share in the Porsche voting rights from VW and thus hold a blocking minority in the future. They would then no longer just be indirect shareholders as major VW shareholders, but rather concretely involved partners. Just like they always understood each other. Or as the Stuttgart history professor Wolfram Pyta puts it in an interview with the FAZ, who has written a book about the company history of Porsche: “It was always the credo that the families ultimately decide.”
“Opportunist of the purest water”
The IPO marks a new, historic milestone in a history that has left deep scars on the European economy. Your starting point is Ferdinand Porsche, the famous plumber’s son from Bohemia who became a technical legend with his vehicles. Hitler trusted him and wanted to use his ideas to make the car, which was still a luxury item at the time, suitable for the masses. Not as a convinced Nazi, but as an “opportunist of the purest kind,” is how Pyta describes Porsche’s behavior towards Hitler in his book. Porsche and Hitler are, if you will, the two founding fathers of Volkswagen.
After the war, closely intertwined empires grew in Wolfsburg and Stuttgart, which had always wavered between rivalry and closeness. In one of his books about the Porsche/Piëch clan, the Austrian journalist Wolfgang Fürweger describes the situation during the years of the economic boom for a long time as Porsche was VW’s “outsourced think tank”. “From the family perspective, Volkswagen was a baby of Porsche that should have been named after Porsche,” says Pyta.
Correspondingly self-confident – some say: arrogant – the designers at Porsche have been acting towards their Wolfsburg colleagues for decades. The fact that Oliver Blume, the next Porsche boss, will now lead Volkswagen can be understood in this tradition, says Pyta. For the family, mentally and aesthetically, what happens in Wolfsburg is often just a result of what is conceived and achieved in Stuttgart.
When Porsche wanted to buy VW
This self-image reached its peak in 2008 and 2009. The much smaller Porsche AG, which Ferdinand’s son Ferry had formed into a sports car icon after the war, tried to take over VW under the leadership of the then CEO Wendelin Wiedeking. The most powerful man in Wolfsburg at the time was a family member: Wolfgang Porsche’s cousin Ferdinand Piëch headed the supervisory board. He had previously been CEO and shaped the VW Group for a total of more than two decades, towards the end in the style of a patriarch. When Porsche ran out of money halfway through the takeover attempt – the financial crisis did the rest – and got into dire need, VW turned the tables and swallowed up the attacker from the southwest.
