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quiet and clean, something worthy of being taken to a theater premiere or a state dinner. The messy, noisy, internal-combustion engine simply would not do. He discussed all this with the young man from Maffersdorf, who had never built a car, but was anxious to try. Lohner hired him, and they set to work. From that moment on, Ferdinand Porsche’s main obsession would be the automobile. It was the first step on the path that would eventually
     lead to the creation of the Bug.

Adolf Hitler, a man that history will forever link to Germany, was not a German citizen by birth. Like Ferdinand Porsche, he was born in a small village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the eldest son of a well-respected Austrian customs official. By the time he arrived in the world, born in Braunau am Inn in 1889, fourteen years after Ferdinand Porsche’s birth, the industrial-age Eiffel Tower was being built
     and industrialization was slightly less alien to most Europeans than it had been a decade before; the automobile was slowly gaining ground. The first officialauto race would occur when Hitler was five years old, and though his family would have been familiar with the idea of automobiles, they would nevertheless have been a very unlikely sight in their town.
    From early on, Adolf was a troubled boy. When he was still a child, his younger brother and playmate Edmund died, causing a noticeable change in the family and further heartbreak for his mother Klara, who had already lost three children. Adolf, now her only son, wasn’t a “mother’s boy” in the traditional sense, but by all reports the two were sincerely close. “I never witnessed a closer attachment,” 1 the family doctor, a Jewish man named Eduard Bloch, would later write.
    As Adolf grew, he would seem at first to be a meek boy, yelled at and beaten often by his father, coddled by his mother, neither popular nor unpopular at school. Once the family moved to Linz, considered by some to be the most German city in the empire, Hitler was attracted to the popularized Pan-German ideas, ideas that discriminated against Czechs and others who did not speak German as their first tongue. He also identified with the Schönerer lifestyle, a
     movement that advised boys to restrain from sexual relations until at least the age of twenty-five, and warned them away from drinking alcohol, smoking, or eating red meat. In these same years, Adolf became rather obsessed with the Native American tales of the German author Karl May. Likewise, he was entranced by stories his history teacher told him of a mythologized German past, and men such as Frederick the Great. The stories impacted him deeply; he would talk of May and of
     Frederick the Great for the rest of his life. As he grew into an adolescent, this fantasy life would only expand. By the time he reached his teenage years, he had decided that he was destined to become a great artist and would consider doing nothing else. He and his father quarreled violently over this, and in rebellion, Adolf no longer tried hard at his studies and his grades suffered. This only caused more beatings from his father. His mother demurred and did not stand in her
     husband’s way.

    As Hitler struggled through his adolescence, Ferdinand Porsche was in Jacob Lohner’s workshop designing his first car. Around Hitler’s eleventh birthday, Ferdinand Porsche presented his creation at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. It would be Ferdinand’s inaugural visit to the French capital, his first time mingling with people from all over Europe. The event drew in millions, one of the first large-scale shows about technology ever held. Engineers
     and scientists were ecstatic about it, coming from many European countries to attend, showing off not only cars but also inventions such as escalators and talking films. Excitement was in the air, and so was controversy. The Eiffel Tower seemed the perfect metaphor for the age of industry breaking upon the world: While some loved the