Starting with the author's own experience of ghostliness in the archive, the article explores the political meaning of the postwar Volkswagen in West Germany as embodiment of the country's “economic miracle.” The investigation follows the uncanny in texts and images about the Volkswagen between 1945 and 1960 and argues that the car carried with it a “public secret” as a “debris” from the Nazi empire that silently transcended the 1945 divide. This reading of the Volkswagen as well as the methodological path toward it highlight a phenomenon that postcolonial scholars have described as “haunting”: a confusion about the relationship between past and present that also bears on those who study the past. Taking this analysis as an encouragement to revisit the powerful myths and “miracles” of postwar consumer cultures in the West from a new angle, the article calls for historical genealogies of these myths that conceive of the postwar West as a—not yet—postcolonial space and that cross the 1945 threshold.

中文翻译：

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幽灵与奇迹：战后西德的大众汽车是帝国的废墟

文章从作者本人在档案中的幽灵经历出发，探讨西德战后大众汽车作为该国“经济奇迹”的体现的政治意义。这项调查是在 1945 年至 1960 年期间有关大众汽车的文本和图像中出现的离奇事件之后进行的，并认为这辆车携带了一个“公共秘密”，作为纳粹帝国的“碎片”，悄悄地超越了 1945 年的鸿沟。这种对大众汽车及其方法论路径的解读突出了一种被后殖民学者描述为“令人难以忘怀”的现象：对过去与现在之间关系的混淆，这也影响到那些研究过去的人。以这种分析为鼓励，从新的角度重新审视西方战后消费文化的强大神话和“奇迹”，