Erwin Hymer Caravan Museum

While we driving from Friedrichshafen to Bamburg in Germany we saw a flyer for the Erwin Hymer Caravan museum in Bad Wadsee. Hymer are a caravan company and their factory a little way from the museum. As Bad Wadsee was on our route and we had a long driving day ahead, we decided to pop into their museum to have a look and break up the journey. We were glad we did. This is an excellent museum housed in an amazingly ultra-modern building.

The displays were very well done and focused on the evolution of German caravans from the 1930s to 1970s. There was lots of information and context provided about caravans, vehicles and social context. Moreover, the museum was actually fun and captured some of the sense of fun and adventure of a caravan holiday 'back in the day.' What we had expected to be a half hour diversion turned into a two hour visit. A well recommended stop in southern Germany. Erwin Hymer Museum is located at Robert-Bosch-Str. 7, 88339 Bad Waldsee

For details see their website: https://www.erwin-hymer-museum.de/en.html

The first German caravan was a home built affair made by Arist Dethleffs in 1931. Dethleffs was traveling in Germany for work and decided he wanted an alternative to staying in hotels. He built this little plywood, folding roof caravan that he could tow behind his car. Soon friends were asking him to build a caravan for them.

1939 Dethleff Tourist was an improved version of his first caravan. It was homebuilt and plywood. The extendable roof is an interesting feature that lowered the van's profile when being towed but allowed passengers to stand up inside them when in use. Cloth screens would have covered the gap.

Dethleffs interior

A Czech Praga Piccolo with the Dethleffs Tourist.

1929 Opel P4. This conventional car was pitched at the budget car but was actually well beyond the resources of most people.

For a small car, the Opel is carrying a heavy burden in the Sportsberger Karawane. Streamlining was a critical feature of the early caravans.

Although caravaning originated in the 1930s it would only really take off with the advent of a people's car that bought affordable motoring to the masses.

The topside view of the Sportsberger G2 highlights how small it is. It really was little more than a double bed on wheels with storage, but caravans like this gave Germans mobility in the post-war world.

1938 Opel Kadett and Schweikert Kleiner Strolch

1939 DKW F8 with a Hirth Tramp

The Hirth is quite a large caravan for the DKW's 700cc two-stroke engine. Despite their size these caravans were very lightweight. Hirth also had experience with aircraft engineering.

Sportsberger folding tent. I can remember seeing similar caravans in Australia as a kid. It's doubtful many would be left these days.

1953 Sportsbergen Land Yacht. Not a particularly practical caravan but certainly striking.

1953 Deftleft's Globetrotter

1953 Mercedes-Benz 220B cabriolet

1956 Mikafa Student Special

Zundapp Janus

Not only did the passengers sit back to back, the seats could be folded down to create a flat bed for the passengers.

1961 Dethleffs Nomad

Nomad interior

Borgward Isabella Coupe

1956 Westfalia Camping 2. In the 1950s plastics and fibreglass began to appear in caravan construction.

1954 Schollmeyer and Mahler Wittener caravan

The Schollmeyer made a great use of very small space. The caravan was not very wide and the top section retracted into the bottom half to lower its profile.

Interior

1967 Goggomobil T250

1956 Elektro Stahlbau Piccolo. A caravan specially made for the microcars popular at the time.

Fiat 500 and a Laika caravan. The Laika was a lightweigh, fibreglass, folding caravan that was specially designed for the Fiat 500. To reduce its top weight the upper section of the caravan slid down over the bottom half so that it was no higher than the Fiat's roofline.

1959 Mikafa Reisenmobil Deluxe. Mikafa didn't only built caravan but also mobile homes like this luxury model. The vehicle was powered by a BMW V8 engine.

1961 Hymer Caravano 3 camping bus. It was based on a Borgward rolling chassis.

1961 Knaus Schwalbennest 'baby' caravan

A very art-deco styled home built caravan from the 1960s



1959 Opel Rekord P1

1970 Wurdig 301 caravan from East Germany

1982 Trabant with a Muller rooftop folding tent. This was certainly a novel solution to camping challenge.

A MZ motorcycle and trailer

French Renault Dauphine

Ford Taunus

Mercedes-Benz ponton

A replica of the second model Dethleffs caravan shows its construction.

What you need when you have an amphibious car is an amphibious caravan

Scandinavian fibreglass bodied amphibious caravan

1959 Edsel Ranger towing an Airstream

View from the ground floor

The museum is very interactive with lots of fun things for the whole family.

Trabant Museum, Zwickau

The Trabant was built at the old Audi factory in Zwickau for more than 30 years. The factory is now the August Horch Museum and the museum normally has a large exhibition dedicated to the factory's post-war history. The collection includes a rare post-war Horch 930S and an extensive display of IFA and Trabants. Unfortunately for us, when we visited the museum in July 2017, the post-war section was closed for renovation. Part of the post-war museum collection has been moved to the nearby Trabant International Register museum. We took the opportunity to visit the little collection and it was a very pleasant local museum staffed by enthusiastic volunteers. If you are in visiting Zwickau it is worthwhile making a detour.http://www.intertrab.com/category/ausstellung/

The predecessors - IFA F8 and F9, which were copies of DKW prewar cars.

The IFA F8 was the postwar copy of the prewar DKW F8, with some minor modifications.

The IFA F9 was the realisation of the 1939 DKW F9 'Hohnklasse.' DKW only built 9 pre-production examples before the war intervened. IFA recovered a single example in Leipzig and used it to reverse engineer their version of the car. http://heinkelscooter.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/1939-dkw-f9-prototype.html

The Horch P240. During the war Horch had ceased manufacturing luxury cars and become a heavy truck manufacturer. After the war they continued building trucks but they did have a few Horch 930 chassis tucked away and they were used to build half a dozen limousines for party officials. These cars were so prized that Horch was contracted to build a production car. The result was the P240. It was a far cry from the extravagant luxury of their prewar cars but these were austere times. Only a few hundred were built. http://heinkelscooter.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/veb-sachsenring-east-germanys-peoples.html

The Horch P240 had some stylistic influences of heavy American cars of the 1950s

IFA F9 cabriolet

The Trabant's predecessor - the AWZ P70. The similarity to the Trabant lies in its use of Duraplast bodywork, but under the this new skin the car was basically an IFA F8.

Raw Duraplast panel with the cotton tailings still attached. Despite ridiculous modern claims that the Trabant is made of cardboard or other such rubbish, Duraplast is an amazing product that creatively uses two waste products - cotton waste and a phenolic resin byproduct of the chemical dying industry - to produce something entirely new and useful. Duraplast is somewhat similar to carbon fibre these days.

The golden age of the East German workers paradise was the 1970s. At this point East Germany could feel it had almost reached the same level of prosperity as its western counterpart, but things would soon begin to slide. From the 1980s East Germany was in terminal decline and no amount of propaganda could disguise it.

Trabi folding rooftop tent. An amazing option available for East German camping enthusiasts.

Trabant P60

A diorama of the famous Trabi breaking through the Berlin Wall.

I think the first Trabants are the best looking. They are handsome budget cars for the period, much like their western contempories, such as the Goggomobil or NSU Prinz. http://heinkelscooter.blogspot.com.au/2014/01/trabant-east-german-peoples-car.html

Trabant P50. Early models sometime featured two-tone paintwork and chrome trim.

Trabant P60 kombi. The new P60 model toned down the paint and trim a little.

The classic Trabant - the Trabant 601

Trabant 601

From newest to oldest. The Trabant 1.1 featured a Volkswagen Polo engine.

Trabant kubel was the military version of the Trabant.


One of Trabant's many stillborn models. The designers at Sachsenring constantly attempted to replace the Trabant with a more modern design but as this would require retooling the factory, the management always refused to fund it.

IFA sign

Exploded Trabants

Flying Trabant