“Follow That Car!” Mobilities of Enthusiasm in a Rare Car's Restoration

Abstract

This article follows one object, a rare car, through its life cycle and in so doing engages the literatures in cultural geography on mobilities, materiality, and enthusiasm to show how all three are linked in the restoration of this one automobile, a Czechoslovakian-built Tatra T87 from 1941. Through archival and autoethnographic research, we trace the history of the Tatra company and then follow the production, sale, and subsequent ownerships of this one particular car through two wars and across two continents. We detail its restoration, tracing a geography of automobile enthusiasm that brought this rusted hulk back to life, one facilitated internationally by the Internet but that nevertheless demands extraordinary mobilities of cars, people, and parts. In following this one thing, we join other scholars in complicating the commodity- or global-value chains so often described as linear, to uncover instead complex entanglements of reuse, repurposing, and restoration. Because the car in question is our own, we mobilize our experiences with the car to reveal how the geographies of enthusiasms (automotive and otherwise) involve sustained and profound emotional engagements—emotional engagements often left out of academic accounts where, we suggest, they might be desirable as well.

本文追随一项物品——一部稀有的车种——的生命週期, 以此涉入文化地理学有关流动、物质性与热情的文献, 并展现上述三者如何在此一汽车——捷克斯洛伐克自 1941 年开始製造的塔特拉 T98 (Tatra T87) ——的修復中产生连结。我们透过档案及自我民族志研究, 追溯塔特拉公司的历史, 接着追随此一特定车辆经历了两次世界大战、于两个大陆的生产、销售, 以及随后的所有权。我们仔细描绘它的修復, 追寻让此般生鏽废铁起死回生的车辆热衷地理——此一热情是在国际间由互联网所促进, 但仍然需要车辆、人与零件的特别流动。我们在追随此一物品中, 加入其他学者复杂化经常被描绘为线性的商品链或全球价值链之理论, 并揭露再利用、重新赋予使用性及修復之间的复杂牵连。因为探讨的车辆为研究者所有, 我们调动自身的车辆经验, 揭露 (汽车或其他的) 热情地理, 如何包含持续且深刻的情绪涉入——此般情绪涉入经常被学术研究所遗漏, 而我们主张, 它们同时亦是可取之事。

Este artículo le sigue la pista a un objeto, un carro raro, a través de su ciclo vital, y al hacerlo nos involucramos con las literaturas de geografía cultural sobre movilidades, materialidad y entusiasmo, para mostrar cómo todas las tres se entrelazan en el proceso de restauración de este particular automóvil, un Tatra T87 modelo 1941 de fabricación checoeslovaca. A través de investigación auto-etnográfica y de archivos, reconstruimos la historia de la compañía Tatra y luego documentamos la producción, venta y subsiguientes transferencias de propiedad de este particular carro a través de dos guerras y de dos continentes. Detallamos su restauración, dibujando una geografía del entusiasmo automovilístico que resucitó este oxidado armatoste, facilitada internacionalmente por la Internet pero que aún así demanda movilidades extraordinarias de carros, gente y repuestos. Al hacer el seguimiento de este proceso, nos unimos a otros estudiosos en la tarea de complicar las cadenas de valor global o de mercaderías muy a menudo descritas como lineales, para descubrir en vez de eso un complejo enredo sobre reúso, reacondicionamiento y restauración. Debido a que el carro de marras es el nuestro propio, movilizamos nuestras experiencias con el carro para revelar cómo las geografías de los entusiasmos (automovilísticos y de otro tipo) implican continuos y profundos compromisos emocionales—compromisos emocionales dejados de lado en los recuentos académicos donde, sugerimos nosotros, podrían tener también merecida lugar.

Key Words::

• Commodity chains
• enthusiasm
• follow the thing
• global value chains
• mobilities
• Tatra T87

关键词::

• 商品链
• 热情
• 追随物品
• 全球价值链
• 流动
• 塔特拉 T87 (Tatra T87)。

Palabras clave::

• cadenas de mercaderías
• entusiasmo
• seguimiento
• cadenas de valor global
• movilidades
• Tatra T87

Notes

¹Tatra enthusiast Ivo Slezak's “Tatra passenger car register in USA and Canada” lists all Tatras known to him as of approximately 2002 and terms our car “only spare parts car. Body and interior too far gone” (Authors’ collection).

²Most are in automotive museums: the (Czech) National Technical Museum, the Vienna Technical Museum, Transportation Museum Bratislava, the Samohyl Museum, the Veteran Auto Museum, Olomouc, the Veteran Museum Vitov, Oldtimer Club Museum Steinabrück, Verkerkehrshaus der Schweiz, the Lane Motor Museum, and the Tampa Bay Automobile Museum; a few grace the collections of art museums: the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Modernism show at the Victoria and Albert Museum both in London and Washington, D.C. (see www.tatraworld.nl/tatras-in-museums/).

³Koshar (2004) provides another look at how cars and nations are embedded in shared histories in the mid-twentieth century. Gartman (2004) sketches three periods for the car as a consumer object, all of which are also engaged by the Tatra company, even despite its period of Soviet influence.

⁴Nesseldorf means “nettle town” in German; Koprivnice means the same thing in Czech; the town, in a multilingual region, was long known by either of the two names, depending on who was in power. It was Nesseldorf until 1918; Koprivnice until 1938, back to Nesseldorf until 1945, and Koprivnice ever since. Many of the Tatra staff, most notably Hans Ledwinka (see later), spoke, wrote, and designed in German, their allegiance being primarily to the earlier Austro-Hungarian Empire (see Margolius and Henry 1990).

⁵In fact, Tatra, for more than 100 years, has managed to succeed in spite of its location—a small company town far from transportation or resources. By contrast, in the United States, Detroit was near steel-manufacturing centers as well as sources of water power and transportation, and even smaller automotive companies like Studebaker (South Bend, Indiana) relied on convenient rail transport (from the hub of Chicago); in Europe, Citroën's factory was situated in Paris; Morris's was in London.

⁶For example, Bata shoes in Zlin, Czech Republic (http://www.bata.com/bata-shoes-heritage.php), and the Flint Road Cart Company (whose management later founded General Motors) in Flint, Michigan (Pelfrey 2006).

⁷Baron Liebig, a Nesseldorfer executive, became one of Benz's first customers in the 1890s and later raced cars (Rosencranz [1997] 2007).

⁸Alphabetically numbered, these included the Type A and the Type B.

⁹Paul Jaray held the patent on a streamlined automobile concept. Although never a manufacturer himself, Jaray opened the door to what became true “teardrop” streamlining (Lichtenstein and Engler 1996), and Tatra became the only company to actually work under his patents. Volkswagen, for example, was sued for not doing so (Margolius and Henry 1990).

¹⁰In addition to the streamlined designs, Ledwinka's autonomy also led to four-cylinder versions of the T11 and T12 (Margolius and Henry 1990; Rosencranz [1997] 2007).

¹¹The resulting Tatra car, in 1931, was a one-off prototype, the V570. Other companies (like NSU and Mercedes) experimented with the same ideas, producing their prototypes around the same time. For example, between 1935 and 1939, Mercedes produced the 130H, 150H, and 170H series based on a tubular backbone chassis, independent suspension, and rear-mounted four-cylinder water-cooled engine. None was a success—the water-cooled engine made for too much weight behind the rear axle, which contributed to unstable handling (see Adler 2006).

¹²“The Tunnel,” also known as “Transatlic Tunnel,” was released in 1936 and featured two T77s (see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027131/).

¹³See Rosencranz ([1997] 2007): T77s weighed 1,700 and 1,800 kg; T87s weighed 1,370 kg.

¹⁴See Rosencranz ([1997] 2007): The T77 had 60 hp, T77a had 70 hp, and the T87 had 72 or 75 hp. The T97 had cloth (rather than leather) seats, a simple dashboard, and a flat-four boxer motor in the rear. Essentially, the T97 was a prior model, the T57, turned around, and with the T87's body. If it sounds like Germany's later Volkswagen Beetle, that's because it is—Tatra sued Volkswagen and won (Margolius and Henry 1990).

¹⁵Adolf Hitler was greatly enamored of the Tatra's ruggedness and versatility; he used a Tatra for his early stump speeches (Margolius and Henry 1990).

¹⁶Photographs show a T87 in the parking lot of the Volkswagen factory at Wolfsburg; Hitler was said to have instructed Porsche to ignore patent issues and copy the car. Tatra eventually won the ensuing patent infringement suit (see Margolius and Henry 1990).

¹⁷They “annexed” parts of Czechslovakia in a stepwise fashion, until they held all of the contemporary Czech Republic, leaving independence-seeking Slovakia a German-controlled satellite (Cabada and Waisová 2011).

¹⁸In the German view, there was no war, and never was a war, in Czechoslovakia (Shirer 1960). Logbooks at the Tatra factory archive reveal that most of the buyers of these “civilian” cars were high-placed Nazi officials (although not necessarily military staff; for example, the car built before ours was sold to the head of the Nazi roads department); few were sold to Czech civilians.

¹⁹Efforts to keep Tatra cars at the forefront of both engineering and executive efficiency led to the 1990s “mobicom” (or mobile command center)—a T700 fitted with swiveling captain's chair, “mobile” phone, “portable” computer, and refreshment center for three and a driver. One is on display at the Tatra Museum in Koprivnice.

²⁰Post-Velvet Revolution leaders like Václav Havel sought to disassociate themselves from police and government repression in the Soviet era—typified and symbolized by Tatra limousines. See, for example, the Czech film The Ear (Ucho 1970) where the secret police drive Tatra T603s; and Margolius (2006), who observed that arrests made in government purges in the 1950s featured secret police driving Tatra T600s. In both cases, seeing a new Tatra in front of your house or business signified serious trouble—so much so that when Czech president Milos Zeman visited the Tatra factory in 2013 and was offered a ride in a Tatra T700 (the last model produced, made until 1998) he still saw fit to make a joke about it, and Tatra, meanwhile, was still evidently angling to get back into government contracts (http://www.auto.cz/prezident-milos-zeman-navstivil-automobilku-tatra-77138).

²¹In 1946, Vauxhall Motors brought a formerly German-owned T87 to the United Kingdom for evaluation. It was found dangerously undrivable, but photographs of the car at that time reveal bald tires, leaking oil, and a dented body—all on a five-year-old car (Vauxhall Motors Limited 1946; Margolius and Henry 1990, 115). Cars in Europe had seen hard service by the end of the war.

²²Between 1947 and 1950, Czechs Jiri Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund drove a Tatra T87 around the world, photographing and documenting their journey extensively, chiefly in a five-volume book series that focused particularly on Africa and South America but also in magazine articles, radio stories, and newsreels. At a time when Eastern Bloc citizens gleaned little overseas news, many Czechs learned world geography from Hanzelka and Zikmund's travels, travels that repeatedly heroicized the Tatra T87 (see, e.g., Hanzelka and Zikmund 1955).

²³Tatras, like many other cars of this period and before, came with two spare tires—equipment often seen as necessary on long trips over the rough roads of the region.

²⁴Unlike in car production, in car restoration, creativity and adaptability are key.

²⁵Perhaps most enjoyably in Becker's (2003) film Goodbye Lenin, which both documents and parodies life in the former East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall when Western products of all kinds flooded in to transform every aspect of life.

²⁶Car culture in general, and car restoration in particular, are both highly gendered endeavors; most of those engaged in them worldwide are men (Dannefer 1980; Miller 2001). Our experiences with car restoration communities in the United States and Europe over the past twenty-five years also reveal that, in general, the restoration of cars more than fifty years old is typically undertaken by middle-aged and older men.

²⁷See, for example, Dixon (1977) on the sad case of the “Packard Crushathon” in California where rivalry between enthusiasts allegiant to two different car clubs led dozens of cars to be destroyed.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dydia DeLyser

DYDIA DeLYSER is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at California State University, Fullerton, 800 N. St. College Boulevard, Fullerton, CA 92834-6846. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests include landscape, social memory, mobilities, and cultures of enthusiasm.

Paul Greenstein

PAUL GREENSTEIN restores antique cars and motorcycles and makes neon signs in Los Angeles. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include cooperative colonies in the United States, Los Angeles history, and the neon sign industry in America.