Where are the Hobbys in Germany?

My Manurhin project is on pause for the moment while I am on summer holiday with my family.
This week we are in Berlin; an amazing city that I so wish I had visited as a student in the 80's.

I was rather excited to be coming to Germany - perhaps I might stumble over a DKW Hobby or two in a local junk shop or car boot sale.  As it happens Berlin has a number of 'Flohmarkts' (flea-markets) and the  one in Mauerpark is easily one of the biggest markets I've ever been too.  We must have spent 4 or 5 exhausting hours walking up and down the alleys of people selling anything from vintage t-shirts to handmade lampshades, from East German Kitsch to cool retro furniture.  And it seems like they are into their bicycles here too.  We must have seen hundreds of bicycles, and thousands of bicycle parts for sale ..... but not a motorbike bit in sight.


I left the family to search through even more piles of clothes and went to visit the Bauhaus Museum and on my way passed the first interesting looking scooter I'd seen on this trip.  It looked unusual, certainly something I'd never seen before, so I stopped to take a photo.  While nosing around to find a manufacturer badge the owner came out to see what I was doing.  He couldn't speak English and I couldn't speak German, but through some friendly sign language I was able to establish it was an 1980's East German (DDR) built SIMSON SCHWALBE.  I'd never heard of it, and it was such an odd looking thing that I took rather a fancy to it.  That was yesterday.


Today, there was still more markets and shopping to do (for the girls), so I took the opportunity to go and find out a little more about these East German built motorbikes.  I went to the DDR Motorrad Museum (which conveniently is only a few hundred yards from the railway station AND the shopping center).  I had a wonderful time on my own exploring an area of motorcycle manufacture that I'd never even heard of.  Of course I had heard of MZ when my poverty stricken student mates were buying their first motorbikes in the mid '80's - but as far as i remembered they were pig ugly and unreliable to boot, but today the penny dropped for me - MZ has ancestry in Auto Union and as a consequence in DKW and by association, my Manurhin Concorde too - everything is connected!

I still don't have much enthusiasm for the MZ ES125 - whoever agreed for a design like that to come off the drawing board?? (even if it is "the most-built German motorcycle"), but I have discovered the most wonderful great grandfather of MZ, the very cool 1955 shaft-driven AWO 425 Touren.  OK so its not a scooter, nor is it a 2-stroke...... but maybe it could become another project one day? :-)

So I didn't find any DKW hobby parts in Berlin.  I hope I have better luck with Manurhin parts when Im in France next week.

BTW - I was delighted to find tonight someone writing an excellent blog about the rebuild of his Simson Schwalbe.