# West Germany Got Mercedes and East Germany Got The Roles Royce Of Baby Vehicles



## Goldenrod (Jan 16, 2021)

I had just became a great grandpa so my hormone level was spiking when my neighbor pulled this out to the trash.  I was alone so no one was there to tie me up.   Interesting history and so clean.  Quiz Time: Why would you want to turn the handle and push the unit backwards?  The answer is at the end of the pictures and info.
How a Maker of Baby Carriages Outgrew Communism​October 16, 1997

By Ruth Walker Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
ZEITZ, GERMANY
It's amazing how much history can be tucked into a baby carriage.
Zeitzer Kinderwagen, or Zekiwa, as the carriagemaker based here is known, could be used to tell just about the whole story of German manufacturing, from the exuberance of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution to today's era of outsourcing and downsizing.
Infants were still being wrapped in swaddling clothes when Ernst Albert Naether started his business in 1846. He had taken over his father's wheelwright shop, and had the idea of mounting baby-sized baskets onto a small wagon chassis. Voil! The first modern baby carriage.

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By the time Naether's firm marked its 50th anniversary, Zeitz was to baby carriages what the Silicon Valley is to today's computer industry. "Zeitz was the location for the baby-carriage business," says Bernd Einhorn, a 30-year veteran of Zekiwa who is now the firm's managing director. By the end of the 19th century, Zeitz carriages were shipped as far as the United States, Russia, South America, West Africa, and Australia.
After the division of Germany in 1945, East Germany's Communist government merged several firms, including Naether, into Zekiwa. Never mind that West Germany had Mercedes - East Germany had Zekiwa.

By 1988, Zekiwa was one of the prestige brand names of Eastern Europe. Production was some 800,000 units a year, including both baby and doll carriages. Twenty percent of this stayed in East Germany, 60 percent went to the Soviet Union and other East bloc countries, and 20 percent went to West Germany and Western Europe.

The firm had 2,600 employees. "It was a typical East German operation," Mr. Einhorn says. "We did everything in-house, even the microelectronics on the production line."
Then came "the turning," and specifically, currency union of East and West Germany on July 1, 1990. "Overnight, our whole market was gone," Einhorn says. East German customers suddenly could shop in the West, and Eastern European customers could not afford to pay in hard currency.
Fortunately, he says, a large contract with the Soviet Union enabled the firm to modernize and keep afloat. And unlike many of the command economy firms of that time, he says, "We had our own deals in the West. We knew the market, and our customers knew us. That made the difference."

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Still, the upheavals associated with privatization were "a bitter experience," Einhorn says, especially "having to lay people off that you've grown up with."

Nowadays the firm has only 70 employees, although there are another 200 working in effect full time for Zekiwa at other firms in Germany. Zekiwa sells 30,000 baby carriages and 120,000 doll carriages a year. So much work is done by subcontracting and outsourcing that Einhorn prefers to speak of "sales" rather than "production."
Product development and assembly is all that Zekiwa does in Germany now; all the rest of the work is done abroad - in Poland, China, Taiwan, Italy, and France.


















When the baby is a newborn, it only wants to look at mom but, after it is grown, it wants to look at the world so you move the handle.  This one is probably prewar. because the elderly lady was in it.


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## Goldenrod (Jul 23, 2021)

bump


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## Jeff54 (Jul 23, 2021)

Goldenrod said:


> This one is probab*ly prewar. because the elderly lady was in it.*



*You said: ""This one is probably prewar. because the elderly lady was in it.""*

Interesting deduction but, I don't know, your carriage looks a little too small for this lady; Margaret Ann Robinson 18" tall,  to have used in her 'Elderly'  😉  years:  circa 1934. Did it come with an "Elderly Lady" or provenance?


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