February 2020 | A special greeting: news from our office in Friedrichshafen!

In addi­tion to the Foun­da­tion’s office in San Fran­cis­co, our Ger­man ‘May­bach-Stiftung’ team in Friedrichshafen, Ger­many. Locat­ed right near the beau­ti­ful Lake Con­stance. Here we focus on build­ing up a com­pre­hen­sive archive of May­bach’s rich his­to­ry and sup­port­ing the Fre­un­deskreis May­bach Muse­um e.V. („Friends of the May­bach Muse­um“). There are many rea­sons why this loca­tion is sig­nif­i­cant for the world of May­bach and the deci­sion to set up a branch here was no accident.

Friedrichshafen on Lake Con­stance is where Karl May­bach cre­at­ed the engines for the Zep­pelin air­ship. The cre­ation of these engines had a long-term impact on both glob­al his­to­ry and the Lake Con­stance region’s his­to­ry. With the first inde­pen­dent­ly pro­duced engine, the ‚AZ‘, in 1909, the foun­da­tion was cre­at­ed for an entire series of May­bach prod­ucts which has a glob­al sig­nif­i­cance by intro­duc­ing major improve­ments in var­i­ous areas of engi­neer­ing, for exam­ple, the inven­tion of the fast-run­ning engines of the SVT trains from the 1930s.

Here in Friedrichshafen, many peo­ple are still close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with May­bach and the his­to­ry of May­bach Motoren­bau has flour­ished with the found­ing of the com­pa­ny MTU (Motoren und Tur­binen Union) in 1969. The „Fre­un­deskreis May­bach Muse­um e.V.“ (Friends of the May­bach Muse­um Asso­ci­a­tion) idea began to pick up trac­tion after the for­ma­tion of the MTU. The goal of the „Fre­un­deskreis May­bach Muse­um e.V.“ is to pur­sue the goal of giv­ing the May­bach his­to­ry its own and main­tain­ing the his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance of the May­bach her­itage. Under the lead­er­ship of Sigfrid Rehm (who has worked for Karl May­bach) over 2,000 objects, arti­facts and doc­u­ments have been col­lect­ed on a vol­un­tary basis since its foun­da­tion in 2015 and a broad net­work of experts have been help­ing this project. This project has also been being pro­mot­ed with a great com­mit­ment by the cur­rent direc­tors and members.

In close coöper­a­tion with the Fre­un­deskreis May­bach Muse­um, two col­leagues (Mar­vin Meier-Braun, our Col­lec­tion Cura­tor and Tobias Erne, the Assis­tant for Col­lec­tion and Inven­to­ry) of the Ger­man Stiftung are over­see­ing and man­ag­ing the list­ings of this impor­tant col­lec­tion and items while also han­dling the acqui­si­tion of new, addi­tion­al col­lec­tion items. In 2019, a very impor­tant tool has been imple­ment­ed at the muse­um: a cloud-based archive software.

Over the course of our muse­um work, we take images and record the basic data to doc­u­ment the object in detail so that they can be clear­ly iden­ti­fied. The sub­se­quent stor­age accord­ing to con­ser­va­tion aspects is an equal­ly impor­tant issue. The sep­a­ra­tion of met­al and paper or the use of acid-free mate­r­i­al are only two of many points to be con­sid­ered when main­tain­ing old items that can be eas­i­ly dam­aged. Dig­i­tal access to data entries of indi­vid­ual col­lec­tion items and objects also serve as a form of pro­tec­tion, because that means that orig­i­nals do not have to be han­dled as fre­quent­ly, ensur­ing they stay in good con­di­tion for as long as possible.

The usabil­i­ty of the var­i­ous con­tem­po­rary tes­ti­monies is great­ly enhanced by our new soft­ware. When search­ing our data­base we are allowed to enhance our search­es with pre­cise key­words and, above all, the var­i­ous objec­tions can be eas­i­ly linked and con­nect­ed to one anoth­er. For exam­ple, a news­pa­per arti­cle can be linked to objects and oth­er mate­r­i­al, cre­at­ing an inter­est­ing the­mat­ic net­work of May­bach’s his­to­ry. With these con­nec­tions, com­plex sto­ries can emerge even from things that at first glance seem unre­lat­ed. In the long- term there is also the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mak­ing the data acces­si­ble to the glob­al pub­lic via a web­site — a first approach to the idea of a glob­al May­bach Archive.

For now, we only want to show a teas­er of our archive work and we will show­case some more details in our next newslet­ter edi­tion. Stay tuned and we will share more excit­ing finds and news about the every­day life of the col­lec­tions work here on site.