Report on a visit to the GDR Motorcycle Museum in Berlin. MZ.
Hello.
In this post I collect MZ motorcycles from the GDR Motorcycle Museum and give a brief history of the company. The motorcycles themselves, unfortunately, for the most part have a simple, not very interesting design with a two-stroke engine and a minimum of bells and whistles. However, they were produced in hundreds of thousands of copies, so they occupy a significant place in the history of the motorcycle, at least due to their scale and prevalence.
The MZ motorcycle production plant (Motorradwerk Zschopau) was located in Germany, in the city of Cschopau. Until the end of World War II, this plant produced DKW motorcycles; after the war, the plant ended up on the territory of the GDR, controlled by the USSR. Some of the equipment was taken to Izhevsk, as a result of which we received an Izh motorcycle, almost completely copied from the DKW NZ-350, which then evolved into the Izh-49 and further down the list.
Since 1956, the plant began producing motorcycles under the MZ brand. These were two-stroke, technically simple and lightweight motorcycles, the production of which was designed for scale. It’s a big strange thing that MZ were imported into many countries of the world, while they were practically absent in the USSR. Of course, in the Soviet Union there were other manufacturers that saturated the market with motorcycles: domestic Urals, Dnepr, Izhi and Voskhody. There was also Czech Java and CZ. But why there was no place for MZ in this huge market is a mystery to me.
In 1983, the two millionth motorcycle was produced.
Continuing the theme of non-capitalist markets (pun intended
