the Daimler-Benz Museum

[JHertzman@xxxxxxx]

In AD7-170 John Brierty in Dublin asks about the Mercedes Benz museum in
Stuttgart: "Have any digest members been and if so is it worth a visit, is it
hard to find?, and do they operate odd opening and closing times ??"

Old notes but probably still valid, open 9am-5pm Tuesday to Sunday, admission
free. Strictly speaking not the Mercedes Museum but the Daimler-Benz Museum,
mailing address Postfach 60 02 02, 7000   Stuttgart 60;  tel:0711 1722578
located on the east side of Stuttgart. It is a magnificent piece of
museumship, purely Mercedes, Daimler, and Benz; unquestionably the most superb
car museum, (apart from Alfa's, of course) we will ever see with that narrow a
focus. From an Alfa perspective there is much to be learned from the full
range of competition cars from pre-WW I to the second World War; the World
Record Blitzen Benz of 1909, just before the very first Alfa, contributes a
technical context; the very successful 1914 Grand Prix car, when Alfa was
making its first tentative explorations of the new Grand Prix technologies
does more of the same, the two-liter Targa Florio winner of 1924, ditto, the
SSK which was the only car to break Alfa's great string of Mille Miglia wins,
(but with a much larger engine), the W25 which went nose to nose with the P3,
beating it with a more advanced chassis and a lot more money but with a
relatively comparable engine- a blown 3.4 liter straight eight, and the W125
and W154 cars which put a GP win beyond anybody else's aspirations, other than
Auto Union. If you can get beyond partisan nationalistic rhetoric (hard for
some of us) and the undeniable negative associations of the Third Reich
sponsorship (also difficult for some of us) it is a truly outstanding and
well-organized collection of remarkable cars. It is the definitive collection
of oldest and generally most dominant and technically advanced competition and
quality road cars from Day One, in the best-presented and best-run medium
sized car museum in the World.

If getting that far you are not far from the French Musee Nationale de
l'Automobile,   192 Avenue de Colmar, 68100 Mullhouse, tel 89422917. It is the
former Schlumpf collection plus later gifts and loaners- the largest public
collection in the world, built around a love of Bugattis but not stopping
there. The Schlumpfs were a pair of very rich, tasteless, and indiscriminate
collectors who bought car collections by the ton; they went broke and their
properties were nationalized to form an underfunded museum. There is a decent
group of Alfas, an almost obscene number of Bugattis, a fine but uneven group
of post-war competition cars, and a great hodge-podge of anything else that
came in wholesale purchases of existing collections. If you can supply the
conceptual organization, this is the place to put pre-war Alfas into a
complete European perspective, as the Biscaretti does for Alfas in Italy. Even
if you can't it is lots of fun, but organization, labels, and condition of
cars leave a lot to be desired. Go, if you can.

If of more modern tastes and addicted to racing cars, look up the Rosso-Bianco
in Ashaffenburg, same general area, the most Alfas outside the Alfa Museum,
the most Italians outside of Italy- how do you think a German museum got a
name like that? 

Enjoy-

John H. 

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