Great Drives and Destinations:

Mannheim to Pforzheim, Germany

The Bertha Benz Memorial Drive

Story by Nancy & Eric Anderson  

Photography by authors and Peter Krause of the Dr. Carl Benz Automuseum 

 

The Cars 

This is not a Tale of Two Cities but a tale of three cars, the most important being the 1884 Benz Patentmotorwagen Modell 3, an important Benz prototype. Nancy is sitting in the actual original car. The other cars are a black 1933 Mercedes-Benz 170 and a blue 1960 Mercedes-Benz 220 SE Cabriolet, both provided by the extraordinarily generous owner of the Dr. Carl Benz Automuseum, Herr Winfried A, Seidel.

The museum, housed in the original Benz factory, sits in nearby Ladenburg.

In this image. Eric is driving a Model 1 replica of the 1888 car under the watchful eyes of Herr Seidel who, perhaps as a result of his observations, decides to provide drivers for the two automobiles, one a chase car for our famous 97 mile drive. Famous? Yes. It was the first long distance drive any motor car had ever made. And it was driven by a woman, Carl Benz’s wife, Bertha.

Carl Benz didn’t really invent the motor car; many engineers were trying to do that in 1888 but he was the closest to success – despite the apathy of the public and its superstitious fears that horseless carriages were the work of the devil. However, Benz was a perfectionist more inclined to improve each prototype than a business man trying to market his product. Berth thought to sell cars you had to promote them. Her mother lived in Pforzheim 97 miles to the south and her sister had just given birth to a baby there. She simply bundled her own two sons aged 13 and 15, into the third prototype and set off to visit her mother.

But the story isn’t really simple. No one had ever driven such a long distance before, the roads – some from Roman times -- were rudimentary, her car was an untested and essential prototype and she didn’t have her husband’s permission or knowledge.

Things went wrong. And this incredibly resourceful woman handled them all! Even including the problem where the husband, instead of seeing the trip as positive public relations, was not pleased and sulked apparently for six months: The distance was unheard of and for the event to be initiated by a woman seemingly bothered his male ego.

Give yourself time in the museum; there’s a lot to see including some of Bertha’s personal effects that made the trip a success: her garter she used to insulate an over-heated connection and the hatpin she used to clear a blocked tube. The car shows the brakes she reinforced with shoe leather from a cobbler’s shop during her journey. And the extra gear she had Carl add because she complained of poor performance on hills. She also stopped at a blacksmith’s shop in Bruchsal to get a chain repaired.

The Drive 

The most remembered part of her journey was when she parked outside a pharmacy in Wiesloch, marched into the shop and asked for all the solvent they had for cleaning clothes. She knew her husband had been using the solvent Legroin as fuel. She cleaned out the pharmacy! The Stadt-Apotheke Wiesloch, is now called “the world’s first filling station” The irony is this sensational car trip Bertha Benz made in 1888 has brought so many cars to the downtown part of Wiesloch, now the town’s center is a pedestrian way and traffic is not allowed where we have been driving with the special dispensation given us for this article.

The pharmacy is still there with a lot of memorabilia about its famous visitor. The pharmacy working space has moved into adjacent rooms so there’s room to enjoy its famous prior moment and chat with its current genial owner, Dr. Adolf Suchy, whose wife is now the pharmacist. He comes out with the pharmacy’s antique original bottle of Legroin to simulate he is topping up the gas tank in the memorial outside his drug store. We reach our destination, Pforzheim, Bertha’s mother’s home town where in the main square we find another memorial to Bertha’s ride. September 2003 was the 125^th anniversary of her trip.

The drive has been easy, less than 100 miles and a whole day to do it in with two German accomplished drivers and lush vintage Mercedes-Benz cars to sprawl in as well.

When we arrive at our hotel by the Enz River, we notice four suave polished men applauding our arrival – not. This is the celebrated statue The Claque created by Guido Messer in 1987 to demonstrate the 18^th to 19^th century claque pretension where groups were paid to applaud performers (or boo them) by people with an axe to grand the way professional mourners were paid to walk behind a hearse and wail. The claque goes as far back as Roman times. When the Emeror Nero performed on stage he had 5,000 of his soldiers clapping for him.

The Destination 

Pforzheim is the regional center of Baden-Württemberg and has one of the highest industry densities in the state. The traditional industry is jewelry and watchmaking. Eighty percent of all jewelry exported from Germany comes from Pforzheim.

Germany’s “City of Gold” gets its name from the vast numbers of skilled goldsmith refugees given asylum here in 1686 when the Catholic French king Louis XIV evicted between 200,000 and 900,000 Protestants (Huguenots) from France. There is a gorgeous museum here the Schmuckmuseum that spotlights gold jewelry over the centuries, and we do mean centuries. The original goldsmiths came with all their treasures with many of those now in this museum going back to Persian, Egyptian and Greco-Roman times!

The head or neck jewelry exhibit is Persian ca 2500 BC! It is made of gold, glass beads and agate. The other images are of a temporary exhibit, a celebration of all the cars used in the James Bond movies, an oddity until we see the gold connection. Bond’s enemies surely loved gold. They would have approved of the excesses on show: gold-plated busses and a Porsche. And we think -- as we replicate in comfort this amazing journey taken by a woman under such hardships in 1888 – that James Bond would have found Bertha Benz too much to handle if she was ever staged as a “Bond Girl”! In the 1933 photo of Bertha, she has just received an award

It must run in the family. Bond couldn’t have handled Jutta Benz, Bertha’s great great-granddaughter, any better either. Before we leave Mannheim we have dinner with Julia Luttenberger, the marketing executive for Mannheim, and Jutta Benz, an articulate and interesting former history teacher. It is just the four of us with plenty of time to ask questions.

Carl died in 1929 and Bertha in 1944 but Jutta reminisces about the monthly family assembly they had for dinner after World War II. They all sat in the same fixed order: great grandfather Eugen at one end and great uncle Richard at the other. “I was five years old,” says Jutta, “Under the long table munching pretzels. I’d hear my great great grandfather say, ‘Richard, do you remember when we went off from Mannheim?’ and the same stories would come out. Richard died in 1955 then my great great grandfather had no one to chat to. He died, himself, in 1958. I was part of the monthly assembly till I was 14 but the meetings got longer and more boring so I’d leave and go to a friend’s house and dance rock and roll!”

What a memory for our own Rock and Roll car dance through German and automobile history!