Why the World of Typewriter Collectors Splits Down the Middle When These Machines Come Up for Sale

“It’s a Urania Klein,” my pal mentioned, as he lifted the shapely vintage typewriter from his automotive trunk. “German-made moveable. Nazi-era. Built in 1939.”

It was a surprising machine—he actually knew how you can shut a commerce with a fellow typewriter collector.

To the uninitiated, it seems fairly like all of the numerous outmoded typewriters which are gathering mud in vintage malls throughout the nation. Their model names turned the vernacular of the 20^th-century American workplace: Royal. Underwood. Remington. Smith-Corona. But this wasn’t a type of. It had a historical past way more tumultuous than something Mad Men might devise, and its existence exhibits how these troubling historic legacies resonate into the current day.

You don’t must be a connoisseur of vintage workplace equipment to establish the Urania as a Nazi-era typewriter; it has that exact aesthetic. The shine from chrome-ringed, glass-topped keys accents its stern profile. From the keyboard, the high-gloss curves speed up easily upward towards the basket of typebars. The place of each knob, lever, and button has been properly thought-out and positioned most logically, and engineered to maximise utility.
It has the contours of a Darth Vader helmet, and shines simply as black.

This machine simply seems Nazi, and unapologetically so.

But how are we to understand these machines of each menace and sweetness? Are they merely inanimate instruments for writing, and nothing extra? Or are they relics of essentially the most odious regime in human historical past—cursed eternally to be symbols of the Third Reich the place they have been birthed? And if such objects have been born with some type of authentic sin, is there any hope for redeeming them?

Strange ideas? Perhaps. But as each an educational and collector, these are the questions that confront me each time I come throughout such mechanical artifacts from Nazi Germany. Encounters like this are literally a surprisingly frequent incidence.

“It was a battle trophy,” my pal interjected, although that went with out saying. “It was lugged dwelling in some GI’s duffel bag, with out its case.”

As unusual because it sounds right this moment, German klein (“small” or moveable) typewriters have been among the many most sought-after souvenirs for troopers preventing in World War II. Think of it: Adjusted for inflation, top-of-the-line moveable typewriters price roughly the identical as your MacBook Pro right this moment, and their usable lives have been measured not in months or years, however many years and generations. Consequently, 1000’s of Uranias, Gromas, Erikas, Rheinmetalls, Continentals, Olympias, and different high-quality, precision-made German machines have been looted from Nazi navy and authorities places of work, companies, and even from civilian houses, whether or not their homeowners have been useless or alive. “War trophy” is after all a nice euphemism: It denotes a reward for heroism, bravery, and sacrifice, whereas concurrently acknowledging that even the great guys steal, pillage, and destroy amid the haze of complete battle.

In most instances, the brand new lives of those machines have been decidedly extra tranquil than these they left again in Europe. This explicit Urania, for instance, was in-built Dresden, and was offered at a store on Ferdinandstraße in central Hamburg in 1939. But after spending its first six years in no matter unknown capability in Nazi Germany—and some months in a duffel bag—it then handed the following 75 years typing out invoices and receipts at a mom-and-pop basic retailer and repair station outdoors of Bel Air, Maryland.

Far fewer Nazis in Bel Air.

It doesn’t take an animist—going round attributing a soul or life pressure to inanimate objects—to anthropomorphize this Urania into some aged German American immigrant who by no means acclimated to utilizing {dollars} as an alternative of deutschemarks, by no means misplaced his accented Ös und Äs, and sometimes nonetheless confounded his Ys and Zs on the German QWERTZ keyboard.

But one needn’t delve into fantasy to know a typewriter’s historical past—one want solely hear and chronicle the oral histories of their homeowners, who are sometimes very happy to share.

In March of 2020—as all the nation was shutting down forward of the quickly spreading coronavirus—my final main errand was to trace down a 1929 Tríumph moveable typewriter noticed on Facebook Marketplace. A younger girl was promoting it for her aged Oma, so I made preparations to go to the household’s well-kept townhouse in suburban Philadelphia.

A easy pickup that ought to have taken 5 minutes as an alternative stretched right into a two-hour interview over tea and biscuits on the eating room desk because the spry grandmother with a barely perceptible accent shared with me the story of the typewriter.

She was a Sudeten German, because it turned out: a part of the sizable minority of Bohemian Germans within the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia, which Adolf Hitler annexed to Germany in 1939. Keen to keep away from battle, on the 1938 Munich Conference, France and Britain (in-)famously hoped sacrificing the Sudetenland would satiate Hitler’s territorial ambitions.
It was a deadly mistake, and “appeasement” would turn into the byword for naïve Western dithering within the face of a totalitarian menace.

In the Sudetenland, the longer term typewriter-seller fell in love with a younger Wilhelm Müller—a pacifist, poet, and aspiring musician. The typewriter was his. She smiled whereas recounting to me how her “Willie” would write her sonnets and love poems on it. Just glancing on the machine crammed her coronary heart with heat reminiscences.

In the waning months of the European battle in 1944—because the Nazi loss of life machine was determined for heat our bodies to ship off to the Eastern Front—they conscripted younger Willie, then solely 15 years of age. Once on the entrance, he was wounded: Both of his legs crushed. He returned dwelling on crutches. Most males weren’t so fortunate.

At the conclusion of the battle, native Czech authorities, armed militias, and common navy items ethnically cleansed almost 3 million Bohemian Germans from Czechoslovakia. From the high-altitude perspective of postwar geopolitics, President Edvard Beneš dubbed it Czechoslovakia’s “last answer of the German query.” The view from floor stage was totally different: Armed with AK-47s and an official ordinance, the native Czech militia knocked on their doorways, informing the younger couple’s households that that they had 18 hours to go away their houses—and the nation—eternally.

As she poured me extra tea, the vendor matter-of-factly recounted how they explicitly instructed her to place clear sheets and linens on the beds for his or her dwelling’s new inhabitants and stipulated that they might solely take 50 kilograms (110 kilos) of their belongings with them. Willie’s 15-pound typewriter was one of many few issues she grabbed as they have been expelled to Germany.

After a short stint in Soviet-occupied jap Germany, they joined greater than 1,000,000 ethnic German refugees within the American sector of occupation. They have been among the many fortunate ones, as some 30,000 Bohemian Germans died within the expulsions. The couple quickly married and settled in Nuremberg, the place the prison trials of the remaining Nazi management have been ongoing. Willie turned a music trainer and armchair composer earlier than passing away within the Fifties.

She later remarried the captain of an oceangoing ship and immigrated to the United States in 1961. She introduced along with her the typewriter as one of many few mementos of her first husband; her past love.

From the murmur of the standard household rhythms emanating from the kitchen and front room whereas she spoke, it appeared she’d nurtured a heat and glad household, stuffed with loving and affluent youngsters, after which grandchildren. But none of them, apparently, had any curiosity in maintaining the Tríumph typewriter. She was grateful to go away it in my cost.

“I don’t imply this to come back off as unusual,” she hesitated as we mentioned our goodbyes and he or she confirmed me to the door, “however you actually are the spitting picture of my pricey Wilhelm. I used to be truly shocked to see you in individual, the likeness is so placing.”

That last utterance shook me, and stays with me to today.

Still, as I drove off with the Tríumph Klein seat-belted securely beside me, I used to be grateful to have been aware about their fascinating story, which might have been solely misplaced have been it not for a collector’s quirky curiosity in typewriters and their historical past.

Unfortunately, few encounters over Nazi-era machines finish so amicably.

The “Special Key”

Over the previous twenty years, vintage typewriters have skilled a renaissance mirroring the resurgence of vinyl records. Larry McMurtry thanked his trusty Hermes 3000 typewriter whereas accepting his Golden Globe for Brokeback Mountain. 2016 noticed the discharge of the acclaimed documentary California Typewriter, starring well-known typewriter fanatics together with Tom Hanks, John Mayer, and David McCullough. Ever extra writers, artists, and thinkers are slicing the digital umbilical twine to their laptops and cellphones, and the persistent calls for of social media and 24-hour information cycles that lay past. Typewriters are on the forefront of an analog counterrevolution towards the nagging persistence of connectivity and knowledge know-how, in favor of privateness, thoughtfulness, and creativity.

It is ironic, then, how social media has each supercharged and democratized the pastime, whose denizens have gone from a small handful of (predominantly older, white, male, American) collectors to a really world “typosphere” of people of each race, faith, gender orientation, and political persuasion, whose uniting characteristic is an obsession with these antiquated writing machines. The largest on-line typewriter group presently boasts some 29,000 members, with no indicators of slowing down. As on-line boards go, it’s a remarkably congenial and respectful bunch, with a penchant for correct spelling and punctuation.

Predictably, nonetheless, the one matter that invariably polarizes the net group is Nazi typewriters … particularly these sporting the “particular key.”

By the late Thirties, the iconography of Hitler’s Third Reich had even made its manner onto typewriter keyboards. In very uncommon circumstances, a German typewriter could be made with a devoted swastika key, like this one on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

More frequent have been machines constructed with the double-lightning-bolt SS Siegrune, often above the No. 3 or 5 key. With sieg which means “victory,” the runes turned ubiquitous in Nazi Germany as a shorthand rallying cry for “victory, victory!” In their extra sinister software, the SS runes turned the brand for the Schutzstaffel—the infamous paramilitary items most accountable for the wanton slaughter of 6 million Jews throughout Europe.

It is an emblem imbued with highly effective resonance even right this moment. Since trendy German denazification legal guidelines prohibit the airing of SS runes, and French legal guidelines prohibit the sale of such Nazi memorabilia—together with by on-line auctions to sellers in different international locations—savvy collectors have prevented the scorn and suspicion of mentioning the runes by identify, as an alternative merely suggesting {that a} given typewriter has a “particular key.” Perhaps as a result of the everyday group of typewriter patrons overlaps with the far bigger group of militariana collectors, typewriters with the “particular key” often command a premium, making them far dearer than run-of-the-mill German machines, like Willy’s Tríumph or that Urania from Bel Air.

Some collectors ante as much as purchase “particular key” machines. Others have vowed that if they arrive throughout one, they’ll grind down the metallic SS-key slug to finish their denazification conversion, as many such battle trophies had accomplished to them within the fast postwar years.

Even on this historically even-keeled on-line group, discussions of machines with the “particular key” invariably go sideways, and all the time in the identical manner. Upon recognizing the runes, a commenter will often reply: “How dare you! That machine could have despatched my grandparents to the fuel chamber!!” (or comparable), and the dialog solely spirals downward from there. If you’ve ever had a political dialogue on-line, you may in all probability think about the vitriol and name-calling that observe.

To make sure, it’s troublesome to disclaim each the veracity and emotional energy of this anti-fascist perspective. But the collectors of special-keyed machines even have a degree.

Rightly, they argue that solely in really distinctive circumstances can one meaningfully hyperlink any particular person typewriter to its explicit utilization throughout the Reich. Also, simply because a machine has an SS key doesn’t imply it was utilized by the Schutzstaffel items concerned within the Holocaust. Moreover—similar to when Second Amendment defenders say guilty the shooter, not the gun—some argue that the typewriter is simply an inanimate object; a instrument crafted for a selected goal, which assumes neither the duty of the person nor his blame. Likewise, they conclude, a typewriter with the “particular key” isn’t any kind of odious than one with out; it’s only a matter of the meanings we people impart upon it.

The argument is just not completely with out benefit. Certainly, a typewriter is just not a dwelling object, so how is it to be accountable for how and by whom it was used?

But this argument can be unsatisfactory in its downplaying of the polarizing resonance these machines have throughout the group. Yes, swastikas and SS runes are “simply” symbols. But all the opposite letters on a keyboard are likewise symbols. These symbols are solely imbued with which means by the people who encounter them, within the broader social atmosphere during which they’re embedded. For illustration: One of essentially the most superb typewriters in my assortment is a uncommon 1923 Underwood “Semitic” 46, which sorts right-to-left in Hebrew script with Yiddish diacritic marks—or no less than that’s what I’ve been informed. Even as I lovingly restored it, and admire it as an impressive work of commercial artwork, I nonetheless can not decipher the which means of any image on the keyboard.

Yet if all symbols are created equal, and solely differentiated by the meanings societies inscribe upon them, then why are some people drawn to the Siegrune image, which repulses so many—drawn to it to the purpose that they’d be keen to pay a further premium for it? Even if the collector values the machine for what it does, quite than what it represents, he (and let’s be frank … it’s, nonetheless, nearly all the time a “he”) nonetheless operates throughout the bigger society that understands and largely scorns the inhumanity the runes symbolize.

What these interactions with Nazi-memorabilia collectors have highlighted is that we’re in the end desirous about basically various things: They accumulate artifacts, I accumulate histories.

Archeologically, artifacts are easy objects, created by people in a selected place and time—nothing extra. Museums around the globe are populated by historic artifacts whose meanings are murky to us, as a result of the human context has lengthy since been misplaced. Typewriters with the “particular key” are unarguably artifacts of the Third Reich, simply as a Royal or Smith-Corona from the identical period is an artifact of our American previous.

Histories, however, are chronicles of previous occasions, that are imbued with shared which means by human beings. Artifacts are easy objects; histories are the interpretations and values we overlay upon these objects, whether or not by the individuals who initially designed, constructed, or used them, or by historians who search to grasp these methods of which means. For me, the histories of Willie Müller or that Urania from Bel Air are extra fascinating than a special-keyed typewriter displayed behind glass, with no human context.

As time marches ever onward, Nazi typewriters akin to these will endure as artifacts, however it’s their histories which are being erased because the people who imbued them with which means steadily move into oblivion.

Typewriter Penance

So if an inanimate object certainly carries such symbolic baggage—even when not resulting from any innate fault of its personal, however by the meanings society imbues it with—is there something that may be accomplished to cleanse a machine of these social meanings? Can a “penitent” Nazi-era machine be someway rehabilitated? And how might that even be accomplished by an inanimate object with no free will of its personal?

The reply, I consider, is sure. If you’ve adopted me this far, and agree that an inanimate instrument will be denigrated and scorned by society, it logically follows that it may be redeemed by society, too. Perhaps one other illustration will suffice.

In the summer season of 2019, one more German typewriter emerged on the market domestically that piqued my curiosity. Rather than a klein, a transportable machine constructed for mobility, this was a hulking “commonplace” typewriter—35 kilos of iron and metal meant to be bolted to an workplace desk and keep there eternally. While moveable German typewriters have been straightforward sufficient to stash in a soldier’s duffel bag for the boat journey dwelling, only a few desktop machines made the journey throughout the Atlantic. This one was a 1936 Continental Standard: top-of-the-line; pound for pound among the best writing machines ever made … and there have been numerous kilos. When the vendor mentioned it had “fairly a backstory,” I used to be keen to seek out out for myself.

The typewriter was made in Siegmar-Schönau—a suburb of Chemnitz—by Wanderer, an early German pioneer in manufacturing bicycles, bikes, automobiles, and later navy vans and tanks for the Wehrmacht, the armed forces within the Nazi period. In the Thirties, Wanderer’s automotive division was one among 4 automotive corporations consolidated into the Auto Union AG, which later turned Audi. Indeed, one of many 4 interconnected rings on the Audi model emblem represents Wanderer. The typewriter division of Wanderer Werke continued unencumbered, manufacturing precision typing machines akin to this one, emblazoned with its placing “WW” crest (which bears a placing similarity to the Wonder Woman emblem from the Nineteen Eighties). The seller plaque affixed to the entrance testified that it was offered by the Baum & Herzog firm in Nuremberg, whereas the serial quantity dates its manufacturing to 1936: simply after the passing of the notorious anti-Jewish Nuremberg race legal guidelines. The vendor crammed in what occurred subsequent.

In Nuremberg, the machine was put in at Wehrkreis XIII headquarters—the German navy district for northern Bavaria. The group was charged with constructing and supplying all the XIII military corps, which had spearheaded the occupation of France in 1940, and invaded the Soviet Union as a part of Operation Barbarossa the next yr. It is smart that such an costly piece of apparatus could be outfitted to serve the Nazi battle effort, even when it didn’t have the “particular” lightning-bolt SS runes.

In April 1945, with Hitler’s forces collapsing, American armed forces carried out a pitched, five-day battle for Nuremberg en path to liberating Nazi focus camps throughout Bavaria. As a part of the U.S. occupying forces within the metropolis, the vendor’s grandfather had procured the hefty Continental typewriter for his personal whereas sweeping via what remained of Wehrkreis headquarters. For a time, he stored his prize at Ferris Barracks in Erlangen, the previous German navy base simply north of the town that housed American occupation forces after the battle.

When the victorious Allies determined to maneuver the deliberate trial of Nazi battle criminals from the capital of Berlin to Nuremberg—itself a symbolic location, related to Hitler’s notorious Nazi rallies and race legal guidelines—they bumped into extreme logistical issues, together with a dearth of translators, workplace gear, and purposeful typewriters amid the destruction and looting.

It was at this level that the American soldier’s just lately appropriated Continental was drafted again into service, this time in pursuit of justice for a number of the worst atrocities ever dedicated by mankind. The machine was leased to the Allied prosecutors and relocated to the Justizpalast in Nuremberg, the place the highest 21 surviving members of the defeated Nazi regime could be tried as battle criminals.

The amount of typewritten proof introduced on the trials—200,000 affidavits and sworn depositions of over 360 reside witnesses, in accordance with the final dwelling signal-corps typist—all wanted to be translated into English, French, Russian, and German. This stored a whole pool of court docket reporters, secretaries, and typists endlessly busy at some stage in the almost yearlong proceedings.

In the tip, the International Military Tribunal convicted 19 of the highest surviving Nazi officers, with Hermann Göring, Wilhelm Keitel, and Joachim von Ribbentrop among the many 12 sentenced to loss of life. The verdicts supplied little satisfaction—to say nothing of justice—to the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Holocaust and Hitler’s battle of aggression. But for the primary time, Nuremberg established particular person prison duty for wars of aggression, battle crimes, and crimes towards humanity. If Munich represented kowtowing to authoritarianism and bending precept to the calls for of energy, Nuremberg represented not a victory for precept, however no less than its starting.

Nuremberg marked the origins of worldwide prison legislation, worldwide human rights legislation, and a generations-long normative shift in worldwide relations that more and more locations the rights of people and communities forward of the prerogatives of states and their leaders. From Israeli reprisals in Gaza to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, right this moment it’s straightforward to be cynical about worldwide legislation’s potential to confront unjust navy aggression, a lot much less deter it. Still, as a professor of worldwide legislation, I sometimes look up from my desk towards the Nuremberg Tribunal Continental that now graces my workplace shelf to think about each how far we’ve come and the way far we’ve got but to go within the pursuit of worldwide justice.

Of course, over these intervening many years, there have been seemingly few such ethical and authorized musings surrounding the typewriter itself. After the tribunal’s conclusion, the Continental was returned to the GI who “liberated” it from Nazi headquarters, disassembled, and shipped to his dwelling in Pennsylvania. There, three generations of American schoolchildren used it to kind their classroom assignments. Indeed, the soldier’s daughter confided to me as she was displaying me to the door that she nonetheless makes errors when typing on an American QWERTY laptop as a result of she discovered to kind on the Continental’s German QWERTZ keyboard.

So then—can an inanimate instrument akin to this typewriter be penitent, reformed, and redeemed from the unique sin of its creation? Logically, one has to suppose so … if one believes that an inanimate object will be imbued with authentic sin to start with. 

And if any artifact of Nazi Germany has the potential to be so redeemed, certainly it should be the typewriter. Unlike all the opposite battle trophies of that heinous regime—Nazi battlefield flags, daggers, Lugers, and the like—typewriters are in the end devices of human creation, not destruction. Whether it’s writing generations of kids’s college essays, or the business invoices for a thriving mom-and-pop basic retailer, and even the poems and love letters of a younger Willy Müller, the typewriter’s very raison d’être is to allow human curiosity and creativity, which is basically the core pursuit of humanity itself. It is that which interprets artifact into historical past.

As cherished, private, intimate, and lifelong instruments of a person’s passions and creations, typewriters are a superb repository of such oral histories. Their tales shed new mild and views not simply into the historical past of the on a regular basis and the mundane, but additionally the very actual and human connections and penalties of main historic occasions. The microhistorical views these machines convey are largely absent from our typical historical past texts.

Unfortunately, with the passing of generations, we lose ever extra of those historic relics themselves, but additionally the cherished household histories that they’ll inform. The significance of those mechanical writing machines is just not merely in what they’re or what they do as artifacts, however in the end in what they symbolize inside our shared social communities. And what they’ll symbolize—and the way—is just not some innate characteristic printed on the machine at its creation, however a mirrored image of our ever-evolving and ever-progressing social and political conceptions.