01 Aug Tatra Two

Last month’s Collection In Action feature on FMM’s Tatra T97 elicited the following interesting response from Heinz Barnerth in Vienna.

Hello, everyone. I would like to bring to your attention an amazing and interesting story of a trip that took place in the late 1940s, done in a Tatra by Czech journalists Jiri Hanzelka and Miroslav Zigmund, and published in a three-volume book published by Verlag Volk und Welt GmbH, Berlin 8 in 1953. The book followed a film that was shown with great success in the German Democratic Republic and survived because all the songs of praise that were customary at the time for the form of government, and the history of the area behind the Iron Curtain was mentioned. Accordingly, criticism of the West is not spared. The trip takes the reader all the way to Johannesburg and Cape Town. I was only able to determine the year once, namely when the text mentioned the car being loaded onto a ship in Marseille 5 May 1947, bound for Tangier. There is little information about the car itself, only on page 105 is it mentioned that after an accident in North Africa, the journey was continued with another “T87”, which was in a bonded warehouse there. Each volume has around 300 pages and is partly illustrated with many impressions and details from regions, travel routes and earlier life. The books are available for small money, but I could detect them only written in German.

As an aside, this journey encouraged these two journalists to travel further afield, finally to South America.

Does anyone know of this journey to South Africa?

Further reading and images by Curbside Classic