Olympia-Werke

» see olympia-werke.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In early 1969 more than twenty thousand people worked for Olympia. The plants were at Roffhausen near Wilhelmshaven, at Braunschweig, Leer, Norden and Kaufbeuren, and then abroad in Belfast, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile and Toronto. It was the largest office machine manufacturer in Germany and one of the three largest in the world. Twenty-three years later the main works closed and what was left of the company was the brand name.

The start date on the certificate is 15 August 1903, when AEG handed distribution of a machine called the Mignon to a Berlin company set up for the purpose. The Mignon was an index typewriter designed by Friedrich von Hefner-Alteneck, cheap enough that a tradesman could own one, which was not then a normal thing for a typewriter to be. Production was consolidated in Erfurt in 1923, in the buildings of a former armaments works, and from 1930 the products carried an internationally registered brand name: Olympia.

The company's second founding is the part that reads like fiction. At the end of June 1945 the management of the Erfurt works, under Joachim Wussow and on instructions from AEG, left for the west with the engineering drawings. They spent a month in Burgkunstadt, moved to Bielefeld in August, and set up in rented rooms inside the headquarters of the Dr. August Oetker food company. Late in 1945 they found a disused naval depot at Roffhausen, and on 1 October 1946 the military government granted permission to produce. The starting workforce was twenty-eight people.

Forty-six years later the same site employed about 3,600 and was closed by a decision taken in another building entirely. I was eight at the time and a long way from any of it, and the only honest connection I have to this company is the one almost everybody my age has: the typewriter was the machine in the room before the machine I actually learned on, sitting on a desk in an office you were taken to as a child, with a sound you can still reproduce from memory without having typed a word on one.

~ the case file ~

~ the factory floor ~

By 1957 the payroll had reached twelve thousand and a new plant at Leer in East Frisia was building portable machines with up to 2,500 people of its own. AEG bought the remaining shares in 1962 and held the entire share capital of Olympia Werke AG, fifty-five million marks of it. The SM series of portable typewriters, started in 1948, is the product that survives in collectors' hands and the one most people picture when the name comes up.

Olympia also had a real claim on the computer business and could not hold it. When Hall 1 of the Hannover fair opened in 1970 under a new name, the Centrum der Büro- und Informationstechnik, Olympia was the largest exhibitor in it. The company that showed up biggest at the first CeBIT was showing the Multiplex 80, a computer-controlled data capture system whose first installation had gone in at Deutsche Bank Hamburg the year before. By 1976 seventy of them had been sold.

The calculator line tells the same story faster. From 1964 Olympia built electronic calculating machines with Nixie tube displays, hundreds of transistors in each one, and within a few years they were too heavy and too expensive against Japanese machines built around far denser integration. The response in the early seventies was to stop competing and start cooperating with Matsushita. Copiers were bought in from Agfa and others. By the end of that decade a growing share of what Olympia sold had been manufactured by somebody else.

~ the fight ~

In December 1991, after years of losses, the parent companies decided to withdraw from office communication altogether and close Roffhausen. AEG by then belonged to Daimler-Benz, and the judgment in the German accounts is blunt about it: the owner could give no decisive innovative push. Two months earlier Die Zeit had run a piece on AEG-Olympia under the headline Rosinenpicker ohne Skrupel, which means cherry-pickers without scruples.

What followed was a labor campaign that got national attention, run under the slogan that Olympia was the heart of the region and had to go on living. There were actions in Wilhelmshaven and in Stuttgart, aimed squarely at Daimler-Benz's sense of its own public responsibility. It did not save the plant, which shut at the end of 1992.

One thing did come out of it. The campaign produced the Technologie-Centrum Nordwest, a plan to spin parts of Olympia out as independent businesses on the same ground and bring new firms onto the site, backed by the state government of Lower Saxony and by Daimler-Benz itself. By the beginning of 1993 the TCN held fourteen businesses employing around 750 people. That is roughly a fifth of the jobs, rescued from a closure that was never going to be reversed.

~ the name went to hong kong ~

The remains were cut into pieces that could each be sold. A service company, OSG Office Service GmbH, went to Elcosa AG of Schaffhausen on 1 May 1993. The sales company, which held the Olympia brand name along with the worldwide distribution network and the plant in Mexico City, was bought on 1 July 1994 by the Elite Group of Hong Kong and continued as Olympia International Holdings Ltd, registered in Road Town in the British Virgin Islands.

Which is why the name is still in shops. Olympia-branded calculators and office machines are sold today with no link at all to Roffhausen or to the twenty-eight people who started building typewriters in a naval depot in 1946. The brand went on because a brand is the one asset in a manufacturing company that does not need a factory.

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