The upper floor of the Wartburg Museum revealed a future that never happened

The next segment of the ground floor picks up the thread where the first segment ended. The line-up still starts where the first hall ended: a 1965 Wartburg 312 saloon, followed by the new,  more modern 353 introduced in 1966.

This car was a huge step forward after the decades of the DKW based 311 models, at least in terms of design. Nevertheless, the tech under the metal sheets (well, it’s plastic, actually) did not improve that much.

The first segment also showcases the practical station wagon and the facelifted versions. In the 35 years of the model lifecycle, a new grill was introduced after a few decades, and a four-cylinder engine was furnished by the end of Communism, basically donated by the VW Group.

Apart from an old-school Dixi workshop and a few half-made concepts, the last few cars illustrate the post-communist era of the Eisenach factory site.

After the fall of the DDR, Opel erected a new factory in Eisenach, where it produced some of its best sellers, like the Vectra B and several generations of the Corsa.

The upper floor contains a selection of motorcycles and prototypes. The motorcycles include some familiar faces of mass production from Jawa, MZ and Simson.

The concepts gave a glimpse of the hopes of the Eisenach factory. Not much more than that, as the sad reality was that the Wartburgs remained hopelessly outdated. Even by the late 80s, they were still running on age-old super emitting two-stroke engines until VW provided a proper four-stroke engine.

The yellow station wagon is a prototype with a 1300 VW engine, built-in longitudinally. When the Politbüro gave the order in 1987 to adapt the Wartburg 353 W to accommodate the VW engine, Eisenach did not have the tech to carry out the tests. Therefore, in strictest secrecy, a Wartburg 353 W was delivered to the VW factory in Wolfsburg to fit it with a VW engine.

This car is based on a 353 W Tourist with an extended nose, and the longitudinally installed VW engine was paired with the gearbox of the 353 W. This kind of power could probably bring the family car to previously unknown dynamics.

Besides a military-green off-road version, there is a red prototype, a final series from 1990, when AWE introduced the modernized Wartburg 1.3 “New Line”.

This vehicle was created in cooperation with the Opel tuner Irmscher and was the last attempt to keep the Wartburg on the market. The car featured design innovations and technology updates, but nothing extreme. The body kit included new bumpers, side skirts and mirrors in teardrop design, along with Irmscher alloy wheels carrying 185/60 tires.

Obviously, this had little effect on potential buyers, with cars like the Vectra A, the 1988 Galant or the “pig nose” B3 Passat already on the market for several years.

AWE had one more ace up its sleeve, exhibited in the back of the room. The 610M was a Prototype of the COMECON car project, a lower-middle-class passenger car that was never produced.

The car, also known as the P760, was intended to replace the Trabant 601, the Wartburg 353 and the Škoda 100. It was a joint development project of the GDR and Czechoslovakia. The planning for the P 760 began in January 1970,  but by the end of the decade, after the failure of the P760 and the subsequent project P1100/1300, which was also cancelled in 1979, the development of new passenger cars came to a standstill in the GDR.

The other side of the floor presented race models coming from the Wartburg factory, starting with a pre-war BMW 3/15 and a red 1954 EMW 327 Cabrio.

In addition, there are a few Rallye cars, like the white Wartburg 353 W460 group A spec and the red 353 from 1969.

The coolest of the floor is arguably the Melkus race car, the East German Ferrari, as long as one accepts the fact that they are powered by a two-stroke Wartburg engine…

Initially, the company was in operation from 1959 to 1986, with cars initially using two-stroke engines from Wartburgs and components from Wartburgs and Trabants.

There was also a road-legal model, the Melkus RS 1000, and the company produced over 100 cars between 1959 and 1986. In 2019, there was a Melkus exhibition at Techno Classica 2019 to commemorate that the first Melkus RS1000 was publicly presented 50 years earlier. A Melkus club was also present at last year’s Essen Motor Show with two cars.

Following a speedboat (how bourgeois!), a few exciting specimens like the black EMW 340 and the white 313/1 sportscar from 1959.

The segment’s most interesting car was the green Wartburg 355 from 1968. The three-door prototype was equipped with a 1.4-litre Renault engine, but only six specimens were built.

In order to access the full gallery of over 80 images, you have to click on the second page of this article (the “2” tile a little bit further down below). We also included some concluding remarks for you.