Admin l Monday, January 30, 2023
LEIPZIG – Just outside the German city of Leipzig, is the town of Zeitz, once the European capital of prams, having produced thousands upon thousands of ever-changing models since the mid-19th century.
This former cradle of pram production, a central source of pushchairs for Communist East Germany, is today home to a museum dedicated to the long history of making cots mobile.
A walk through the museum shows just how much the designs changed over decades, with some earlier frames made out of wood, others with side windows and some even with chrome-plated wheels reminiscent of an old Cadillac.
The collection at the Moritzburg Castle in Zeitz comprises around 1,000 exhibits from the 19th and 20th centuries to the present.
Prams and pushchairs have not only changed visually over the course of time, visitors learn, but also in function and societal significance.
A core focus of the museum is on Zeitz native Ernst Albert Naether, who introduced the first pram in 1846, although historians will argue whether it was not a British inventor, Charles Burton, who was first, patenting his “perambulator” in the mid-19th century.
Zeitz museum director Kristin Otto explains that while children could only sit upright in Burton’s buggy (“It looked something like today’s sports cars”), Naether’s design was the real thing, a basket allowing babies too young to sit to lie horizontally and sleep.
The town’s factory produced prams for more than a century, employing some 2,200 people up to the fall of the Berlin wall, when many of East Germany’s state-operated companies were dissolved.
Before German reunification in 1990, the town’s Zekiwa company (still running today) was considered the largest pram producer in Europe in terms of volume, and almost every baby in East Germany was pushed around in a pram from this factory.
Otto says the museum is more than a history lesson about the town’s industry, and is appealing to younger audiences with a more interactive multimedia approach that explores the lasting relevance and steady evolution of the pram.
The Deutsches Kinderwagenmuseum in Zeitz is about 40 minutes from Leipzig city centre, and while the exhibition material is largely only in German, the many decades of different designs tell the whole story on their own.
