For our non-German speakers, I made a rough translation:
[qoute] "Small, noble, technically perfect – 54 years ago camera producer Leitz presented in the beginning of April at Photokina, Cologne, the until today legendary Leica M3. It should be the last magic moment of the North-Hessian traditional company for decades.
SOLMS/WIEN. A simple 35mm camera in silver and black Peter Coeln puts into the hands of his visitor. It is more than 50 years old, with some traces of use, but operationable. „For 100 000 Euro“, Coeln says with his sensitive dialect from Vienna ("Wiener Schmäh"), „it will be yours.“ And he smiles.
That's not a joke, but a quite serious offer. This is not any camera, which the owner of a Vienna auction company "Westlicht Photographica" shows here. It is a Leica, a special Leica: a pre-production modell of the M3, a prototype with the number „0010“. For the layman it does not distiguish from a modern Leica of today, for the passinate collector it is a rarity.
The Leica M3 – few cameras on earth are so lengendary like this one. „For me the most beautiful Leica“, says Peter Coeln, Leica-seller and one of the leading private Leica-collectors in Europe. „One of the finest mechanical cameras ever built“, adores it the Leica-expert and book author Erwin Puts. Already for a halfway excellent sustained serial modell of the M3 with standard lens one has to invest about 1000 Euros.
54 years ago the Ernst Leitz GmbH from Wetzlar presented the camera, on April 3, 1954 at the Photokina in Cologne. Nine years after the end of the war, before Western Germany had its economical rebirth ("Wirtschaftswunder"). Then, when the Photokina was still held in spring and not in the fall, when the Hessian family company Ernst Leitz was one of the biggest camera producers in the world and not a niche market player.
The M3 was the godfather for all cameras for the M-system, which the company since put on the market - up to the 4800 Euro costing digital M8, the only digital camera "made in Germany". The moving history of the M3 and her successors, it is a piece of German economical history. The single chapters are about genius-like ingenieurs and about precise work on highest level, about the myth of a big label and about photographic pieces of art, but also about miss-management and missed chances.
The „M“ in the type name stands for "Messsucher" (= rangefinder). On the Leica M, different from SLRs, the photographer watches the frame through a seperate viewfinder and not through the lens. Until the end of the 60s this camera type was standard.
With the M3 Leitz secured the supremacy on the world market for cameras. It was produced until 1966. Toghether with a cheaper sister modell Leitz sold more than 310 000 pieces.
[page 2] In those years this camera dominated photography. Henri Cartier-Bresson used the M3, Elliot Erwitt, Josef Koudelka, Inge Morath and all the other top level photographers in those days. The British Queen Elisabeth II. loved her M3 so much, she let herself be portaited with it on a stamp to her 60th birthday.
Many photos, which went into our collective remembrance, were taken with M-Leica cameras – for example the potrait of Che Guevara, making the guerillero to a pop-ikon; the picture of the nude girl during Vietnam war, screaming after a napalm attack and running for her life;the shot of the kissing couple, whose happy faces one sees in the sidemirror of a car.
„1954 the Leica M3 was THE camera“, the vice-president of the society „Leica Historica“ and Leica-seller Lars Netopil from Wetzlar wrote for the 50th birthday of this camera. „Other cameras were mostly sold to customers who did not have the money for a Leica.“
How enormous the dominance of the Leica was, clears up a picture in the office of Peter Coeln. It shows a group of photojournalists during the Olympic wintergames 1964 at Innsbruck – more than half of them had a M-Leica in their hands.
For Leitz development of the M3 at first was no risk. It was a totally new construction. It succeeded the models originally made by Oskar Barnack, the inventor of 35mm photography who died in 1936. His idea to use cinema film and to double up the format of the negative was the revolution of photography in the 1920s.
More than 600 000 cameras the company sold since 1925, in addition hundreds of thousands lenses. But the Barnack-construction had also disadvantages. For example the lenses were screwed on the camera body. These minuses were past for the M3.
The new camera Leitz constructed in top secret sorroundings. When the Japanese crown prince Akihito visited the Leitz-fabric 1953 on his trip through Germany, the production of the pre-series model of the M3 already had started. Before the visit Leitz de-assembled all machines and stored them with the camera prototypes in a sealed room. On the free workspaces the employees put toghether the old Leica models.
But the M3 should stay the last big coup of the traditionell company. The outstanding work of the Leica-ingenieurs made until today can not cover the miserable management from the 1960s on. The leading group decided wrongly on target for decades, producing repeated cathastrophes.
„In the past 40 years the company decided on nearly every road junction for the wrong direction opposite to other companies on the market and nearly all tecnical news were judged differently“, wrote the magazine „Leica Fotografie International“ in 2006. To add to that: „There never was enough money for investments“, reported Günter Osterloh, who worked nearly 40 Jahre for Leitz and wrote several books about the Leica cameras.
The first big error was made by the Leitz-managers in the 60s. Thanks to the high score and the success of the M3 Leitz did not take the companies from Japan serious enough - mostly because of the new SLR cameras. Only later on and just step by step Leitz developed its own SLR line, the „Leicaflex“.
When the first model hit the market in 1964, it is compared to the Japanese competitor clunky and technically inferior. The advance which Nikon and others worked out, Leitz did not gain.
„In the middle of the 70s Leitz fought for the first time for the further existence of the company“, remembers Osterloh. The interim rescue is the cooperation with competitor Minolta, who helped the Hessians to produce SLR cameras.
The next wrong decision hits the Leitz-management at the beginning of the 80s at the issue of the autofocus. The ingenieurs from Wetzlar already invented the AF in those days and got them patented. But the company decided to let this issue rest. „The management board said the famous sentence: ,Our customers can focus’“, tells Osterloh.
A similar example is the third big error Leica management board did, this time in the digital photography branche. As early as 1996 the company presented a top class digital studio camera. But in the main selling branche of 35mm cameras the company neglegted the digital range for a long time.
The board of the company, which is on the stock market since 1996 , wants to try to survive as analogue niche market seller. The former Leica-boss Ralf Coenen said about digital photography in the beginning of 2005: „The mechanisms of the market of this branche are alienating myself. They do not fit us nor most of our customers.“
[FONT=Verdana,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif] This attitude nearly kills Leica. Analogue cameras proof to be more and more nearly unsellable since 2004. The business volume, which in the production year 2000/01 still was at 158 million Euros, broke down during the next four years for more than 40%, the losings began to rise. In spring of 2005 the banks stop credits. Leica was nearly broke.
Rescue came from Austira – in person of Andreas Kaufmann, who used to be a teacher at a "Waldorf"-school, who got rich after selling an inherited paper production plant. Via his participation company ACM Kaufmann in 2004 at first bought 27,4 % of Leica, in the meantime he owns 97 %.
„Our engagement is from a long term perspective“, says Kaufmann. „We don't want the quick money. When it would be like that we had closed the company in 2005 when it was nearly broke and had to sell the brand rights to Japan. We did not, because we are convinced about the company's abilities.“
Now Kaufmann invests a two-digit million sum into new products. „We now have to make the investments neccessary for establishing a safe future for Leica. There was made less for it in the past years.“
But: Also Kaufmann makes mistakes. So he brought in fall of 2006 the American Steven K. Lee to the head board of the company. Lee screwed himself opposite employees, sellers and customers, until Kaufmann fired him in February 2008. About the background the Leica-Eigentümer remains silent. „Things happened, which may better not occurr“, he only said.
Also business is bumpy these days. After a good year at the end of 2007 the business volume went down. Kaufmann sees this only as a slip: „The clean-up is a marathon“, he says. „But 80 % of the way we already coped with.“ Irony of the story: Leica's future is strongly based on a great-grandchild of the M3, the digital M8. This is the biggest part in gaining business volume.
They nearly stopped the M-System. Because of the hard times to sell a new M-model production stopped between 1976 and 1977. Until Walter Kluck, head of the Leitz-plant in Canada, virtually on his own, decided to bring the old machines to Canada to produce new M-Leicas over there.
In the 80s M-production returns to the ancestral seat of the company at Wetzlar, before the Leitz-camera brance moved into the ten kilometer away town of Solms. Like in the old days there are cameras and lenses produced in hand work. In clinically clean rooms women sit in white laboratory coats with a tiny brush in their hand and paint each lens border in black. Next to this men put small, corrugated pieces of glas into warm water. They test the surface at a mikroscope and put the lenses in a box. That's how they are made, the noble tools for the purist.
„The Leica“, says starphotograph Jim Rakete from Berlin, who until today preferrs analouge M-Leicas to use, „is, what makes Germany special.“ [/quote]
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