Historic car cemetery in Gürbetal
In the Historical junkyard Gürbetal it was a part of premises of the wrecking yard Messerli Autoverwertung GmbH in the municipality buying village in the Swiss canton of Bern . The car cemetery was a collection of over 1,000 wrecked cars and around 400 motorcycles from the 1930s to 1970s, which gained international fame through press reports.
history
The trained carpenter Walter Messerli began trading in used automobile spare parts in 1933 . To do this, he bought old vehicles , removed reusable parts and placed the bodies on his parents' farm. There was no legislation that would have restricted this for environmental reasons. Since neighbors felt disturbed by the sight of the wrecked vehicles, Messerli had to plant trees as privacy screens by order of the community. In 1975, Franz Messerli took over the business from his father and continued to run the company. The meanwhile considerable collection of cannibalized vehicles with a focus on the 1940s to 1960s, some of which have already sunk into overgrown vegetation, was an exceptional testimony to Swiss transport history, which both the Lucerne Museum of Transport and the Bern Historical Museum have attested to as having a cultural and historical value.
vehicles
In addition to everyday vehicles from the 1940s to 1960s such as Auto Union , Volkswagen , Mercedes , Ford , Opel , Lloyd , Goliath , Fiat , Peugeot and Citroën , exotic car types such as Studebaker , Mercedes-Benz 190 SL Roadster, Panhard , Sunbeam and Buick were also on show parked in the junkyard. But also special bodies and bodies - e.g. For example, a Peugeot 203 Cabriolet with a Worblaufen body or a VW bus with a rare Beutler body - and even vehicles from the Eastern Bloc like Framo or Tatra were on the site. Offers to buy individual wrecks or their, in some cases, very valuable spare parts, were rejected for a long time by the car scraper Messerli. “I see the junkyard like a puzzle. If even a single particle is missing, it is never complete, ”said Messerli.
Since the Messerlis denied access to the public, the bodies and attachments of many Kaufdorfer cars were preserved as they were parked and were only subject to natural decay for decades - unlike in similar places such as Kyrkö Mosse in Sweden or in a forest near Châtillon (Belgium) , where the unattended cars of visitors are looted and vandalized .
Eviction order
The recycling company, which had grown over time, finally no longer complied with the federal and cantonal regulations that were now in force. Following interventions by the canton from the spring of 2000, the municipality of Kaufdorf issued a catalog of measures to the operator in 2004. In it, also for environmental reasons, the clearing of the car cemetery and the renovation of the site were ordered. In addition to Messerli, classic car enthusiasts also resisted the eviction order. The legal dispute between Messerli and the Kaufdorf community as well as the search for a solution to preserve the car cemetery, e.g. B. as a kind of open-air museum , received an international media response.
National art exhibition
In 2008, on the initiative of the artist Heinrich Gartentor, the art association Gürbetal organized a national art exhibition in the car cemetery. The site was prepared for the expected high number of visitors. Pedestrian walkways were built over areas where the wrecked cars were parked close together. Over 30,000 people visited the exhibition and the car cemetery.
Catwalks over the cars; Artist: Heinrich Gartentor
Walled-in cars as art objects; Artist: Bob Gramsma
Automotive critical installation; Artist: Reto Leibundgut
Stacked police cars
resolution
Despite the worldwide echo and concepts of preserving the car cemetery, the municipality of Kaufdorf did not agree to the conversion. She criticized the non-compliance with environmental requirements and unsecured funding. The development association suspected vengeance as part of the community's motive, as there had been around a hundred legal disputes between the Messerli family and the community and residents in the past few decades. A final deadline for a new conversion concept was initially granted until March 2009, then until September 2009. After this period the eviction was ordered. While the development association accepted the eviction decision according to its own information, Messerli still refused to evacuate and let the deadline expire unused until the end of March 2009.
Shortly afterwards, Messerli agreed to the eviction order. At first he tried in vain to auction all the vehicles in the car junkyard "en bloc"; the required minimum bid was 1.09 million Swiss francs. Finally, an auction was organized by the Oldtimergalerie Toffen, at which the vehicles were auctioned off individually on September 19, 2009 without a minimum bid. Around two thirds of the vehicles were sold for prices between 50 and 17,000 Swiss francs, the rest was disposed of. The snowy winter of 2009/2010 massively hindered the removal of the vehicles sold, which is why the municipality of Kaufdorf extended the eviction period to the end of May 2010. Messerli would like to make the cleared area available as a storage space for travelers in the future .
Web links
- Website of the historical car cemetery Gürbetal, with press review
- Scrap press (PDF; 656 kB) Association bulletin of the association "Historischer Autofriedhof Gürbetal"
- Picture presentation of the historic car cemetery
Individual evidence
- ^ Historical car cemetery in Gürbetal, Kaufdorf. (No longer available online.) OldtimerPortal, archived from the original on December 5, 2015 ; Retrieved March 17, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Infopost of the Gde. Kaufdorf ( Memento of the original from March 31, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) 1/2009
- ↑ Fullsize Klubový Magazín (cz; PDF; 1.1 MB)
- ↑ Revue Automobile ( Memento of the original from October 5, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (fr)
- ↑ The Independent (en)
- ↑ YNet (il)
- ↑ Berner Zeitung bernerzeitung.ch , February 19, 2009
- ↑ Der Bund daily ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF) March 13, 2006
- ↑ Interview with the mayor blick.ch ( memento from April 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) at a glance
- ↑ Oldtimer Praxis 03/2010, p. 4
- ↑ Car cemetery auctioned . In: Oldtimer-Praxis , 11/2009, p. 4
- ↑ Wrecked . In: Oldtimer-Markt , 11/2009, pp. 56–62
Coordinates: 46 ° 50 ′ 6.7 " N , 7 ° 30 ′ 20.2" E