Hummingbird (typewriter)
The Kolibri was a compact portable typewriter, manufactured from 1954 by VEB Mechanik Groma Markersdorf (Chemnitztal) in the GDR . Production was stopped in 1962. By then 150,000 machines are said to have been built, of which around 90 percent have been exported to around 70 countries worldwide. It was considered a robust, hard-wearing and precise typewriter.
production
The Kolibri is the successor to the Groma Gromina N and T. In 1959, after a production cycle of only two years, the significantly larger and heavier Combina office model , which was originally intended to replace the Gromina, was discontinued on the grounds that it wanted to increase the Kolibri's production figures. Their production could thus be increased to approx. 40,000 copies annually by approx. 1961. It was the only Groma typewriter after the two previous models were discontinued. By the end of 1962, the Groma plant had to cease production of the typewriter and then switch to booking and balancing machines.
In 1956 the Kolibri cost 330 East Marks in the GDR and was initially delivered in a suitcase, later also in a leather bag. One of the main customers was the Neckermann mail order company , which they offered as Brillant Junior .
construction
The type lever machine designed by Karl Ronneberger with front impact and simple switching had the unusual dimensions of only 28 × 28 × 7 cm and was very light. With the 44 writing keys arranged in four rows, 88 different characters could be written. The model was available with different keyboard layouts, even for the German keyboard layout there are several variants. So - atypical for this time - the "1" was present (while the letter "I" must be used on the Icelandic layout), but the exclamation mark had to be overprinted with apostrophes and dots in individual layouts.
Because of its great success, a further developed Kolibri Luxus model with expanded equipment appeared in 1960 .
reception
The model plays a role in the film The Lives of Others , in which the writer Georg Dreyman writes an article for the Spiegel on a model smuggled from the West . Due to its small size, he can hide it from the Stasi under the loose base plate of a door threshold . The red ribbon is an artifice in the film, a black ribbon was common.
Peter Wawerzinek writes autobiographically about his childhood, when he began writing on one of his adoptive father's hummingbirds and which made him feel drawn to writing.
literature
- Kunzmann: A hundred years of typewriters in the office. Merkur-Verlag, Rinteln 1979
- Dingwerth: The history of the German typewriter factories (Volume 2). Verlag Kunstgrafik Dingwerth GmbH, Delbrück 2008
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Leonhard Dingwerth, Historical Typewriter Archive: Medium-sized and Small Manufacturers - Volume 2 of The History of German Typewriter Factories. Books on Demand, 2008. ISBN 392191339X , ISBN 9783921913390 . (Pp. 195/196 online at Google Books)
- ↑ Gudrun Fröba, Peter Wawerzinek: I'm a scribe. Transit Book Publishing, 2017
- ↑ Nils Kahlefendt: The memories of the word worker. Interview on Deutschlandfunk, May 22, 2017