A Prussian arms factory turned office-machine works.

The Optima typewriter came out of an office-machine works in Erfurt, Thuringia. German Wikipedia traces the factory to the Königlich Preußische Gewehrfabrik, the royal Prussian rifle factory founded in Erfurt in 1862. After the First World War, the same article says, the Treaty of Versailles obliged the works to switch to civilian products, and typewriters were among them.

Ownership passed through several hands. German Wikipedia records that on 11 October 1919 the business became a state-owned Reichswerk and later part of Deutsche Werke A.G. of Berlin. In 1923 the electrical group AEG took a half share in a new typewriter company, the Deutsche-Werke-Schreibmaschinengesellschaft mbH, and in 1929 it took the company over completely. Under the name Europa Schreibmaschinen Werke AG, Erfurt then made the Mignon, an index typewriter on which the user picked each letter with a pointer, followed by machines sold as the Filia, the Elite and the Progreß.

The name that would cause trouble later arrived in the 1930s. German Wikipedia says that after the introduction of a small typewriter called the Olympia, the company was renamed Olympia Büromaschinen Werke AG in 1937. In the Second World War, it adds, production was switched back to rifles, and on 12 April 1945 much of the works burned out after artillery fire.

Two Olympias, one name.

The end of the war split the company in two. English and German Wikipedia both say that after Erfurt was handed to the Soviet occupying forces in June 1945, staff of the Erfurt works left for the West with the company’s design documents; German Wikipedia names the chairman Joachim Wussow as their leader and adds that they did so at the request of AEG’s management. In West Germany they started again, and their business became the Olympia Werke of Wilhelmshaven, which was named Olympia Werke AG from June 1954.

The western restart took several names before it settled. English Wikipedia says the group that fled first founded a company in Bielefeld, the Bielefelder Schreibmaschinen Werke, and that a later company, Orbis Schreibmaschinen-Werke, changed its name to Olympia Werke West GmbH from 1950. German Wikipedia places that company’s works at Roffhausen, near Wilhelmshaven.

In Erfurt, German Wikipedia says, the surviving works became a Soviet joint-stock company (SAG) in 1946 and were handed back to German administration in 1950 as VEB Olympia Büromaschinenwerk Erfurt, a state-owned enterprise of the German Democratic Republic. Two factories in two German states now claimed the same brand. Both Wikipedias say the question of which company could trade under the Olympia name had to be settled in a legal dispute in 1949, and German Wikipedia says the Erfurt works lost.

The result was a new name. According to both encyclopedias, the Erfurt plant then called itself Optima Büromaschinenwerk Erfurt and sold its products under the Optima name, while the Olympia name stayed with the West German company. German Wikipedia names the enterprise as VEB Optima Büromaschinenwerk and says the typewriters themselves were renamed from Olympia to Optima.

The works carried on under that name for decades. From 1 January 1978, German Wikipedia says, it became part of the Kombinat Robotron, the East German electronics and computing combine, and was renamed VEB Robotron-Optima Büromaschinenwerk Erfurt, shortened to OBE.

Typewriters as brands.

The seven brands in this group are all typewriter names: Royal, Remington, Olympia, Erika, Groma, Torpedo and Optima. Typewriter brands in general sit at many different points in the history of office machines, from factories that carried a founder’s name to names that passed between owners, changed countries or outlived the machines that made them familiar, and a single nameplate can turn up on an office desk, a portable in a case or a collector’s shelf.

A typewriter brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single machine than by a nameplate, a decal and the factory behind it, because the company that owned the name may have been sold, divided, renamed or closed long after its last typewriter left the line. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owned it over time, where its machines were actually made and what became of the name.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what a company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its typewriters were made and how its nameplates changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A management buy-out, a last factory and an end in 2004.

German reunification brought a series of short-lived successors. German Wikipedia says that as the Robotron combine was wound up, Robotron Optima GmbH was formed in 1991. When the Treuhandanstalt, the agency privatising East German state companies, could not find a buyer, a management buy-out in 1992 created Optima Bürotechnik GmbH, which again made typewriters, in a new building at Peterborn in Erfurt. In 1999 that company stopped production and filed for insolvency.

A smaller firm followed. German Wikipedia records that Optima Schreibmaschinenwerk Erfurt was founded on 18 January 2000 and built electronic typewriters of the SP series until March 2004. It too became insolvent, and the typewriter production was sold to Mexico. From 2004 to 2006, the same article says, an Optima Vertriebs GmbH bought typewriters from Mexico, programmed them and labelled their keyboards for the relevant language, mainly for export.

So no Optima typewriter has been made in Erfurt since 2004, and the distribution business that kept the name in circulation closed in 2006. An Optima nameplate today points to a machine built by the state enterprise in the GDR or by one of its post-1990 successors.

The Erfurt story has its own book-length history. German Wikipedia lists Eberhard Lippmann’s AEG – Olympia – Optima. Büromaschinen aus Erfurt 1924–2004, published by Sutton Verlag in Erfurt in 2010, as a source, along with the first volume of Leonhard Dingwerth’s history of German typewriter factories, published in 2008.

For a design guide, Optima shows how a brand can be created by losing another one: the name on the machines changed, while the factory, its staff and its typewriter tradition in Erfurt stayed the same. Compare Olympia, the West German company that kept the original name, and Erika, another East German typewriter name. For this guide we use a slate blue, a ribbon rust and an office cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Optima Typewriters’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.