Stoewer: quality from Szczecin. 1858-1945.

A collection containing products from the factories owned by two generations of Szczecin’s Stoewer family. Bernhard Stoewer, founder of the factory in the Niebuszewo district, started with sewing machines. Later, typewriters and bicycles were also produced in the factory complex.

His sons, Emil and Bernhard Jr, set up a car factory on today’s al. Wojska Polskiego. From 1898 to the 1940s, the Stoewers’ factory made more than 60 models of outstanding cars: electric, racers, luxurious saloons, buses, lorries, reliable passenger cars...

In our museum you can see the world’s largest collection of Stoeweriana. Seven cars (the oldest from 1913), 50 sewing machines (1867), 28 typewriters (1903), seven bicycles (1900) and hundreds of exhibits related to the Stoewers and their times: parts, tools, photographs, prizes, signs, badges.

This impressive collection was compiled by one man: Manfried Bauer, born in Szczecin in the winter of 1941. When he was just a few years old, Manfried had to leave Szczecin; for Bauer as an adult, his native city was an increasingly blurry memory. That’s how it was until 1984, when he took his wife and sons to Poland on vacation. He visited Szczecin and here, for the first time, he heard about Stoewer cars.

‘I felt a spark’, says Bauer. ‘Five years later, in Switzerland, I bought my first Szczecin-built car, a Stoewer Greif’.

The Stoewers changed Bauer’s life. He collected products from the Stoewers’ factories, as well as mementos of the family of Szczecin industrialists, documents and photographs. He gathered up every scrap of knowledge, creating an impressive archive. In April 2002 he opened the Stoewer Museum in Wald-Michelbach, Hesse. The museum was separated from Emil and Bernhard Jr Stoewer’s old factory by 787 kilometres.

In 2019 we bought the 1,095 exhibits that made up Bauer’s museum. That same year, the collection arrived in our museum. The Stoewers and Stoeweriana had returned home.