One of the pitfalls of brand loyalty is that it urges us to embrace the bad with the good. Those strokes of genius congealed in my heart a loyalty to that serpentine guttersnipe, Axl Rose.
This preamble is here to illustrate the ways we sometimes embrace no-good things because of an emotional attachment to a brand. For me, that once extended to cameras too. Camera after camera, these much-maligned machines proved to be more reliable and optically proficient than the propaganda against them would have us believe.
But I started getting cocky with old Soviet cameras, thinking that they were always going to punch above their weight. Until another Chinese Democracy happened. Opinions vary in the wider world of camera collectors and users, this includes the ranks of the CP staff. Strong words, I know. Almost immediately after the war the Red Army began disassembling the factories in its sector and shipping their valuable equipment back to Russia. Seeing this, Zeiss decided to seek greener pastures and moved to Oberkochen in the American sector.
Zeiss was and remains synonymous with excellent lenses, and names like Planar , Sonnar and Tessar remain watchwords for world-class optics. After losing the rights to those names, Zeiss Jena offered Flektogons, Distagons and Pancolars, and their export products were badged with aus Jena from Jena to differentiate them from the western-made products.
Carl Zeiss Jena was eager to prove that it could hold its own against its capitalist sibling and set out to manufacture a rangefinder camera. Most of the people working at Zeiss Jena had previously worked for the unified company and the Werra was to benefit from their institutional knowledge. For the Werra , Zeiss Jena leaned into the fact that it was a lens manufacturer.
