Severe and beautiful.

The German Bauhaus movement (1919-33), headed by architect Walter Gropius, gave the world unrelieved ugliness when it came to buildings. If ever there was a model for the bleakness of the Nazi concentration camps, the humorless, colorless and severe Bauhaus style was it.

But when it comes to cameras many good things came about, perhaps the most famous being the Leica M2. Eschewing the embossed finder frames of the M3, the M2 was a study in severity and cleanliness of line and arguably the acme of rangefinder camera design with its uncluttered ‘one frame at a time’ finder which displayed 35, 50 and 90mm frames when the related lens was bayonetted to the beautiful body.

But there’s another design which takes the Bauhaus aesthetic far further and it’s that of the East German Werra.

The Werra I of the mid-1950s.

What is especially noteworthy is that the camera was designed within the Soviet block, not one known for its originality, commies generally preferring to steal designs appropriated from Zeiss Ikon and, when it comes to motorcycles, BMW. Indeed the Russkie copy of the BMW airhead bike, which goes under the name of Ural, remains in production to this day and yes, it’s genuinely awful.

But the Werra was special, with its clean lines and integrated design. While later designs added rangefinders and exposure meters, spoiling the lines, the original Werra I was gorgeous to behold. The only function on the top plate is the shutter release. Film was advanced by rotating the collar at the rear of the lens. Indeed, I recall selling these as a kid and thinking that the grinding noise accompanying this act did not predict longevity. I was right. Apertures, focus and shutter speeds were adjusted with concentric rings on the lens and the baseplate housed the exposure counter and rewind knob. And that was it. The provided hood reversed to protect the lens, along with a screw-on cap. The leatherette trim was standard black or, far better, olive green.

A beautiful design, one which was last made in the late 1960s. Examples can be had for a song, which is about what they are worth, for many were made and you probably need two or three just to get one working example.

A quirky, miniature 35mm camera.

If the spy camera special, the Minox, had a focused target audience, it’s harder to say what the purpose of the Tessina was.

A wrist-sized twin lens reflex.

Made between 1957 and 1996, the Tessina used regular 35mm sprocketed film stock, but this had to be loaded in special cassettes. The camera was just 2.5″ x 2″ x 1″ in size. The image was 14mm x 21mm (compare with the 8mm x 11mm of the Minox) making the area more than three times the size, and 34% that of the full 24mm x 36mm regular 35mm film frame. A cassette was good for some 24 exposures.

Accessories included a wrist strap, minuscule selenium cell exposure meter and a pentaprism for eye level viewing, the default being waist (wrist?) level through the composing lens. The taking lens is off to the side – like a miniature Rolleiflex TLR turned through 90 degrees. Film advance was by spring, good for 8 exposures, wound like a watch, testifying to the Tessina’s Swiss heritage.

There’s no arguing with the quality of the machine, and I recall selling a couple when working a summer job at Dixon’s in London in the late 1960s. But why you would buy one of these costly pieces of jewelry beats me to this day.

Spy special.

Spying is not what it used to be. Today’s Russkie steals data after hacking your cloud server or uses his cell phone. The images are perfect, sent by encrypted cellular mail and infinitely enlargeable.

Ponder then the pre-war and cold war spy’s challenges. He had to make images of those stolen military secrets in poor lighting, had a limited number of snaps on a roll and the chances are that his exposures were off, his shutter speeds too slow and the result a grainy mess. Then along came the Minox camera in 1936 and his life was made considerably easier. For the first time a truly pocketable, high quality camera could make half decent images and the minuscule 50 shot film cartridge was not that hard to secrete away. The original Minox measured just 3.1″ x 1.1″ x 0.6″, and weighed but 4.6 ozs. The cartridge was smaller still. The 8 x 11mm negative, just 10% the area of a 35mm film original, was useable in the right hands.

Small and stealthy. Shown extended and ready for action.

Appropriately enough the first Minoxes were made in Latvia, one of the three Baltic states sharing a border with Comrade Ivan and forever looking over its shoulder at the gathering Russkie hordes on its border, waiting to invade. They used AK47s, not Minoxes, to do their thing. So production was moved to – where else? – Germany after the war, and the Russkie spies were no longer home grown but came from Cambridge (Burgess, McLean, Philby, Blunt) or Los Alamos (Klaus Fuchs). But nationality notwithstanding, the Minox soldiered err, spied, on.

The Model B shown above included a selenium exposure meter and the neat metal lanyard provided just the right distance measure for a sheet of A4 with nuclear trigger drawings. A complete subsystem grew up around the camera including an enlarger and projector (to better enjoy your holiday snaps from Chernobyl) and there was even a binocular attachment for when you needed a real close up of Comrade Stalin’s murderous mustache.

Once the Cold War faded the Minox faded with it, later attempts at compact 35mm cameras a flop. At one point Leica bought the maker, proving that German financial acumen was not bred at Harvard Business School. But it was the spy camera of choice for some 50 years and is quite beautiful to operate and behold.