Qualla: PS Speicher

PS Speicher: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Einbeck's contribution to civilisation was beer. Written evidence of Einbecker beer being exported dates to 1351, the town joined the Hanseatic League in 1368, and when Munich brewers copied the style they mangled the name — Einbeck came out as oan bock, a billy goat, and the goat stuck. That is why a strong dark lager is called bock. A short walk from the half-timbered old town stands a brick granary from 1898, and inside it, on six floors, are several hundred motorcycles and cars. The building has gone from storing the raw material of one German obsession to housing another.

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Image: Public domain

PS Speicher: A Town Rebuilt in Fifteen Years

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0. Einbeck sits in southern Lower Saxony with a population of a little under thirty thousand, and it looks the way it does because of a catastrophe. In July 1540 an arsonist set a fire that destroyed almost the entire town. The rebuilding took about fifteen years, which is why the o...

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Image: Pedelecs | CC BY-SA 3.0

PS Speicher: Grain Out, Machines In

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Norbert Schnitzler, CC BY-SA 3.0. The granary went up in brick in 1898, on the scale that late nineteenth-century agriculture demanded — a working silo, not an ornament. In the second half of the twentieth century more modern facilities were built in the region and it went out of use, drifting through a series of...

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Image: Norbert Schnitzler | CC BY-SA 3.0

PS Speicher: One Man's Garage, Enlarged

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Iringdon, CC BY-SA 4.0. The collection was assembled privately by Karl-Heinz Rehkopf, who then handed it to a foundation — the Kulturstiftung Kornhaus, established in 2009 and renamed the Stiftung PS.Speicher in December 2020. It runs to more than four hundred historic vehicles spanning about 130 years,...

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Image: Iringdon | CC BY-SA 4.0

PS Speicher: Down Is Forward

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit C-C-Baxter at German Wikipedia (Original text: C-C-Baxter), CC BY-SA 3.0. The decision to run the chronology downward is the cleverest thing about the place, and it changes how the collection reads. You take the lift to the top and start in the 1880s and 1890s, where the machines are experiments — spindly, improvised, obviously uncertain about what the...

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Image: C-C-Baxter at German Wikipedia (Original text: C-C-Baxter) | CC BY-SA 3.0

PS Speicher: 1894 and Everything After

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dirk Godlinski, CC BY-SA 3.0. The oldest headline exhibit is a Hildebrand & Wolfmüller, the first series-production motorcycle and the machine that gave the German language the word Motorrad. Its connecting rods drove the rear wheel directly, the way rods drive a locomotive, with none of the transmission logi...

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Image: Dirk Godlinski | CC BY-SA 3.0