Frieder Bach and Heiner Jakob tell a story of the Saxon engineering spirit in their book "THE LAST TWO-STROKE COMPRESSOR-ENGINE WITH DKW GENES":
Heiner Jakob's (one of the editors) comment, according the 'restored' KS1:
For Frieder Bach and for me, the book project was more than just research. It opened our eyes to see how 'truths' arise. What we humans perceive to be true is the product of our understanding of the world. As soon as we investigate, more and more often our view turns out to be a mirage. When an internationally respected expert like the now deceased NSU and DKW collector Hermann Herz from Lampertheim presents a motorcycle to the public as a 'DKW opposed piston racing machine' and thus causes a stir at all the major classic car events, an image solidifies and shapes the media reporting the public perception. Years ago when I wanted to point out that this machine was a fake, my text was 'editorially' edited. Herz was a legend even in his lifetime. He enriched classic car events at home and abroad with his numerous and incredibly perfectly crafted racing machines, which he had often built from fragments based on famous models. Not so with Kuhnke-Sport 1.
Then he created a historically worthless pseudo-DKW factory racing machine from the originally preserved and historically significant one-off. He also communicated the history of the machine according to idiosyncratic ideas, although he had all the facts, especially from Karl Reese's archive. It seems like a bitter irony of fate that the Kuhnke Sport 1 proudly presents itself today as a DKW product, when the Auto Union Kurt Kuhnke had forbidden exactly that under threat of legal consequences. Nevertheless, you have to see it positively, because it was only the sparkling clean and beautifully designed Herz'sche renovation that caused a sensation in the professional world. Kuhnke's “work tool” would have been more of a wallflower, and our book would probably never have been written.
Another comment out of the book:
This motorcycle, owned by Audi Tradition, is doubtless based on the original ‚Kuhnke Sport KS1‘.This is historically proven. In 1990, the Lampertheimer DKW-collector and restorer Hermann Herz had the engine redesigned by the TU Darmstadt as part of a student thesis and redesigned the motorcycle based on the full image of the DKW US250-prewar-factory-racers. The ‚restoration-result‘ looks pretty as a museum-masterpiece, but hardly remembers the historical proved KS1.
What happened, may have caused on the prevailing opinion on the term restoration on those days:
Functional and optical better than new! To keep the patina and originality wasn't really the theme. It was not until the ‚Charta of Torino‘ 2013, that this conception was overcome.
Sadly, I don't own this brilliantly book. But this puzzle by 'sichel' encourages me to buy and read this book. Thank you for the puzzle, 'sichel'! Perfect! I only knew about the DKW-Prüßing-opposed-piston-engine out of a book, which also provided the K.-H. Meller-information. See picture attached
I also added a picture showing the 'Audi-Tradition KS1' (left) in comparison to the original bike on the right side
And the cover of the book (showing the original KS1)
Really exciting puzzle! Thank you once more!
