Dannenhaur and Stauss - A particularly fine blend

• Saturday, 27 October 2007
• Jon Gilbert
• 2 Comments

Dannehaur and Stauss

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Mixing elements of early Porsche 356 and Rometsch banana, the Dannenhaur and Stauss could just be the best-looking coachbuilt VW ever

The ubiquitous Beach Buggy is almost certainly the best-known vehicle based on the VW Beetle's tried and tested mechanical components and, thanks to their overtly eye-catching styling and the media's love of them, pretty much everybody that knows what a car is also knows what a Beach Buggy is. However, if you mention a Dannenhauer and Stauss, it'll be blank looks all round. Of course, what made the Buggy so popular across the world was that anybody could build one at home. You simply lifted off the Beetle body and plonked on the new one. In the case of a long wheelbase version, they required little or no mechanical knowledge to build, as mechanical components were all virtually new in their heyday and, with bodies pre-formed and pre-coloured, a basic, usable Buggy could be built from a kit in little more than a weekend. But what if you had to make the body by hand yourself? How many people do you think would have built a Beach Buggy then? Precious few, I'd suggest.
Yet that's exactly what many of the coachbuilding companies that were still relatively common in Europe in the Fifties did. They took the venerable Beetle floorpan and built bodies around it. The difference was that where the Beach Buggy was a simple, glass fibre mould design that could be produced in quantity, these cars were handmade in metal, usually aluminium, by skilled craftsmen. Two such craftsmen were Germans Gottfried Dannenhauer and Kurt Stauss, who donated not only their skills but also their names to the glorious and very rare coachbuilt car, of which Siegbert Holtermueller's version here is such a fine example. Dannenhauer, the elder of the two, had served previously at Reutter Coachwerks (the coachbuilder responsible for making the majority of the early Porsche 356 bodies) after Porsche relocated their factory from Gmund to Zuffenhausen, an area in the north of the industrial city of Stuttgart. Porsche moved to near where Reutter was located in 1950, and Dannenhauer and Stauss (D&S) started up in the early months of that same year, so while it seems unlikely that Dannenhaur actually worked on any Porsches, the design 356 influences in his own car are plain for all to see.

For the full story on the Dannenhaur and Stauss check out the November 2007 issue of VolksWorld magazine. On sale 5th October 07 to 2 November and then available through back issues.