Arnoud op de Weegh, Ard op de Weegh
|
The Op de Weegh father and son new book about the Schlumpf affair is now available in the English language, after the Dutch language version was published in 2017. The book will tell the true story behind the Schlumpf affair and will reveal new untold facts, pictures and documents.
This fabulous collection of cars was brought together by two French brothers, Hans & Fritz Schlumpf , and consists of hundreds of the most beautiful cars ever produced. The ‘Schlumpf affair’ is perhaps one of the most famous stories in the car collectors world, covered extensively by the media in the mid-1970s when the collection was seized by the trade unions and later by the French government. The Schlumpf brothers were accused of fraudulent actions to obtain their collection – but following extensive research by the authors of this book, the true story behind the collection is revealed. Ard and Arnoud op Weegh spent many years investigating the Schlumpf affair, and discovered many previously unpublished documents which prove that the Schlumpf brothers have been wrongly accused over the years. This book is written to tell the true story behind the collection, and also to rehabilitate the Schlumpf family. The book is beautifully illustrated with some rare photographs, and features many of the beautiful cars that make up the Schlumpf collection. Published by Veloce Publishing
Review The book sheds a new light on this well-known affair around one of the nicest automobile collection in the world. It makes use of some new information which was not available before, including for example the actual price that the Schlumpf brothers payed for each car. Especially this information makes the book worthwhile, many of the photographs are of not too good quality (compared with the price of the book), and only a few of them are new or show unknown aspects of the collection. Compared with the Dutch edition, luckily many of the language errors have been removed, and the layout is improved (though the tables with car-info are difficult to read because of the colour-choice). However, the book accuses many of the former publications to be one-sided about the subject (painting the Schlumpf brothers as real capitalists, enriching themselves at the cost of their workers), this book is equally one-sided, but now in stating many times in almost exactly the same wording how wronged the brothers were, and that they were sacrificed for political reasons. What these reasons were remains unclear and the political context is only lightly touched. In effect, the important part about the affair would have benefited a lot from a more neutral view, though of course the final conclusion might have remained the same. That might also have resulted in a bit more pages about the subject. Now, most of the book goes into descriptions of some of the cars from the collection. |