They may be famous for it, but I assure you - the city is in Saxony. And it was the home of the Ihagee camera factory - makers of the little gem you see in the heading image.
I first encountered the Exakta cameras through advertisements in Popular Photography in 1965. Oldens in New York were selling them for about $ 79.00 US at the time and it has always rankled with me that I did not send off my money and get a brand new one. To give you a comparison, a new Asahi Pentax Sv camera with a CdS meter was selling for $ 99 US at the time. It was a time of Elvis, dinosaurs, and the 70¢ malted milk in every drug store.
The Exakta was the first really successful SLR, and despite the factory being bombed flat and the Soviets stealing everything that was not nailed down, the company did come back for a number of years after WW2 to make these cameras. They are fine machines, if somewhat quirky.
I was never able to get my head around the left-handed arrangement of the controls of the Exakta - whether it was the VP model of prewar days that took 127 film ( Note: I bought one of these, working, in Perth in the 1960's. Perth was like that in those days... ) or the later models. I could operate them, but the idea of making a left-handed camera in a world of right-handed people always seemed odd.
And then there was the trapezoidal shape of the body. Grasp it how you might, it was the opposite shape to what your fingers expected or wanted...particularly if you tried to put your eye to the back of a prism to sight the thing. You always seemed to put your thumbs into your eye...Later users of the R9 Leica know exactly what I mean.
And then the odd-bod controls and the wind-it-until-it-breaks film lever - surely never intended for rapid work. Who could have thought of these things? It's only now that Wikipedia has made it all clear - Johann Steenbergen - the founder of the company - was Dutch.
Note that the Exakta seen here - post-war - has things that later were to feature in many Japanese devices; a self-timer - a slow speed shutter ( 12 seconds! ) a removable and interchangeable prism, interchangeable focusing screens, a bayonet mount. If they seem crudely done, remember that the factory may well have been nothing but a tin shed on top of a smoking ruin.
The quirks of the Exakta are many:
The complex back lock.
The knife to cut film in-camera to allow you to change rolls.
The LHS mount.
The mechanical cocking of the lens diaphragm.
The beautiful machining evident upon the accessories - here's the set of extension tubes.
The double cassette back.
This example does not work - the shutters of feinmechanik cameras of the period would only go for so long. But that chrome plating will be gleaming as a museum piece long after a lot of newer cameras have been discarded. One cannot say the same about East German lens barrel materials or machining, but remember that they may have been melting down old Messerschmitts for the materials.
One final tribute to the German cameras of the time. East or West, the cases were made magnificently. These were protection housings for a time when travel was rare and difficult and a tourist was a person of consequence. If you were contented to use the one and only lens, you could pass your entire career with the camera in this case - it probably accounts for why it is in such good shape.
