People · Zora Arkus-Duntov · Chapter 2 of 11

Berlin

Berlin, Germany — 1927

Weimar Berlin is the loudest room in Europe, and a seventeen-year-old with gasoline on the brain has walked straight into it. This is the Berlin of cabarets and physicists, of airship arrivals and newsreel speed kings; the AVUS — a public highway turned into a terrifying two-straight race track — runs right through the city's forest. For a boy who has spent his childhood watching an empire collapse, Berlin offers an intoxicating new religion: the machine.

Zora's conversion happens at handlebar height. He finds work around a motorcycle shop and discovers that a motorcycle is the cheapest ticket to speed ever invented. He rides, he wrenches, he races — and he crashes, learning early the tuition that speed charges. His mother, the physician, is predictably unamused. The lesson that sticks is not caution, though. It's that the difference between a frightening machine and a magnificent one is engineering, and engineering can be learned.

So he learns it properly. His grades win him a place at the Institute of Charlottenburg — the great Berlin technical university — and in December 1934 he graduates in mechanical engineering with a specialty that tells you everything about the man he is becoming: engine development and supercharging. Not bridges. Not turbines. The dark art of making an engine breathe harder than God intended.

Why supercharging mattered

  • In the 1930s, forced induction was the bleeding edge of speed — the era's Grand Prix cars were supercharged monsters making power figures that wouldn't be seen again until the 1970s.
  • A supercharging specialist had to master airflow, heat, fuel, and metallurgy at their limits — the exact skill set Zora would later pour into cylinder heads, cams, and fuel injection at Chevrolet.
  • His engineering thesis years put him in the orbit of the German motor industry at its most ambitious — including, remarkably, consulting work connected to the Mercedes Grand Prix racing effort.

The résumé entries from these years read like a young man sprinting: consulting for the Mercedes Grand Prix team while the Silver Arrows are rewriting what race cars can be; technical papers, including one in 1938 — published by the German Auto Club's magazine — arguing the benefits of four-wheel drive for performance cars. Sit with that for a moment: in 1938, a twenty-eight-year-old Zora Arkus-Duntov is publishing the case for the driven front axle. Eighty-five years later, the fastest Corvettes ever built — the E-Ray, the ZR1X — would finally agree with him. He was not early. He was three generations early.

The darkening

But Berlin is running on two clocks, and the other one is counting down. Zora is a Russian-born Jew in a city curdling into the capital of the Third Reich. The street violence, the boycotts, the Nuremberg Laws — the family has seen a state turn on its own people before, and they can read the signs in any language. In the mid-1930s Zora gets out of Germany, and the family's center of gravity shifts to Paris.

Paris gives him the two great loves of his life. The first is a spirited German dancer named Elfriede Wolff — Elfi — performing with the famous Bluebell troupe at the Folies Bergère: quick, glamorous, fearless, and every bit his match. The second is the one he already had: anything with wheels and a throttle.

For a little while — a very little while — Paris lets him have both in peace. On February 11, 1939, in Billancourt, Zora and Elfi marry. He is twenty-nine; she is a teenager with a stage career and, as it will soon turn out, nerves of chrome-vanadium steel.

Seven months later, Germany invades Poland.