Culture & Arts 3 min read 4h ago

Manta Dredged from Danube Draws Crowds

An Opel Manta A, probable build year around 1970, was recovered from five metres' depth in the Danube near Neu-Ulm in late May by more than fifty emergency personnel in a
The wreck is now on public display at the Oldtimerfabrik Neu-Ulm, drawing between 50 and 100 visitors daily, and will be kept in its found condition as a cultural artefact.
Ownership of the car remains unresolved; police say a witness claims it was stolen from her then-husband in 1972, and how it entered the river has not been established.

A rusted, mud-encrusted Opel Manta believed to have lain on the bed of the Danube for more than half a century is drawing up to a hundred visitors a day to a classic car workshop in the Bavarian town of Neu-Ulm — its crumpled roof, flat tyres, and absence of a rear fox-tail ornament now treated as features rather than flaws.

Raised from five metres

The first-generation Manta A was spotted by an angler in late May near Elchingen in the district of Neu-Ulm. The fire brigade, the water rescue service, and the Technisches Hilfswerk responded, with divers locating the vehicle at roughly five metres' depth. A crane was used to recover the wreck. More than fifty emergency personnel were occupied with the operation for over seven hours.

Rain since the recovery has washed away a layer of river mud to reveal the car's original paintwork: an iconic yellow, with a probable build date of around 1970. Peter Wirsching, managing director of the Oldtimerfabrik Neu-Ulm, where the car is now on display, has confirmed that it will be preserved in its current state. "What the rain washes away may go," he said. "But the rest is art in the broadest sense." Visitors are no longer permitted to sit inside, though the wreck remains open to view.

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Ownership unresolved

Who owns the wreck has not been established. According to police, a witness stated that the car had been stolen from her then-husband in 1972. That former husband subsequently returned to the United States during the 1970s and has not yet been traced. How the vehicle came to be in the river remains unclear. The angler who discovered it has reportedly indicated he would be willing to leave it in the care of the Oldtimerfabrik rather than claim it for himself.

Wirsching noted that visitors have already slashed the tyres in a search for hidden gold. "The Manta fires the imagination," he said.

Cultural resonance

The Opel Manta built a substantial following in West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s, becoming associated with a particular strain of working-class youth culture — one satirised and ultimately immortalised by the 1991 film Manta Manta, starring Til Schweiger and Tina Ruland. Well-preserved examples are now sought-after collectors' items. The interest attracted by the Donau wreck — however irreparable its condition — reflects that enduring attachment, and suggests the car's cultural afterlife is far from over. The phenomenon echoes a broader public fascination with objects retrieved from rivers and waterways, as seen when a European drought recently exposed a Roman bridge and a century-old tugboat, drawing comparable crowds of curious onlookers.

Wirsching is unambiguous about the vehicle's mechanical prospects: "It's done for," he told reporters. What the Danube has surrendered is not a car to be driven but, as its daily visitor count suggests, an object that has become something else entirely.

##OpelManta ##ClassicCar ##Danube

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