KURIER  |  1921-24  |  Germany  :

Kurier was the name of both an engine and a lightweight motorcycle made by Curt Hanfland GmbH in Berlin during the early years of the Weimar Republic. The firm, Curt Hanfland GmbH of Berlin, used the badge designation HFD, and its best-known product was a lightweight fitted with the company’s own 147cc Kurier two-stroke engine, offered with engines of up to 2 horsepower until 1925. The engine was the heart of the enterprise, and Hanfland supplied it beyond his own machines. Argul was one of several other manufacturers that used the Kurier engine. Hanfland himself was enough of an authority on the type to write about it. He published a book on bicycle auxiliary motors in 1921, Der Fahrrad-Hilfsmotor, covering their construction and use.

The Kurier engine’s lasting significance lies in its place in the prehistory of BMW, through the aircraft maker Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, or BFW. Kurt Hanfland had designed the 148cc two-stroke in 1920, and it was later fitted to a combination bicycle and motorcycle called the Flink. It was BFW that built the Flink around the Hanfland engine, and the same firm was also responsible for the Helios, from which the first BMW motorcycle was developed. The link to BMW runs through BFW’s corporate history rather than through BMW directly. BFW had been a wartime aircraft manufacturer, and the merger of BFW and BMW took place in 1922 or 1923, after which BFW briefly became a separate company again in 1926 before being renamed Messerschmitt AG in 1938. Because BFW was one of the firms absorbed into BMW, the Hanfland-powered Flink is widely treated as the first BMW motorcycle and the Kurier as the first BMW motorcycle engine, though that description holds only in this ancestral sense, since the Flink was a BFW product that came before the merger and was never sold under the BMW name, and BMW’s own first motorcycle engine was the M2B15 boxer twin, with the R32 of 1923 the first complete machine designed and sold as a BMW.