MZ was founded in 1903 after a particularly heavy night of
drinking in a pub in south-eastern Germany. For reasons
best known to themselves, a group of particularly insane
Germans decided that it might be a good idea to build a
two stroke engine.  It had a cylinder capacity of 250cc
and produced half a kilowatt.

Some years later, after wasting several thousand gallons of
petrol in attempts to interest the public in a wheel that went
round and round, they decided to mount it on the luggage rack
of a Raleigh Wayfarer.  They invented the twistgrip, and the
right hands of the motorcycling world thanked them for it.

Many years later, after another legendary drinking session, they
decided that maybe attaching a trombone to the exhaust port of the
engine 'might be cool'.  Franz Spoffel was heard to say that
'loud pipes are savink zer lives, nein?' and the tuned twostroke
exhaust was born, much to the annoyance of noise regulators
everywhere.  The world had become a slightly more mental place
for everyone.

They then produced a range of motorcycles including the RT,
the TS ('trophy sport', though commonly rumoured to stand for
'total shite'), the ES and the ETS.  In 1975 they acquired a
licence from the authorities to use the letter Z, and the
now-legendary ETZ was born.  After a frustrating and chilly
morning pushing the bike to the factory, it gained an oil pump,
a disc brake and twelve volt electrics ('so ve are seeink zer
bahn ven it is rainink, and so ve are startink zer fucker, nein?')
and became the monumentally-misnamed 'ETZ Luxus'.

In 1995 MZ went bust for a third time and was sort of bought by
Yamaha, who insisted that 'you make proper bike now, with electic
start'.  In a final blow for the communist ideal (which apparently
revolved around a large number of peasants pushing blue motorcycles)
MZ sold the ETZ tooling and designs to Kanuni in Turkey, where they
are still made.