--- title: Victor Max August Haehling von Lanzenauer · HICONIUM description: "Our man for Porsche: on fast blood, slow shelves, and the discipline of wanting one thing for a very long time." canonical_url: https://hiconium.com/journal/authors/victor-haehling-von-lanzenauer --- > HICONIUM · Index: https://hiconium.com/llms.txt · Every page: append `.md` or send `Accept: text/markdown`. > Path: [Home](https://hiconium.com/) › [Journal](https://hiconium.com/journal) › [Authors](https://hiconium.com/journal/authors) › Victor Max August Haehling von Lanzenauer ![Victor Max August Haehling von Lanzenauer at his desk, notebook open, a silver Porsche 356 and Le Mans posters behind him](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/authors/victor-desk-2048.jpg.w1920.q75.webp) The Journal · Authors # Victor Max August Haehling von Lanzenauer He reads law by day and Zuffenhausen by night: the Journal’s Porsche pages are written at this desk. Our man for Porsche In his own words My desk faces the bookshelf, which is a safety measure: a man who faces the window starts pricing other people’s mornings. On the shelf, four rows deep, stands every serious book on Porsche published since the early fifties, when the first of them was written by a man who signed a false name to it. We will come to him. The perfect 911 book is up there too. Ulf Poschardt wrote it, and I have made my peace with that: there is a particular freedom in arriving after the masterpiece, because it excuses you from attempting one and leaves you the better job. The files. The man with the false name was my great-uncle. Richard von Frankenberg drove for the Porsche works team from 1953 to 1960 and wrote about it as if the two occupations were one, which for him they were. In 1952 he founded Christophorus, the magazine Porsche publishes to this day, and edited it until his death; he ran the sport desk at Auto, Motor und Sport; he left behind more than thirty books. At Le Mans he took three class wins and, in 1955, the Index of Performance: a prize decided by formula, for the car that does the most with the least. He remains the only man in the family to have won a race by arithmetic. A house that prices desire by evidence would have amused him. He would have subscribed. And once, in September 1956, he flew. The AVUS in Berlin had a banked north curve of brick, forty-three degrees of it, with no rail at the top, and my great-uncle went over the rim of it at a hundred and eighty, in a difficult little works prototype the mechanics called Mickey Mouse, in front of the sports pages of an entire country. They found the car burning below the wall. They found him in the bushes behind it, alive, and by the family’s telling mostly annoyed. He kept the story for dinners. We have been retelling it for seventy years, at roughly the speed with which he left the track. Of the family’s two talents, the wheel and the pen, I will not pretend I was dealt the wheel. I read law, which sounds like a betrayal of the blood and is in fact its continuation: the law is provenance with footnotes. My days are precedents, evidence, the long jurisprudence of who owned what, and when, and what the owning was worth; a chassis file is case law with better photographs. Somewhere between the lecture hall and the rear axle, the two educations agreed to be one. People ask, reasonably, which Porsche I keep. My family keeps a 356 that wakes at six and has never once been asked to justify itself; I keep its mornings whenever I am home. Beyond that, my garage is a library, and I will say this for it: it has appreciated faster than most garages, and it has never needed tyres. The car will come. Conviction precedes the deed; it did in Gmünd, too. Until then I do what the other half of the blood did, and I try to do it at his standard: I write the Porsche pages of this Journal, slowly, the way the cars deserve. ![Victor von Haehling, signed](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/authors/victor-signature.png.w1200.q75.webp) Our man for Porsche From the family file ## Richard von Frankenberg ![The Porsche works team on a fence: Jean Behra, Huschke von Hanstein, Richard von Frankenberg and Edgar Barth, in a Sioux shoes advertisement](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/authors/frankenberg-porsche-team.jpg.w2048.q75.webp) The works team, mid-fifties: Behra, von Hanstein, Frankenberg, Barth. A shoe advertisement, of all things. ![The AVUS north curve in Berlin: sports cars on the brick banking, the city behind](https://hiconium.com/_derived/images/journal/authors/avus-nordkurve.jpg.w1920.q75.webp) The AVUS north curve: forty-three degrees of brick, no rail at the top. He went over it, and lived. Lived 1922–1973 Porsche works team 1953–1960 Le Mans Class wins 1953 · 1955 · 1956 Index of Performance Le Mans 1955 German sports car champion 1955 Christophorus Founded 1952 · edited until his death Auto, Motor und Sport Sport desk, for years Books More than thirty The AVUS wall September 1956 · survived Racing driver, journalist, and the founding editor of Porsche’s own magazine: the family’s case that writing about these cars is not the opposite of driving them. In the Journal - [Porsche Nobody’s Perfect July 6, 2026](https://hiconium.com/journal/nobodys-perfect) - [Porsche The Same Car, Since 1948 July 5, 2026](https://hiconium.com/journal/the-same-car-since-1948) Photography: Porsche works team — Sioux GmbH, CC BY-SA 4.0 · AVUS north curve — Willy Pragher, Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg / Staatsarchiv Freiburg, CC BY 4.0. Via Wikimedia Commons.