Deep Dive: Roger Rossmeisl
The man who made a Rickenbacker a Rickenbacker
Almost every article about Roger Rossmeisl—the German-born designer of almost every model in the Rickenbacker lineup—tells the same story: he’s the son of luthier Wenzel Rossmeisl; trained in lutherie in Mittenwald where he was certified as a “Gitarrenbaumeister”; worked for his father after the war; then emigrated to the US in 1953 where he went to work first for Gibson and then Rickenbacker, and later still Fender.
But if you dig a little deeper, there are a few details here and there that don’t neatly fit that narrative—along with a complicated geopolitical framework that influences the story yet rarely gets mentioned. There’s also some tragedy—and a little bit of crime.
It’s a story worth telling in its entirety. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Buckle up—it’s gonna be a fun ride.
Let’s begin with Roger’s father, Wenzel Rossmeisl. Wenzel was born in 1902 in Graslitz, the son of a musical instrument craftsman—but not a maker of stringed instruments, rather one who built brass and woodwinds.
Graslitz had long been known as a center of brass instrument production, along with the nearby town of Schönbach, which was also renowned as a center of stringed instrument production. So it makes sense that Wenzel’s father would become an instrument maker, and that so would Wenzel himself. Except he didn’t…at least not at first.
But before we get into that, it’s worth taking a short geopolitical detour—one that isn’t strictly necessary for our story, but adds some useful historical context.
You’ll notice I didn’t say that Graslitz and Schönbach were in Germany. And that’s because they weren’t. Both were part of the historical Kingdom of Bohemia, which at the time of Wenzel’s birth was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Most of what was once the Kingdom of Bohemia falls today within the Czech Republic—as do Graslitz and Schönbach, which are now known by their Czech names, Kraslice and Luby. Both towns sit within about 5 kilometers of the German border.
Bohemia was populated by both German speakers and Czech speakers. After World War I, the Austro-Hungarian empire was dissolved, and most of Bohemia was merged with parts of Moravia to form the new country of Czechoslovakia.
German-speaking regions like Graslitz and Schönbach remained within the new state of Czechoslovakia rather than joining Germany or Austria. These German-speaking regions in Czechoslovakia, primarily located near the Czech-German border, would come to be known in the 1920s and 30s as the Sudetenland.
The Pan-Germanist movement that arose in Nazi Germany—centered on the idea that all German-speaking people should be united—led to the Sudeten Crisis of 1938, wherein Germany demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland. In the hopes of appeasing Hitler, the UK, France, and Italy agreed to this annexation in the 1938 Munich Agreement.
That policy of appeasement, of course, only emboldened Hitler—but that’s another story.
After World War II ended, Czechoslovakia’s pre-war borders were reestablished, and the majority of the German-speaking population—over 2.1 million people—were forcibly expelled.
And, tying this back to our main story, that forced expatriation of German-speakers effectively sounded a death knell for the musical instrument centers of Graslitz and Schönbach. We’ll come back to that in a minute.
For now, let’s return to Wenzel, who—despite growing up as the son of an instrument maker in Graslitz—did not train to become one himself, despite what the standard Roger Rossmeisl narrative would have you believe.
We’re not 100% certain what he did study. Some contemporaries report he may have trained to become a hairdresser—not exactly the path you’d expect. But we do know that what he really loved more than anything else was playing the guitar. Not building them, playing them.
He moved to Berlin around 1925, and he and his first wife Elizabeth—a singer who performed under the stage name “Lollo”—played in jazz clubs throughout the city. In 1927 Elizabeth gave birth to their first and only child, a son they named Roger Raimond Rossmeisl.
Here’s the thing about the German guitar industry in the 1920s: it didn’t really exist. Yes, Höfner can trace its roots back to 1887—in Schönbach, of course—but they wouldn’t start making guitars until the mid 1930s. There were a handful of master luthiers—mostly centered around Schönbach and Mittenwald near the Austrian border—but even they had largely been trained in violin making techniques and were simply applying that knowledge to guitars.
In other words, guitar building in Germany was still a craft tradition—not an industry. There was certainly no production at scale like in the US. To Wenzel Rossmeisl, a guitar fanatic who lusted over American archtops, this looked like an opportunity.
The problem was that Wenzel didn’t actually know how to build a guitar. This is where Franz Hirsch comes in.
Hirsch, born in 1879, had trained as a guitar and lute builder in Schönbach—where he still resided—and was highly regarded as a master craftsman. Wenzel, meanwhile, had very clear ideas of what the ideal jazz guitar should look like, but not the skills to build it. So how did the two connect?
The answer is inconclusive. Some accounts say they were distant relatives, but given that Hirsch had grown up elsewhere and only later moved to Schönbach to study, that seems unlikely. More likely, Wenzel knew of Hirsch through his reputation—passed along by other guitarists or perhaps family involved in the instrument trade.
Either way, a deal was struck: guitars would be built by Hirsch’s workshop in Schönbach with design input from Wenzel, and then sold in Berlin by Wenzel. The name chosen for this venture—and for the guitars themselves? “Roger”, Wenzel’s pride and joy.
The first “Roger” guitars were produced in 1930, and all prewar “Rogers” were built by Hirsch in Schönbach. While Wenzel did learn many useful things from Hirsch during this period, he still did not know how to build a guitar himself.
Wenzel was conscripted in 1940, and served until the war ended in 1945. Nothing is known about his war record. Some time before that, likely around his tenth birthday, Roger was sent to the Staatliche Berufsfachschule für Musikinstrumentenbau (State Vocational School for Instrument Making) in Mittenwald.
Why Mittenwald and not Schönbach? The protective Wenzel likely did the math in his head and deemed Mittenwald—on the Austrian border in southern Germany—would be a relatively safe location to send Roger as war loomed. It also helped that, like Schönbach, Mittenwald was a historic center of instrument making, with a well-known school fully capable of providing Roger with the skills Wenzel wanted him to have.
Now there is some debate over this point. Some sources—including Martin Kelly’s book Rickenbacker Guitars: Pioneers of the Electric Guitar—suggest Roger trained in Schönbach with Hirsch, rather than in Mittenwald. That’s a credible claim, given how intertwined Hirsch was with Wenzel at the time, but I believe the available evidence points the other way.
First, the school at Mittenwald, founded in 1858, combined a traditional academic curriculum with vocational training. Roger would have been around ten years old when he was sent away, and would have needed to continue his formal education alongside his training in lutherie. While Hirsch would have been an excellent teacher, there was no equivalent structured program in Schönbach at the time.
Next, numerous sources—including Roger’s apprentice at Fender, Phil Kubicki—recount stories of Roger reminiscing about his school years in the Alps. That detail aligns with Mittenwald, not Schönbach.
And finally, Mittenwald was likely the safer location of the two. Given the geopolitics of the time, potential conflict was more likely to impact regions along Germany’s western or eastern borders—where Schönbach was located—than more isolated southern Alps where Mittenwald was nestled.
For these reasons, Mittenwald appears to be the more likely answer—though it’s worth noting that we don’t have definitive proof either way.
Putting that aside, we’ll jump forward to 1945 and the end of the war. Wenzel is discharged, Hirsch has been displaced from Schönbach—landing in Bubenreuth, like many German-speaking instrument makers from Czechoslovakia—and Roger returns home to Berlin with certification as a “Gitarrenbaumeister” (Master Guitar Builder). But the Berlin they return to—and Germany itself—has been divided by the conquering Allied forces.
Wenzel spent about nine months working for Arnold Hoyer in Bubenreuth, where he helped develop Germany’s first double-necked Hawaiian steel guitar. The money he made from Hoyer went to Hirsch to fund the construction of components, which were then sent to Roger in Berlin for final assembly.
But by mid-1946, Wenzel didn’t really need Hirsch any more. Roger was more than capable of building guitars on his own, and had his own flair for design. From that point on, Roger became the technical and creative core of the business while Wenzel focused on sourcing materials and keeping the business growing.
The problem with growing the business, however, was getting the materials needed to build guitars in the first place. Postwar Germany—and especially Berlin—was a pretty grim place, with much of its industry and infrastructure destroyed. Shortages were everywhere, and money was scarce.
Then there were the complications created by Germany’s post-war division. The Rossmeisl home and shop were located in American-controlled West Berlin, which was completely surrounded by the Soviet-controlled zone that would later become East Germany.
Now this was before the Iron Curtain descended, and Wenzel could still travel fairly freely between Berlin and the Soviet sector. But getting things from the East to the West—and vice versa—was complicated. Legally, anyway.
As happens in any time of shortages, the black market exploded. Out of necessity, Wenzel became a player. Not to become rich, but simply to acquire the supplies he needed to keep his business running.
The “Roger” guitars’ most notable design feature, once Roger took over the design and production, was its pronounced German carve (click to learn more). The design would later show up in his work with both Rickenbacker and Fender. Roger didn’t invent this technique—it was a hallmark of German violin design, and several of Hirsch’s “Roger” guitars feature a modest German curve—but he pushed it further, adapting it to take advantage of the constraints presented by the materials available to him.
All the “Roger” guitars produced by Hirsch were true arch-tops, with tops and backs hand-carved from a slab of at least 25mm thickness. But tonewood of that thickness was simply not available in post-war Germany.
Despite not being a luthier himself, Wenzel came up with a workable solution. He was able to procure tonewood of 7.5mm thickness—prewar slabs meant for piano soundboards. By gluing three slabs together—with the grains aligned to avoid infringing on existing plywood patents—he could approximate the needed thickness.
Roger could then apply an exaggerated German carve to the edges, creating the visual appearance of a carved archtop while the instrument itself remained essentially flat-topped.
Demand for the “Roger” guitars grew to the point that by 1948, two additional employees had been hired and a larger workshop was required. The business moved to a new West Berlin location, but Wenzel had even larger plans.
Around the same time as the Berlin move, Wenzel leased the workshop of instrument maker Peter Harlan—and acquired its stock of tonewoods and its experienced craftsmen—in Markneukirchen, in the Soviet sector just across the Czech border from Schönbach. The second production line began producing “Roger” guitars later that year at a much lower cost thanks to the relative value of West and East German Marks—a bold expansion that would soon prove far more complicated than expected.
During this period Roger would continue to refine his design language, and the Berlin workshop would become as much a laboratory as a factory. Style elements that first showed up here would later appear on Rickenbacker models. In 1950 he passed his master craftsman exam, and received the title of Zupfinstrumentenmacher-Meister—master luthier, plucked instruments—the highest certification Germany’s luthier’s guild offered. All looked bright for Roger and Wenzel. But by the following year, the risks Wenzel had been taking were no longer sustainable, and it would all start to fall apart.
In spring of 1951, Wenzel was arrested by the East German Stasi on his way to a trade fair in Leipzig. He was charged under the Foreign Exchange Act—his black market activities and the smuggling of materials between his two workshops had finally caught up with him. He was sentenced to four years in prison, and the Markneukirchen workshop along with all its inventory was seized.
This left Roger alone in Berlin, and as good as he was at designing and building guitars, he was terrible at running a business.
Roger was quite fond of wine, women, and song—along with fast cars. Without Wenzel controlling the purse strings, he began to overindulge in all of the above. Yet “Roger” guitars became the toast of the town, with increasingly elaborate custom-built guitars finding their way in the hands of all of Berlin’s biggest players.
Unfortunately, many of these guitars were leaving the workshop for little—and often no—money, at a time when production capacity had already dropped sharply following the seizure of the Markneukirchen workshop. Demand was there, but supply—and cash flow—were not.
In mid-1953, with creditors closing in, Roger began forming an escape plan. He wrote to Gibson president Ted McCarty in the US and asked for a job. Impressed by Rossmeisl’s portfolio and “Gitarrenbaumeister” certification, McCarty made him an offer—including paying for his passage to the US.
Within two weeks of hearing back from McCarty, Roger quietly left Berlin in September, bound for Kalamazoo—leaving his mother to clean up the financial shambles he had left behind.
It became clear fairly quickly that Roger wasn’t a good fit at Gibson. German archtop guitars had much thicker tops than was common in the US, and in McCarty’s own words Roger’s guitars looked “clumsy” in comparison. His exaggerated German carves looked radical to Gibson’s more conservative eyes, and there was still significant anti-German sentiment in the US—and on the Kalamazoo shop floor.
In early 1954, he told McCarty he needed a vacation. Instead, he signed on as a Hawaiian steel guitarist aboard a cruise bound for Hawaii from Los Angeles. He never returned to Kalamazoo.
How Roger ultimately ended up interviewing with Rickenbacker shop manager Paul Barth after returning to Los Angeles is unclear. Some sources say he first went to Fender, where Leo may have pointed him towards his former business partner, F.C. Hall. More likely, as an avid steel guitarist, Roger was already familiar with the brand and simply decided that applying at a guitar company with a German name was worth a shot.
However it happened, his timing was perfect. Hall had acquired Rickenbacker in 1953—then still primarily a manufacturer of Hawaiian steel guitars—and was looking to develop a line of Spanish guitars. He needed a designer, and someone with hands-on experience building them. After meeting Roger, Paul Barth knew immediately that he was exactly who Hall had been looking for.
Hall had already hired an outside industrial designer to develop what would become the Combo 600 & 800 (click to learn more). Barth and Roger refined the design—adjusting the headstock shape and adding Roger’s signature German carve to the top ahead of its launch later that year.
Rickenbacker’s first modern electric Spanish guitar may not have been designed by Roger, but his fingerprints were all over it. From that point forward, every new guitar Rickenbacker introduced between then and 1963 would be a Roger Rossmeisl design.
Roger spent most of 1955 building guitars, not designing them. He brought Barth apprentice Semie Moseley onto his team, training him to help apply the labor-intensive German carves to the Combo 600 and 800—a design feature Moseley would later carry with him when he left Rickenbacker to found Mosrite.
Back in Germany, Wenzel had been released from prison the year before, and spent much of 1954 and 1955 cleaning up the mess Roger had left behind. Despite everything, father and son remained in close contact until Wenzel’s death in 1975, regularly corresponding and continuing to share ideas. “Roger” guitars resumed production in 1956 under Wenzel’s guidance, in Mittenwald this time. And while their design would evolve over time, they remained rooted in Roger’s earlier work.
California suited Roger’s playboy style, but he seems to have balanced work and play relatively well. His first original design for Rickenbacker came in late 1955 with the Combo 400 (click to learn more), which went into production in early 1956. F.C. Hall’s brief—a simple to build, entry level guitar—may have been a disappointment to Roger, but he met it nonetheless…with some tulip-shaped flair.
The path from that first design to the absolute blizzard of creativity Roger unleashed in 1957-58 isn’t entirely clear, but what followed was a two-year burst of output that many designers don’t match over an entire career.
What didn’t Roger do over that two-year stretch? The tulip-bodied Combo 400 lost half its tulip (click to learn more), and then morphed into the cresting wave (click to learn more) 425 and 450 (click to learn more). That cresting wave language had already appeared on Rickenbacker’s first bass guitar, the 4000 (click to learn more), which debuted a few months earlier.
The Combo 600 and 800 body shape was modified to create the Combo 650 and 850, which then was carved out from the rear to create Rickenbacker’s first semihollowbodied guitar, the Polynesian prototype (click to learn more).
The Polynesian would be simplified for production into the small-bodied, short-scale Capri models, which were then first lengthened and then widened to create the full-size 330 Capri (click to learn more) and 360 Capri (click to learn more).
In other words, this was the foundation for pretty much the entire Rickenbacker line as we know it today. Not to mention the design elements these guitars introduced—the guitar paddle-style headstock, the bass cresting wave headstock, the cat’s eye soundhole, the tailpiece “ramp”, triangle fingerboard inlays (click to learn more), and the teardrop pickguard—that continue to be used on almost all Rickenbacker guitars to this day.
Let’s put it another way: Rickenbacker’s 1956 price list had three Spanish guitars listed. The 1957 price list had eleven, plus a bass. By 1958, the list had exploded to thirty-eight guitar models, a bass, and three mandolins—virtually all from the mind and chisels of Roger Rossmeisl, apart from the original Combo 600 and 800, which he had only helped to bring to their final form.
To be fair, not all of these models made it into production, and many were simply variations—pickups, tailpiece, or trim changes built on the same “base” guitar. But it was still a lot, with prototypes built of almost every base design. It was an astonishing output.
And in the middle of all that, he somehow managed to marry Kunigunde “Mickey” Feldbauer in late 1957—a fellow German émigré he’d met at a party the year before. Mickey would give birth to their only child—a son they named Roger—in October 1958.
Hall’s confidence in Roger’s ability was high enough that the 1957 catalog offered “Custom built guitars…made to your own specifications, including design, layout, and colors.” Roger produced a number of “sample” custom instruments in 1957 and 1958 that appeared at trade shows—including acoustics and the wild “El Toro” guitar—but the program was short-lived. His time was simply too valuable to the company.
As many new ideas as Roger had during this period, there is comfort in familiarity. Whether he was homesick or simply wanted to prove to himself that he still could, he produced two guitars—one each in both 1957 and 1958—officially designated as the Model 390. But in truth, they were “Rogers” in all but name.
As the final 1958 lineup took shape, Hall realized one key thing was missing: a dedicated jazz guitar. Roger’s last major effort from this incredibly productive period would fill that gap with the F-Body guitars (click to learn more).
Ward Deaton replaced Paul Barth as the factory manager in 1958. Roger was, to paraphrase John Hall, something of a loner who preferred to work independently, and Barth had largely allowed him to do just that. Roger had staff assigned to him to work on whatever struck his mood that day—though at times that meant they simply stood by while the hands-on Roger did the work himself.
Deaton’s mandate was to improve efficiency and increase output, and Roger’s method of working didn’t fit his vision. Inevitably—but slowly—friction began to build between the two.
The product line Roger had spent the past two years building was largely complete. Hall stopped sending suggestions—the company finally had the lineup he felt it needed. Roger, in turn, began spending more time building guitars than designing them. Under Deaton’s increasingly watchful eye.
He would have one last burst of creativity in late 1960/early 1961—adapting the entry-level 450 into the 615/625, building several prototypes for a proposed acoustic guitar line that went nowhere, and finally, there was the New Capri.
Roger took the existing Capri body and enlarged the horns, lowered and pinched the waist slightly, and reduced the body depth from 2” to 1 1/2” to create the definitive semi-hollowbody Rickenbacker shape, still in use today on the 330.
In 1962, Hall moved the Rickenbacker factory 30 miles south to Santa Ana, leaving behind the Los Angeles workshop the company had occupied since the 1930s. Whether it was the commute, friction with Deaton, or simply a sense he had nothing left to contribute at Rickenbacker, Roger didn’t make the move. With that, the Rossmeisl era at Rickenbacker came to an end.
But Roger still had plenty of guitars left in him. When he approached Fender for a job, he was hired on the spot by Leo himself, who was under pressure from his sales team to deliver an acoustic line. Roger, Leo believed, was just the man for the job.
Roger would go on to design a number of guitars for Fender as the head of Acoustic Guitars R&D. The Fender Concert and King (renamed the Kingsman in 1966) acoustic guitars launched in 1963, followed by the Coronado series of semi-hollowbodies in 1966 and the Thinline Telecaster in 1968. He even designed—but did not build—the rosewood Telecaster played by George Harrison during the Beatles’ rooftop concert.
But by the late 1960s, things were beginning to unravel for Roger. His drinking—which had always been heavy—had become a serious problem. His marriage to Mickey ended badly, and he was involved in a serious automobile crash that left him partially disabled—and deeply in debt. And yet, he still had one last great guitar left in him.
Fender wanted to make a “statement” jazz guitar line to compete with Gibson—and who better to design and build it than Roger? He drew up two models—the Montego, and the super-deluxe LTD.
Roger outsourced the Montego bodies to a German workshop, but the LTD models were handbuilt in Fullerton by Roger and his apprentice, Phil Kubicki. The two models shared a silhouette, European spruce tops and flamed maple backs and sides, and special electronics designed by Freddy Tavares.
The LTD, however, replaced the Montego’s arched top and back with exactly what you’re expecting: Roger’s signature German carve. Where else could his story as a luthier end than with one final “Roger”? Only 36 were made.
Roger left Fender in 1971, penniless. It is unclear whether he left of his own accord, or was let go due to his drinking problem. Either way, word had spread, and no other guitar company would hire him. In the end, his mother had to buy him a ticket home to Germany.
Unfortunately, Wenzel retired and closed his business around the time Roger returned to Germany. As he was no longer a German citizen, Roger struggled to find steady work, and spent the last years of his life working in a department store in Berlin. He died in 1979, at the age of 52.
In the end, Roger Rossmeisl’s story didn’t close with the LTD—it just faded out. But every German carve that followed carried a piece of him with it. In a way, he never stopped building “Rogers.”
