Roger

Wenzel Rossmeisl was a jazz guitarist and guitar maker in pre-war Berlin. In the early 1930s he brought a Gibson archtop back from a trip to America, was inspired by its construction, and began building his own instruments — naming the line "Roger" after his son.

Father and son worked together in post-war Berlin, and are generally credited as the first commercial electric guitar manufacturers in Germany. In 1951, Wenzel was arrested at a trade fair for smuggling materials from East Germany and served three years in prison. Roger ran the company during those years, drove it into debt, and fled to the United States in 1953. He wrote to Gibson president Ted McCarty asking for a job; his Gitarrenbaumeister credential got him hired. He made an archtop that didn't fit Gibson's style, conflicts arose, and he left. He ended up in California and approached Rickenbacker, where Paul Barth hired him in early 1954.

What followed was one of the most consequential careers in electric guitar design. At Rickenbacker, Roger spent eight years developing the 300-series Capri guitars — refining an earlier Hunt Lewis design by hollowing the body from the rear and applying the German carve to the top, creating the look that defines vintage Rickenbacker. He also designed the 4000/4001 bass and the Jazzbo archtop. The thread from Roger's own work is direct: the Roger Super is essentially the ancestor of the Rickenbacker Jazzbo, and early Rickenbacker solid-body prototypes trace to Roger electric designs. He also taught Semie Moseley — founder of Mosrite — the German carve during Moseley's apprenticeship at Rickenbacker. In 1962 Roger moved to Fender, where he designed the Coronado, Montego, LTD archtops, and the Telecaster Thinline. A car accident left him with a serious head injury; he returned to Germany in 1971 and died in 1979 at 52.

Wenzel meanwhile restarted the Roger guitar business in Mittenwald in 1955, continuing until 1962. The guitars — archtops with German-carved tops, parallel-laminated bodies (Wenzel's own construction method), and a deeply musical sound — are a direct window into the design vocabulary that Roger carried to California. The Rittinger article and photo archive, linked below, remain the definitive reference on the brand.