No DPF, fair enough. I try to avoid them myself because of the costs involved when they go wrong (especially on the older cars I like). Avoiding airbags is idiotic though. Airbags allow you to walk away from an accident that would otherwise cripple or kill you.
All the fun diesels come after the introduction of airbags unfortunately. There are some good diesels pre airbags but they're not particularly quick. You might be able to find a very early mk3 golf with the fully mechanical TD engine (pre TDI) with no airbags, but 90bhp was what you got. You could probably crank the mechanical fuel pump up a bit to give it a bit more go but 100-105bhp would probably be your absolute limit. Even later mk3s are getting hard to find now, let alone early ones, and all the later ones had at least dual airbags. You can pick up an older Audi C5 A6 or B5.5 Passat with a PD130 TDI and map it up to near 200bhp and have a fun, quick, luxo-barge without having to worry about DPFs, but they'll all have four or more airbags.