ABSTRACT
When the Trabants crossed the Berlin Wall in 1989 from East to West Germany their occupants gaped in wonderment at the Western part of the city and revelled in their new found freedom. The cars themselves belching acrid fumes were soon littering the roadsides as many drivers stood by their broken down vehicles and attempted to take in this unique experience. Just as the Berlin Wall had come to stand for the division of, not only a nation, but also two opposing ideologies so too did the 'Trabi' come to symbolise the relative backwardness of East Germany as opposed to West Germany, and, in consumer terms, the Soviet system vis-a-vis Western capitalism. Like the Russian equivalents, the Volga, Moskvitch and the Zaporozitsa, it was made of poor materials, poorly designed and poorly assembled . The Trabis and their Czech counterpart the Skoda became the butt of endless jokes both within and outside the soviet satellites. 'What do you call a Skoda convertible with twin exhausts? A wheel barrow!' 'How do you double the price of a Skoda? You fill it with petroli' 'Why is the Trabant called Luther? Because Luther once said "Here I stand, I can do no other'" (Benton and Loomes, 1976, 101). They had become the embodiment of a moribund communist system, which Gorbachev had realised would implode if the necessary reforms did not take place (Walker, 1986, 52; Smith, 1991). The irony is that the Trabi ended its life as a symbol of a nostalgic past by becoming a collector' s item; and after the last ones were produced at the eastern German town of Zwickau in 1991 these 26 horse power, two stroke engine vehicles with plastic bodies and thin panel doors were selling at twenty times their original price to avid collectors (Guardian, 13 October 1995, 22).
