Last ‘Little Stinker’ Signals End of an East German Era : Unification: Trabant car production ends today. The demise points to failures of Communist technology.
For anyone familiar with the purr and comfort of a Western-style automobile, the east German Trabant had little to offer.
It was small, ugly, slow, obsolete, uneconomical, unsafe, uncomfortable and such a polluter that it quickly earned the nickname “Little Stinker” in the West.
The Trabant--or “Trabi,” as it became known--may have survived in the heavily protected environs of Communist Eastern Europe, but in a free market, it was simply uncompetitive.
And so, later today, the last Trabi will roll off the assembly line in the southern city of Zwickau, and one more factory in eastern Germany will close.
But the end of the Trabant production is more than the closure of another factory.
In many ways, it signals the end of an era--one in which the funny little car helped foment the revolution that destroyed Europe’s barbed-wire divide and then became a de facto symbol of national identity for the eastern Germans who effectively lost their nation with October’s unification.
“The GDR produced everything from light bulbs to television sets, but the Trabi symbolized it all,” said Evelyn Schneider, spokeswoman for Sachsenring, the company that produces the Trabant.
Today the Trabi stands as a metaphor both for the pitiful legacy of Communist East European technology and for how far apart spiritually Germans east and west remain despite their political unification.
The expression “Trabi-German” has come into the language as a synonym for the east German stereotype.
For eastern Germans, the Trabi was a source of perverse pride and affection--with every trip filled with a sense of triumph over adversity and a sense of achievement akin to that of an American teen-ager who has coaxed an extra mile out of an old clunker.
Many were named by their owners.
“It made our modest lives a little easier,” said retired health official Kurt Falkenberg, 69, of his Trabi, nicknamed “Schwejk.” “It was part of the family.”
In Peter Timm’s critically acclaimed film, “Go, Trabi, Go,” about an eastern German family’s psychological collision with the west, the loving owner gives his Trabi a morning wash before using the same washcloth on himself.
“They were polished more than they were driven,” noted an article on the Trabant in the current edition of the All German Automobile Club’s magazine, Motorwelt.
But this object of considerable eastern German affection is scorned by their western cousins in the land of the Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and the BMW. To them, the Trabi is no love object at all. It is a smoke-belching road hazard--a technological mutant that can best be described as a four-wheeled ugly duckling.
“It should be a museum piece,” sniffed a lawyer in Bonn, who declined to give his name during a brief street interview.
There is much to support the western Germans’ view.
All but the very last of the 3 million Trabis produced since the 1950s are powered by a two-stroke engine that sounds more at home in a lawnmower than an automobile.
The Trabi’s 26-horsepower motor produces roughly the same amount of emissions as 30 large Mercedes-Benzes, and the body is a mixture of cotton matting and phenol plastic that makes the Trabi a sure second-best in any accident and a recycling nightmare once its road life is over.
The gasoline is turned on by a tap, the springs are virtually nonexistent and the crash tests conducted using plastic dummies often left the dummies destroyed.
It has been variously dubbed a plastic bomber, Zwickau cardboard, a crutch on wheels and an asphalt bubble.
So outrageous is the Trabi that it has inspired an endless series of jokes in a land that has all too little humor:
* Will the Trabi owner go to heaven? Yes, because he’s already been through hell.
* Why are Trabis never painted black? To avoid the danger of their being mistaken for charcoal briquettes.
* How do you double a Trabi’s value? Fill the gas tank.
A recent German television documentary claimed that improvements offered by the car’s original designers over the years were repeatedly brushed aside by the Communist authorities, who insisted that the Trabi was good enough as it was.
As long as there was no competition, the authorities were right.
In an economy of shortages, eastern Germans typically waited 12 to 15 years for delivery. The month before the opening of the Berlin Wall, the Trabi retailed for $8,600, an amount equal to the annual wage of many.
Black market prices ran more than $16,000.
Falkenberg recalls saving and waiting for nearly a decade before getting his first Trabi in 1965. The children were told there would be no Christmas presents that year: Santa had brought the car.
Such pride among eastern Germans for such a questionable technological achievement as the Trabi is a phenomenon that perplexes many western Germans and, as much as anything, highlights their many differences.
Despite its shortcomings, the Trabi had enough staying power to carry waves of fleeing eastern Germans more than 1,000 miles across Czechoslovakia and Hungary to freedom in the West during the late summer and early autumn of 1989.
But the demise of the border that the Trabi helped bring down signaled the beginning of the end of the Trabi itself.
In the months since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Trabi has been upgraded with a metal body, a four-stroke, 50-horsepower Volkswagen engine, a modern transmission and real springs, but all to little avail.
Like so much of the region’s obsolete industry, the Trabant’s producer, Sachsenring, has been unable to compete against cheaper, better Western models.
After months of struggle and a few fleeting rays of hope, the decision came to give up.
“The mood is somewhat depressed around here,” said Sachsenring spokeswoman Schneider in a telephone interview Monday. “It will be a hard day to get through.”
