Thursday, November 25, 2010

This article is taken from ' The Zwickau Journal' titled 'The little car that couldn't find love. Printed 07 Oct 1995


ZWICKAU, Germany, Oct. 4 — With their two-stroke
 engines, they sputtered along the roads of the former
 Communist East German like souped-up lawn mowers.
They were boxy and homely. Their plastic bodies came in
 four drab colors. They were so light, a handful of college
 students could play pranks on teachers by carrying them
away to unknown spots. But East Germans had to wait 15
 years and pay more than a year's salary for the privilege
 of owning one.
This, of course, was the Trabant, a clattering, bone-rattling
 heap of socialist technology that was the principal mode
of personal transportation for almost four decades in East

 Germany and that by the fall of Communism became
despised as representing everything wrong with the system.
 .
Once East Germans had the opportunity in 1990 to buy
an Opel or a Volkswagen made in the West, orders for

more than 1.5 million Trabants fell to zero in three months.


But how things change. The Trabi, as it is affectionately
 known in Germany, has developed a cult following.
There are Trabi owners associations. There are Trabi
rallies every summer. Trabis have been turned into stretch
 limousines,

 checkered taxis, dune buggies. Owners can convert their
trabbies into convertibles for $1,300.
And for the ultimate socialist-capitalist mix, change the
 front grill,  put on some chrome trim, and you get a Trabillac.

In this town, where all the 3,096,099 Trabants were built,
 the last 444 new ones go on sale next week, at the
 equivalent of $13,600,

 nearly 20 times the original price.
Ulf Rittinghaus, managing director of Sachsenring
 Automobiltechnik,  which produced the Trabis, says
 that the Trabi sale has generated 600 inquiries, including
 one Japanese auto maker that offered to
 buy the entire lot.


"It is absolutely unsafe and terrible, but it is one
 of the nicest old legends we now have in Germany,"
 Mr. Rittinghaus said.

 "It is the last product that exists intact as it did
 during the socialist times."
Some rather strong social and emotional currents
 underlie this new love for the Trabant.
  Five years after German reunification,
 many in the east are caught in a deep melancholic
 funk in which they long for the former days when
everyone had a job, rents did not rise,
 no one was dismissed, child care was free
and food was cheap and always on the table.

Though the last five years have brought remarkable 
prosperity for many, it has not brought an even 
distribution of wealth, and many of the 18 million
 East Germans have felt the insecurity of unemployment,
  
  competition for jobs, evictions, rent increases
 and social stratification. The longing for the Trabi, 
many say, reflects a desire for the simpler life as 
they knew it in Communist times, and an attempt to
 hold on to what they see as the good things 
about the old system.
"After the war the Russians took all our automobile technology
 and equipment, literally 32,000 pieces of machinery, and we
 had to build the Trabant up from nothing," said Frank
 Bretschneider, a technical engineer in the Sachsenring plant.
 "So we have something to be proud of. The only trouble was
 the political system stopped technological development of the
car, so at the end we were producing cars in 1990
 with a 1960's design."
To be sure, sitting squeezed into the front seat of one of the
 new Trabis that will go on sale next Wednesday,
 with its thin door panels, plastic strap door pulls
 upholstered map shelf underneath the simple black
dashboard, reminds one of Volkswagen beetles of the
 early 1960's.

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