To be fair, the Communists of East Germany did have a few successes.

Like the Berlin Wall.  That worked effectively.  At least for a while.

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Among automobiles, you might be familiar with the classic Volkswagen Beetle — a small car, inexpensive, very reliable, but also very basic. Now imagine a luxury limousine, a car equipped with the latest technological conveniences and comforts. Well, in comparison to East Germany’s Trabant, the Beetle was the luxury car.

A great Communist success?

Nope — unless you’re stuck in East Germany, where you always let the boss answer for you. Hopefully he’ll give the wrong answer and you’ll get a sudden promotion. Yes, few consumer goods proclaimed the wonders of East Germany’s industrial bureaucracy (and I could end this sentence right here) better than the Trabant automobile. The name Trabant is a Latin word which means “fellow traveler.” I suspect it reminded East Germans of the Stasi — those guys who were always following you around.

The Beetle was small. The Trabant was a foot and a half shorter and 300 pounds lighter. The Beetle looked like a beetle. The Trabant looked like a chubby armadillo whose diet lacked a few vitamins and suffered stunted growth. Nicknamed the Trabi, it had no air conditioning, no automatic transmission, no glove compartment, no carpeting, no ability to open its rear windows because they were glued shut. It had no warmth inside the cab other than a primitive heater. It had no disc brakes, no radiator, no oil filter, no oil pump, and because its fuel tank was located prominently above the engine, no fuel pump. It had no gas gauge: to check the gas you used a dip stick — or waited until a light on the dashboard abruptly flashed Empty! It had no choice of color; you got the color they gave you: factory beige, olive green, or bathroom-tile light blue. (You might think that Communist red would be fashionable, but it was too expensive.) The body was made of something called Duroplast, a compressed mixture of cotton polyester waste from the Soviet Union and phenol resins from the East German dye industry. Duroplast was light, rust-proof, cheap, and in a collision it promptly crumbled into smithereens. (“If we crash, we’re dead.”) The Trabant holds the distinction of being the world’s first car with a body made of recycled material. It sounds so environmentally friendly, doesn’t it? Too bad Duroplast is totally non-recyclable. And non-biodegradable.

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Somehow I don’t think the pretty girl compensates for the exhaust.
Still, I applaud this valiant photo attempt by www.drivinggirls.com!

Too bad the car also coughed out clouds of oily-black exhaust smoke. Plus more carbon monoxide than did the average Western car. Several times more — because the Trabant had no pollution-reducing catalytic converter. The exhaust was so poisonous, West Germans were not even allowed to own Trabants.

When the American magazine Car and Driver brought a Trabant to the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency refused to let it get driven on public roads.

Cough!  Cough!

Cough!  Cough!  Cough!

Guess what was perfuming and coloring the roads of East Germany?

Whence all that pollution? From a two-stroke, two-cylinder engine, racing up to a whopping 18 horsepower. (The Beetle had four cylinders and 54 horsepower). With the deafening roar of an angry vacuum cleaner, in reverse, it reached a top speed of just under 70 miles per hour.

“How do you measure the acceleration of a Trabant? With a calendar.” Yes, the East Germans really did tell that joke.

The engine was so light, a man could lift it out. Some Trabi owners kept a spare in the trunk. (I mean a spare engine.) Until the car was introduced in 1957, two-cylinder engines were limited mostly to motorbikes. Guess what the Trabant was originally supposed to be? A motorbike — but with three wheels. It became a four-wheel car only late in the design process. The West called it obsolete even by the standards of 1957, because by then the West’s small cars had graduated to cleaner, more efficient four-stroke engines. But somehow the leaders of East Germany just knew that their noisy little armadillo was a model of automotive perfection. And so East Germany kept on producing the Trabant — for more than thirty years, almost unchanged. (Okay, in fairness, they did add a little carpeting. Plus a couple of back fins.)

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Intimidating, huh?
Once upon a time, it really was.

That is what daily life was like in a Communist country: it was miserable, bureaucratically bizarre, and gave Western comedians plenty of joke material.

(Eastern comedians too, when they whispered.)

Furthermore, East Germany was the second-richest industrialized country in the Communist world. In the Communist world, a fact which made everything relative. Thus, despite its relative wealth, East Germany could never generate enough money to roll out a new car to replace the Trabant.

“Comrade, if the People of our People’s Democratic Republic get new cars, will their work commutes get any shorter? Nein? Not at all? Then obviously they don’t need new cars.”

Having accumulated so much practice in producing Trabants, East Germany could produce the car really fast. In East Berlin itself, your average wait for a new Trabant was only thirteen years. Maybe that wasn’t super-fast, but some lucky East Berliners waited only eleven years. For everybody else, fifteen to eighteen.

“Hey Gretchen, great news! I just registered our son for a new car!”

“But Bruno, I’m only just pregnant!”

Until that happy day, you partook of the pedestrian virtues of East Germany, while your comrades’ Trabants roared past you, churning out black smoke.

When you registered to buy a Trabant, someday in the distant future the government would mail you a letter, telling you to get ready to take ownership. If you wanted any additional features included — like a radio, or go-faster stripes — you waited another six months. When you finally got the car, you were immediately warned to tighten up all the screws you could see. Oh, and by the way, Comrade, please grease and oil all the working parts too. Enjoy! But do be careful with the car, Comrade, because if you ever require a mechanic to repair it, getting an appointment will take you two years. Really.

Duroplast is not biodegradable — but it is edible.
Want proof?  Look at the photo below.

On the other hand, the Trabant was so mechanically simple that most owners learned to fix it themselves. Fix it and improve their own situation. One owner went to an electronics store and asked the salesman, “I’d like a radio for my Trabant.” The salesman replied, “Okay. That’s a fair trade.”

Yes, it was cheap. “How do you double the value of a Trabant? Fill it with gas.”

Yet, for the average East German, the Trabant was still horrendously expensive. Worse, a used Trabant could cost you more than a new one. That’s because a used one was available right now (if you could find a seller) whereas the government’s car factories kept you waiting for more than a decade. The used car might even be nicer.

“Have you seen the sports version of the Trabant? In the trunk is a set of tennis shoes.”

In spite of all that, ordinary East Germans loved their Trabis. Why, you ask? Well, unless you got chauffeured in a Stasi police car, involuntarily, the Trabant represented a kind of freedom. East Germany was a weird Orwellian police state, calling itself the “German Democratic Republic.” The Berlin Wall was labeled the “Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier.” It sounds so safe and peaceful, doesn’t it? As though so many people were just dying to get into happy East Germany. Not dying trying to get out.

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reginald Dipwipple

Secret Agent Extraordinaire

Yes, the pig really did eat the Trabant. I’m not making this up.
But I would question the taste of that pig.