East Germany’s Trabant: Crummy car and a cherished icon

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This article was published 13/11/2014 (4336 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What’s the best worst car ever made? You could hardly pick a better candidate than this, the humble, homely, slightly horrible Trabant. To the cynic, it’s a terrible car. To many folks, though, it’s a cherished icon. Why?

Twenty-five years ago, the Berlin Wall came down, crumbling away like the worn-out edifices of communism. Citizens of the German Democratic Republic (DDR), better known as East Germany, came streaming across the line in droves. They cheered their new-found freedom, even as they attacked the wall with sledgehammers and pickaxes.

It was a time of celebration, of long speeches and partying in the streets, and music blared from loudspeakers. At one point, David Hasselhoff even showed up to perform, and you have to wonder if this didn’t make most East Germans freeze in their tracks and then suddenly start feverishly shovelling at the rubble trying to put the wall back up again.

However, the partitioning of Germany was over, and East and West mixed again, for better and for worse. Yes, the Easterners now had to put up with denim jackets, hairspray, and some seriously questionable pop music, but at least the hardships of the communist regime were now over. Sort of.

In fact, the integration between East and West would take decades, and the culture shock for Easterners would be more than just getting their ears hassled by the ‘Hoff. Many would lose their jobs, having to start over from the bottom. It was a time of freedom, but also one of great upheaval.

Two years into German reunification, a factory in Zwickau finally closed its doors. It had been in operation since 1957, producing a small two-door car, with hardly any changes to the design over the years. As the last one rolled off the line, it was the end of an era. More than three million Trabants were born here, with a waiting list that before the fall of the wall had stretched to nearly two decades. Now you could hardly give them away.

In the cold light of a new day, it’s not hard to see why the Trabant was treated with such derision. Its body was made from a compound called Duroplast, which bonded together resin, ground wood pulp, and waste cotton. The engine was a 600-cc two-stroke that emitted far more bluish smoke and clattery noise than it did power.

In a best-case scenario, with a bit of a tailwind and a slight downhill slope, the 26-hp Trabant could just barely break 110 km/h. Not that you’d want to be in one while doing so. Crash-protection is practically non-existent, and the car so light that a mild cross-wind at speed could mean disaster.

It was smelly inside and out, a blend of horsehair and curing resin on the interior, and a choking fug of two-stroke hydrocarbons on the outside. If you’ve ever been at a motocross event, double the sound and the smell and you’ll get the aroma of East Berlin in the 1960s.

However, that’s just the context you have to put the Trabant in to understand why it was, in fact, excellent. Well, not exactly excellent, I suppose, but certainly adequate.

From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs: the Trabant was exactly the car that East Germans needed to get on with their lives.

It may have looked horribly outdated when the wall came down and shiny new Volkswagen Golfs started showing up, but before that they were treasured possessions. The “Trabbi” was one small element of four-wheeled freedom in a land where freedom was hard to find.

By the standards of postwar Europe, the early Trabant was actually somewhat competitive, even had the Iron Curtain been drawn back. The ’50s may have been all chrome and V8s in North America, but in the less-decadent areas of the West, people were getting around in BMW Isettas and Messerschmidt KR200s. Basically, fitting bodywork to a scooter and calling it a car was the order of the day.

Little wonder that the VW Beetle and the Mini Cooper would meet with such success. Behind the wall, however, the swinging ’60s never arrived. People needed to get around cheaply, and reliably, and cheaply, and also cheaply. They needed a staple, an automotive equivalent of the turnip — and they got it.

The original Trabant 500, or P50, launched in 1957 with front-wheel drive and an 18-hp two-stroke engine. Not great next to a Chevy Bel Air, but not too bad. Dr. Werner Lang, considered the father of the most common Trabant 601 that followed the original in 1961, came to the Zwickau factory as lead engineer in 1958, and set about making a few changes.

The Trabant 601 now had roll-up windows, 26-hp from its 600-cc engine, and a column-shift four-speed manual with full synchros. It was capable of accelerating to 100km/h in 21 seconds which is not much slower than an air-cooled Beetle.

Best of all, the Trabant’s tiny engine could be lifted out, tucked under your arm, and hauled into your state-appointed concrete apartment to be stripped down and torn apart. Even an amateur mechanic could perform simple maintenance, and there are tales of teenagers being sent out to swap out a piston ring in the same way a modern teen might be asked to take out the garbage. That is, with lots of initial whining, but the job gets done.

Dr. Lang would attempt to modernize the Trabant, but he would do so against a serious headwind. Demand for transportation was huge in East Germany, but the Trabant factory only chugged along at its set rate, creating a huge backlog of orders and a scarcity of spare parts.

“Why improve the design when the demand is there?” the party leaders asked, as they drove around in their Volvos or Citro´ns — anything to avoid an Eastern Bloc car.

In fact, the waiting list got so long, prices on used Trabants were considerably higher than new ones. The ownership cycle was also something that would be unfamiliar to Western tastes, used to buying on impulse. The average lifespan of a Trabant was just about 30 years, lavished with care and attention by their owners.

Entire families were crammed in these little boxes for holidays — a rare treat. Later, the Trabants would represent a more desperate bid for freedom, with people secreted away in hidden components trying to sneak through Checkpoint Charlie. Many wouldn’t make it.

And then the wall came down and people stopped buying Trabants. The car had outlived its useful life, and quickly became the butt of jokes.

But just as the divisions held in place by the Berlin Wall took decades to fade, even after the physical partition was torn down, the Trabant’s legacy was not so easily dismissed. It soldiered on for more than a decade as cheap transportation for those who needed it, and also found itself an unlikely folk hero.

There would be Trabant art cars, Trabants set up for rallying, a Trabant collectors’ association, Trabants that tourists could rent for a “real” East German experience. The little communist car even suffered the indignity of being part of the stage lighting on U2’s Zoo tour.

In short, the Trabant had been such a huge part of life for those in the DDR that it could not simply be tossed in the Dumpster and forgotten. Not to mention that the Duroplast body was toxic, so it literally couldn’t be thrown away.

Instead, the essence of what it represented lingers on, like a faint whiff of oily smoke out of a tailpipe. The Trabant existed in an unchanged form long enough to become completely outdated, but it is that same lack of change that made it such a constant in the lives of ordinary people.

And then, to paraphrase The Scorpions, the Wind of Change arrived to blow away all that blue smoke and whiffy Duroplast. It doesn’t matter: the Trabant’s plucky spirit soldiers on, even if most people are happy that its smell does not.

–Postmedia Network Inc. 2014