President Ronald Reagan viewed the Berlin Wall while standing on a balcony behind two panes of bullet-proof glass and uttered his famous words: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was torn down, thawing the Cold War between East and West Germany.
Then on Nov. 10, a stream of cars 25 miles long passed through Checkpoint Charlie en route from East to West Germany. Their two-stroke engines created a tremendous din, and the cars belched out an acrid smoke making the new breath of freedom almost unbreathable.
Almost all of these cars were Trabants, a small utilitarian vehicle that had come to symbolize communism.
There were nearly 3.1 million Trabants produced in East Germany from 1957 to 1990 by VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau. CNN, which purchased a Trabant to cover the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, reported there were some design tweaks in 1962 – but fundamentally the car never changed.
The name Trabant has the same meaning as the Russian word Sputnik: companion. But almost all owners referred to the car as a Trabi.
Today the “Terrible Trabant” is often vilified as being among the worst cars ever made, but during German communism, it was a status symbol. If you wanted to buy a new Trabi, the waiting period was 11 to 18 years. It cost as much as one year’s salary. Which seems pretty darn expensive, but the Trabi had an average lifespan of 28 years because if you were lucky enough to own a Trabi, you took meticulous care of it, Kyle James wrote in a 2007 story, “Go, Trabi, Go! East Germany’s Darling Car Turns 50.”
The Trabant was made of what East Germans referred to as Zwickauer rennpappe (Zwickai racing cardboard). The manufacturer would tell you that it wasn’t technically cardboard. It was made from cotton waste from the Soviet Union and resins from the East German dye industry with fibrous reinforcement. The technical name for the amalgam was Duroplast.
Duroplast is also used in the manufacture of deluxe toilet seats. And Duroplast is also edible. Many Trabis were abandoned in fields when the wall came down. Some owners returned to their cars a few weeks later only to find that most of their Trabi had been eaten by pigs or goats.
You can tell a Trabant is coming from a long way off. The two-stroke, two-cylinder engine produces a “pocketa, pocketa, pocketa” racket and a plume of noxious smoke. Imagine your uncle’s 1956 Dream Mower XT with a blown head gasket. The Trabi produces eight times the amount of carbon monoxide as the average European car, London’s The Telegraph reported.
The 26 horsepower Trabant goes from 0 to 60 in 21 seconds. Local enthusiast Josef Czikmantory says his has a top speed of 62 mph.
By comparison, the top speed of a Stasi PSzH-IV armored personnel carrier with 120 mm mortars, 100 mm antitank guns and ZU-23 anti-aircraft guns was 64 mph.
But the Trabi got better gas mileage than any heavily armed secret police vehicle. The Trabi gets about 34 mpg. That’s an approximate number because Trabants don’t have fuel gauges.
Matthew Annen is with Trabant USA. The club has 96 members. Annen estimates there are fewer than 200 working Trabis in the United States.
There’s been a resurgence lately in Trabant popularity in former European communist countries. Trabi club members give the cars NASCAR paint jobs, drop in Suzuki super-bike engines and reach speeds of 150 mph. Trabants are also made into works of art and displayed in former communist countries.
A pristine Trabant P50 at an auction in Madison, Ga., went for $25,000.
The Trabi is sacred in Bulgaria. In 2005 its National Historical Museum added a display featuring the foreign minister’s Trabant 601.
After it had been blessed by the pope.
Contact the writer: balkofer@scng.com
