The new-found Love for the Cult Car Trabi by Kakapo2
Like with many things of the East, people have only started to deeply love the East?s Volkswagen when they realised that also in the capitalist western system man stands a long time with mouth open before roast duck flies in, as Confucius said, or in the actual terms of the reunification: that D-Mark and Mercedes are not just raining from the sky into every dreamer?s outstretched arms. We speak about the Trabant ? short: Trabi. This in all respects unique car ? pronounced as if spelled with double-b, and the whole world like ?Trubby? in English ? has become a prime nostalgia item. When they were the only private motorised means of transport of former GDR they were appreciated as there was just nothing else. But at least it was robust. And as the people had to wait for those plastic boxes with environment-killing two-stroke lawnmower motors for years and years until they were finally delivered the outdated cars even became a status symbol.
An enterprise named VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau built 3.051.485 Trabis between 7 November 1957 and 30 April 1991.
The Trabi jokes tell a lot about the quality of the cars. Just some?
How do you call an accident that involves three Trabis? ? A tupperware party.
Why don?t you have to pay taxes for a Trabi? ? When you buckle up it is considered a backpack.
What is a Trabi on a mountain? ? A miracle.
Today the Trabi has become a cult car and has quite a lot of fanclubs. In Berlin you can even make a tour called Trabi-Safari. Historians consider the Trabi as the symbol of the rise and fall of the GDR?s centralised economy, driven by ideology, and lack of material. The engineers had to be very inventive to build a car at all. The motor, for example, was so far behind modern development that you could not have filled it up with normal petrol but needed a mixture of gas and oil.-
Websites:
http://www.trabi.de/
http://www.trabi-web.de/index_full.html
And if you understand German, try this one with Trabi jokes:
http://www.einfach-autos.de/autowitze/trabi-witze/