Greifswald Transportation

This is a sight to move all Ostalgics to tears: a Trabant in working order!

For the uninitiated, the Trabant is an iconic car - for all the wrong reasons! It is best summed up in the following harsh comments that TIME magazine had to offer on the Trabi ...

"This is the car that gave Communism a bad name. Powered by a two-stroke pollution generator that maxed out at an ear-splitting 18 hp, the Trabant was a hollow lie of a car constructed of recycled worthlessness (actually, the body was made of a fiberglass-like Duroplast, reinforced with recycled fibers like cotton and wood). A virtual antique when it was designed in the 1950s, the Trabant was East Germany's answer to the VW Beetle — a "people's car," as if the people didn't have enough to worry about. Trabants smoked like an Iraqi oil fire, when they ran at all, and often lacked even the most basic of amenities, like brake lights or turn signals. But history has been kind to the Trabi. Thousands of East Germans drove their Trabants over the border when the Wall fell, which made it a kind of automotive liberator. Once across the border, the none-too-sentimental Ostdeutschlanders immediately abandoned their cars. Ich bin Junk!"

For those who wish to better appreciate the Trabi's unique place in German culture, follow this link to an article about Ossi-Wessi jokes, of which the longest section is devoted to Trabis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_jokes

And if you're still up for more Trabi-stalgia, I suggest that you go out and rent the DVD of the brilliant "Goodbye Lenin", in which the Trabi order placed by the family in question plays a central part to the plot.

Whoever would have thought that a clapped out old banger parked in the corner of a Greifswald car park could be so inspirational?