Trabant and Beetle: The Two Germanies, 1949–89

It is sixty years since the two German republics emerged from the ashes of defeated Germany. Cobbled together from the Allied zones of occupied Germany, the Federal Republic of Germany (Bundesrepublik Deutschland; BRD) and the German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik; DDR) were promulgated on 23 May and 7 October 1949 respectively. These bland official names hardly proclaim their origins in the bitter political division of the Cold War: this is a good deal more apparent from their shorthand designations as West and East Germany. But the two Germanies were the most blatant evidence of the after-effects of World War Two on Germany and its status as the geopolitical epicentre of eastwest rivalry. For the next forty years after their not exactly planned arrivals the two states enjoyed an uneasy coexistence, determined almost entirely by the power politics of the Soviet and Western blocs but scripted by their mutual rivalries, proclaimed and implied, grand and petty.

This was a situation full of paradoxes. West Germany, whose founders saw it as merely a provisional formation pending the reunification of Germany into a single state, became the epitome of political stability and reliability in the postwar West. Meanwhile, East Germany, hastily thrust on to the political stage in response to the arrival of West Germany, was announced as a decisive new departure from Germany’s fascist and prefascist past. While its rulers always struggled to secure its national and international legitimacy, its precipitate collapse in the autumn of 1989, just as it was celebrating its fortieth anniversary, was an unforeseen consequence of the Gorbachev revolution in the Soviet Union. With the DDR having succumbed to pressures both internal and external, West Germany lived out its 1949 invocation to ‘the entire German people to complete, by free self-determination, the unity and freedom of Germany’ (Basic Law, Preamble). And the refoundation of united Germany in 1989/90 was the final act of a superpower relationship that had shaped the course of German history since 1945.

In the two essays that make up this feature, Bernhard Rieger’s ‘The “Good German” Goes Global’ and Eli Rubin’s ‘The Trabant’, HWJ commemorates these German anniversaries of 1949 and 1989 in its own way. Instead of pursuing the grand political narrative, the essays take up a less dramatic but equally prominent aspect of this history: achievement and competition in the sphere of the economy and consumption. Consumer satisfaction was integral to West Germany’s strength and stability from the later 1950s, a basis of popular allegiance to the postwar system.¹ In East Germany, by contrast, ‘the chronic dearth of consumer goods called into question the political legitimacy of socialism on a daily basis’.² Of course, this was only part of a complex of economic and social provisions in each state that encompassed more than consumer goods alone and would have to be part of a full discussion of the differences between the socialist and capitalist systems. Yet the consumer economy also offered one of the most striking means of comparing the economic achievements and public legitimacy of the two German states. Just as in the Cold-War zone as a whole, it became a sphere of overt competition between East and West – a space for demonstrating the ability of each system, socialist and capitalist, to meet the needs of its citizens and fulfill their aspirations for a better and happier life.

The car industry was not the only economic sector in which this drama of self-projection and rivalry was played out, but it was by far the most significant in the postwar economy and culture of Germany, Europe and the US. Conveniently from the point of view of historical comparison, the West and East German car industries generated two models that became exceptionally potent symbols of their respective political and economic systems, the West German Volkswagen ‘Beetle’ and the East German ‘Trabant’. These modest cars, both designed for a consumer mass market, acquired a freight of meaning in Germany and beyond that was far in excess of their ability to transport German citizens from A to B. In the essays that...