The Trabant: Consumption, Eigen-Sinn, and Movement

Fig. 1.

Child looking back from a Trabant. Taken at the border crossing, Invalidenstrasse, 16 Feb. 1990.

In 1957, at the VEB Plasta factory in Erkner on the south-eastern edge of Berlin, Rolf Weichert made a discovery. Weichert, the Research and Development director at VEB Plasta, successfully combined phenol with aniline and formaldehyde and cotton fibres to form a plastic flexible enough for use as the outer body of an automobile. This particular phenol plastic was quickly put into use as the body of the GDR’s main model of automobile, the Trabant. Weichert’s ‘Trabantmasse’, or as it came to be affectionately known ‘Trabiplast’, quickly went into production for most of the outer body of the Trabant, making it the first widely produced plastic car in the world.¹ Trabiplast, the main material of the Trabant, is the key to understanding not only the importance of the Trabant within East German or postwar German history, but also some of the more fundamental differences between the socialist and capitalist societies on either side of the Wall.

This essay explores three ways in which the Trabant was connected to the broader system of state socialism in East Germany: its status as a uniquely socialist consumer product; its place in the cultural and social everyday life of most East Germans; and its place in a broader concept of socialist planning that linked automobile usage, production and ownership to overarching concepts of traffic and getting around, or what was referred to by GDR planners as the Bewegungssystem (‘movement system’). In describing these connections, this essay will argue that the socialist system in East Germany was fundamentally different in ways that are particularly visible when the Trabant is placed in its proper context. This, ultimately, helps to illuminate the strange afterlife of the Trabant as an object of fetishized desire. The Trabant was a thoroughly socialist car and, like a ghost, lived on for a time in a world for which it was not meant. It was intrinsically so unlike the western concept of a ‘car’ that it is in fact almost impossible to assess or commemorate the Trabant simply as a car, or even in relation to the VW Beetle, without examining its context.

The use of plastic for the Trabant’s body became one of its defining features both before and after 1989, especially for westerners engaged in ridiculing it,² along with its atrocious maintenance record and notoriously weak two-stroke engine (its maximum horsepower was twenty-three).³ For many westerners, the use of plastic for the body of a car, especially a kind of plastic that was relatively outdated, exemplified the poor quality common to East German and socialist production in general. And they were partly right – a Trabant (like many other East German products) was not as high quality as most West German products, even down-market goods. But as historians working at the forefront of research on automobiles in the Soviet bloc, such as Lewis Siegelbaum, have suggested, it makes most sense to consider socialist cars in a ‘decentred’ way.⁴ That is, not to look at them as embodiments of value, but rather as having value through their place in the broader socialist society. And viewed this way, the use of plastic for the Trabant appears rather ingenious. In fact it contains three elements fundamental to how the socialist system functioned in East Germany: first, the increased pressure after the 1953 uprising and the Khruschevian ‘thaw’ to develop a parallel, yet distinctly socialist, consumer society to compete against the Federal Republic’s ‘economic miracle’; second, the fascination and idolization of technology – especially polymer chemistry; and third, what Alf Lüdtke calls the ‘Eigen-Sinn’ of workers in East Germany, which we might translate as ‘gumption’, or ‘dogged and creative self-reliance’ – the consistent and remarkable ability of the men and women who ‘manned’ the machines and factories and other quotidian levers of the planned economy to keep things going somehow or other, improvising in highly creative ways so as to plug gaps and failures within...