Abstract
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a small boxy car made of fiberglass and pressed cotton captured the imaginations of Germans East and West. Long the object of affection and frustration in East Germany, the Trabi quickly came to be a key symbol not only of the German Democratic Republic but also of socialist inefficiency and backwardness. In the mid 1990s, however, the Trabi reemerged as an evocative symbol of Eastern German distinctiveness and postsocialist nostalgia. A central figure in the "argument of images" surrounding the politics of German re‐unification, then, the Trabi has moved from thejokebooks of 1989 to a new status as the "cult automobile" of the late 1990s. Drawing on James Fernandez's theory of images and symbolization over time, I trace the symbolic formation of the Trabi before, during, and after re‐unification.
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