‘My unchristian forbears: for their whole lives / had got along without God,’ I once wrote. But not without a car, you might add. When the Nazis dreamed up the ‘people’s car’ – the Volkswagen – and encouraged Germans to invest their savings into its production with the promise of ownership, my grandfather made the contribution out of his first pay packet. He never saw the money again. The war not only consumed millions of lives, but also the credit of all those small savers. In the aftermath of 1945, one of the illusions that continued to circulate uninhibited in occupied Germany was the hope of owning a car. It was a driving force, quite a literal one, behind the economic miracle in the West.

In East Germany (GDR), the Trabant – the Communist people’s car – occupied a more peculiar place in people’s imaginations. It was born in 1957, in the shadow of the successful brands from the West – Mercedes, BMW, Porsche. A home-grown commodity that endured no competition, it was at the same time stymied by arrested development. The Trabant was an isolated invention, a one-off, that outlasted the state that produced it, just like East Germany’s iconic traffic-light men, the Ampelmännchen. In the global imagination today, Trabants are Ampelmännchen on four wheels: fetish objects from a past with no future.

The Trabant was produced in the state-owned car factory VEB Sachsenring Automobilwerke Zwickau in Saxony. It was poorly equipped with a small two-stroke engine. The special oil-and-gas mixture it required resulted in blue smoke exhaust. The true innovation of the Trabant was its body, made from a polymer called Duroplast. This was definitely a step into the future. Metal was in short supply in the GDR: the state enlisted the pharmaceutical industry to supply car production with high-strength reinforced plastics. The classic model series was the Trabant 601 (26 hp), which was produced from 1964 onward. More than 2 million of them rolled off the assembly line until 1990. It was never enough; demand far exceeded output. Automobile deprivation was a constant source of resentment among the population, who saw their dream of mobility, even within the narrow confines of the ‘socialist camp’, disappointed.