By: Charlotte Aver

The Trabi is a car from the Soviet Union. They were produced from 1957 to 1991 and they were made quickly and were not solid at all.

The Soviet Union made it so that it was the only car that a person could own. The Trabi’s were free to the public if you got on the waitlist. However, it could take up to fifteen years to actually get your car after being put on the waitlist, even though it was free it still had a cost. The Trabi’s were made quickly and by hand and therefore were not sound. They were thin and fragile: the windows were hard to roll up or down, the bottoms of the cars were thin enough to break, the seats had no cushion to them and they broke down all the time. Though it was free it was bad quality and would take years to get to you.

An oversight that was made while the Trabi’s were being made was that there were no spare parts, so when they broke down there was nothing to fix them with, making the fifteen years you waited for the car useless.

The people that drove Trabi’s were everyday people where as the leaders all drove Mercedes. This goes to show that communism, which was the Soviet Union’s goal, is impossible to achieve with humans because humans are incredibly susceptible to corruption and selfish desire.

During the 1980’s there was a huge push to tear down the Berlin Wall, which happened in October of 1989. During this time there were many slogans and sayings that were used about freeing East Berlin, one of them was “free the Trabi” because it was a car that only existed on the east side of the Berlin Wall. After the Berlin Wall fell there was a section left up and artists from around the world were invited to come and paint murals on the wall; this section of wall is now known as the East Side Gallery. One artist painted the Trabi breaking through the wall and by painting this immortalized the saying “free the Trabi”.

The Trabi is a true symbol of the people of the Soviet Union and East Germany, how they lived and what little they were given by their government.