Observations on nostalgia

Remember the Trabant, that truly terrible East German car that seemed to embody all the failings of the command economy? Fifteen years after Germans tore down the Berlin Wall on 11 and 12 November 1989, it has become a cult object. Berlin shops sell Trabi T-shirts, keyrings and die-cast models, and modish young people drive Trabis with jazzy paint jobs and souped-up engines. For 20, you can go on a "Wild East Trabi Safari" tour, driving around East Berlin in a Trabi convoy, with a guide in the lead car providing a radio commentary. At the end, you receive your "Trabi driving licence". Trabi chic is part of the current vogue for ostalgie, a tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for the old GDR and what now seem its endearing pretensions to state-of-the-art modernity.

Nicknamed "the cardboard car", the classic mustard-yellow Trabi was made from Duroplast, an unrecyclable resin strengthened by Soviet cotton-wool waste and compressed brown paper. Its two-stroke engine produced ten times as much pollution as western cars, though the accelerator pedal had a point of resistance halfway down to discourage excessive fuel consumption.

The Trabi remained in production, virtually unchanged, for a quarter of a century. There was a "de luxe" version, with such exciting additional features as a different-coloured roof, chromium-plated bumpers and headrests. There was also a convertible Trabi with the trendy name, "Tramp", a civilian version of the GDR army jeep.

When the wall came down, jubilant onlookers celebrated with the Trabi-Klopfen, an energetic thump on the car's roof. But after reunification, East Germans, who had been on ten-year waiting lists for Trabis, abandoned them in the street or exchanged them for more valuable currency, such as western cigarettes. The market was flooded with used western cars and the Trabant factory in Zwickau quickly went bust.

Yet kitsch recuperation began almost immediately, as street artists fashioned makeshift sculptures from the abandoned cars, and smart cafe bars recycled the parts as furniture.

Today, the Trabi cult is not limited to Germany. Graham Goodall, president of Friends of the Trabant UK, was fined £750 at Chesterfield magistrates' court last month for failing to comply with an order to remove 40 vehicles from his orchard. Neighbours did not share his love of communist heritage.

The latest development is an attempt by Sachsenring, a German business group formed from the ashes of the Trabi's manufacturers, to raise finance for the "Afri-Car" - a cheap, low-maintenance model for the third world, based on the Trabant. If the group succeeds, it will join a long line of car manufacturers who have foisted their obsolescent, high-polluting models on African and Latin American markets, often assisted by block purchases from developing world governments. At least in Europe and America, we can view the old rust buckets with a mixture of amusement and sentiment, safe in the knowledge that we will never have to drive the things.

Joe Moran lectures at Liverpool John Moores University

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