Word: trabant
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...East-bloc kitsch and Trabant jokes are one thing; the reality of the D.D.R. was quite another. For this reason, even those with a highly developed sense of Ostalgie will probably, in the end, spend November in a forward-looking frame of mind. Visit, too, the Gedenkstätte in Dresden, www.bautzner-strasse-dresden.de, the still forbidding former city headquarters of the Stasi, the D.D.R.'s pervasive ministry of state security. Or take a look at Leipzig's Museum Runde Ecke, www. runde-ecke-leipzig.de, another Stasi base that is now an authentically preserved museum filled with examples of how East German society...
...legacy. In recent years, films like 2003's Good Bye Lenin!, a wry telling of reunification's effects on an East German family, have captured the imaginations of fashionable urbanites. Others have professed an occasionally ironic love for old East German aesthetics - communist-era branding, old Wartburg and Trabant cars, and vintage Praktika cameras. Rather less flippantly, the current recession has prompted mostly elderly diehards to recall the days of secure employment and income equality with fondness. Richard Stratenschulte of Dresden's Stadtmuseum says that some of the older generation occasionally look to the past because "they don't want...
...controls in 1989 after an apparatchik named Günter Schabowski announced the lifting of travel restrictions on G.D.R. citizens. At first officers tried to turn away the many thousands who congregated, pedestrians just wanting a look at the other side, and lines of olive green and turquoise blue Trabant cars. Finally the numbers forced the authorities to open the gates. Niebank's brother was among the throng and came looking for her. "There was such celebration," she recalls, "over every Trabi that drove through." (Read: "Is the Trabi, East Germany's Clunker, On the Comeback...
...global rush into green technology could be setting the stage for a most unusual comeback: the foul-smelling Trabant, the oft-ridiculed symbol of communist East Germany, all but disappeared from German roadways after the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago. But now its makers are planning to introduce a climate-saving electric version of the Trabi, as it was affectionately known...
...known - has come into vogue in Berlin recent years. Visitors to the once divided German capital can browse souvenir stores selling "authentic" GDR memorabilia; stay at the "Ostel", a hostel decorated in GDR fashion; or take a "Trabi-safari," which involves a sightseeing tour in the notoriously rickety Trabant, ubiquitous passenger car of the GDR. Just last week, former Berlin Senator for Cultural Affairs Thomas Flierl denounced as "tasteless mockery" the service that allows tourists at the old "Checkpoint Charlie" crossing between the two sides of Berlin to be photographed with actors dressed as U.S. and Russian soldiers...