Word: trabis
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Rumania's hard-line leader tries to suppress dissent by ordering a massacre, but a popular uprising drives him from office. An ugly-duckling auto, the Trabi, gets a moment of glory...
Small, snub nosed, slow and the product of Stalinist central planning, the Trabant is the ugly duckling of East Germany's roadways. The ubiquitous "Trabi" has not had its flaky Duraplast body redesigned since the first mass-production models rolled off the assembly line in 1964. Its motorcycle- size two-stroke engine coughs out more pollution than almost any other auto. Often the motor's two cylinders come on line one at a time until they sputter in unison in a puff of blue smoke, sounding uncannily like an ancient sewing machine...
...last year the Trabi suddenly became a vessel for revolution and liberty. First the car ferried cheering, champagne-drinking East German refugees to the West. Then, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, joyous citizens of the Democratic Republic stuffed themselves into their Trabis and poured through border crossings for shopping sprees and dreams of reunification. The Trabant became the car a country rode to freedom. By all rights, it should be hailed as the little engine that could. But it really can't. In this fable, the ugly duckling finds love but stays ugly...
...border towns residents complain of Trabi traffic jams every weekend as East Germans drive in for shopping. A study by Berlin's Technical University has shown that Trabants spew roughly nine times as many hydrocarbons and five times as much carbon monoxide as most other cars in Western Europe. Though some West Germans refer to the Trabi's distinctive mix of gas and oil smoke as "the smell of freedom," others are more direct. They call the Trabi the "little stinker...
...certainly isn't easy being a Trabi. Trabant jokes are now a national pastime in the Federal Republic, just as they have been in East Germany for decades. Some are flattering. "Why did Erich Honecker refuse to drive a Trabant? Because the brakes kept pulling to the West." But others simply pick on the helpless little car's shortcomings. "Why is the Trabant the world's quietest car to drive? Because your knees cover your ears...