Andrei Pleșu: Memories about Trabant

I was, for ten years, a Trabant driver. An unforgettable experience, something between the paranormal and the metaphysical. The Trabant was a mechanical paradox, proof that the possible is stronger than the real. It had all the features of a car, but it also had, in addition, something unclassifiable, a kind of mystery, a kind of technological halo, without a direct connection to traditional engineering. Unusual was, among other things, its enormous maneuverability. Practically, you could not get a Trabant into situations without an exit. It could be pulled out of a ditch by the energetic arm of a single person, it could be held with a shoulder to prevent it from sliding on an icy slope, it could be turned, after a rollover, into a cruising position and, usually, it would start again on the road, even if it groaned with disability. If the induction coil broke, it could be replaced, up to the nearest repair shop, with the starch of a potato. Instead of a broken transmission belt, a women's stocking could be installed, and the gasoline shortage could be solved, for at least fifty kilometers, with a demijohn of strong brandy. Everything was of a durable precariousness. Capable of rising from its own ashes, of recovering after any collapse, with the tenacity of a "Terminator" made of pressed cardboard, the Trabant asked its owner only for patience, trust, and a sack of spark plugs. Any amateur could learn its secrets, while specialists were always taken by surprise by its regenerative resources.

With such qualities, the Trabant was destined to become, under communism, a true metaphor for survival. It was the tangible proof of our ability to capitalize on indigence, to make a whip out of waste, to improvise spectacularly, with an unqualifiable raw material. The Trabant demonstrated, in any circumstance, that what seems impossible can ultimately be possible, that the improbable can be a starting point. Under its sign, we had the chance to experience the rare pleasure of winning a suffocating match, started with minimal chances. We felt solidarity in the common effort towards a difficult victory. Trabant drivers spontaneously formed a club. They greeted each other with headlights when they met, helped each other, and smiled conspiratorially like the jurors of a subversion. I am inclined to say that, at least in Romania, the solidarity among Trabant drivers was, under dictatorship, the only species of mass solidarity. We were in the prehistory of civil society... But it was not only about strict survival. The Trabant was even capable of performance. From this point of view, it imposed itself as the most formidable achievement of the socialist camp: a peak of ingenuity, technical aplomb, and industrial audacity. In essence, everything in the countries of Eastern Europe had the appearance of an implausible makeshift. But the talent of some, the courage of others, imagination, humor, and the well-assimilated lesson of need managed, in happy cases, to obtain or at least to mimic success. The former communist countries, their institutions and enterprises functioned according to the Trabant model: they built on the infinitesimal, harmoniously articulating nothingness. Propagandistic demagogy, but also the anonymous efforts of people were based on the mad attempt to make a Trabant run like a Mercedes. Sometimes, on unrepeatable paths, the work succeeded. [...]

Inevitably, after December '89, I made a leap beyond the Trabant. We can hope, with some justification, for a more stylish automotive course. Bucharest is suffocated by a million cars of the most diverse extraction. The possible has become probable. Romanian agriculture is, we are told, a potential Mercedes. Likewise, Romanian tourism, small and medium enterprises, the food industry, services, dexterity in IT, etc. We can only note that local ingenuity remains as alive, as imaginative, and as efficient as it was in the past: it manages, this time, to make everything that is potentially Mercedes look like a Trabant.

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