Trabant
The little East German car with a plastic body, which chugged across the open border in 1989.
Photo: Chris Mitchell, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Trabant was built in East Germany from 1957 to 1991, with a two-stroke engine and a body of Duroplast, a plastic made with cotton waste. Families waited more than ten years for one.
In November 1989 columns of smoking Trabis crossed into the West, and the little car became a symbol of the fall of the Wall. Ride through Berlin in 3D ›
More in Berlin
Brandenburg GateThe neoclassical gate of 1791 crowned by the Quadriga, symbol of a divided and reunited Germany.
ReichstagThe parliament building of 1894, crowned since 1999 by a glass dome you can walk up.
Unter den LindenThe boulevard under the lime trees, from the Brandenburg Gate to Museum Island.
GendarmenmarktThe French and the German church facing each other across the square, with the concert hall between.
Holocaust MemorialThe Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe: 2,711 concrete slabs on a sloping field.
BebelplatzThe square where the Nazis burned books in 1933, now marked by a library of empty shelves under the ground.
Museum IslandFive great museums on an island in the Spree, from the Pergamon Altar to Nefertiti.
Berlin CathedralThe great domed Protestant cathedral on Museum Island, finished in 1905.
TV TowerEast Berlin’s 368-metre TV tower of 1969, with a ball that throws a cross of light in the sun.
Berlin WallThe wall that split the city from 1961 to 1989, its line now marked by a double row of cobbles.
AmpelmännchenThe little man with a hat on East Berlin’s traffic lights, saved after reunification.
CurrywurstA sliced pork sausage in curried ketchup, invented in Berlin in 1949.