After the Wall II: The Fall and Rise of an Educational System

In the fall of 1990, a hit movie comedy opened to packed houses in eastern German theaters. Go, Trabi, Go!—the producers gave the film an English title—celebrated with rollicking Weltschmerz the misadventures of Georg, a hapless baby-blue Trabant 601—whose jinxed capers make him the undeniable screen successor to Herbie, the Disney VW Beetle of the 1960s. Georg stalls pitifully on the Autobahn, is shorn of his bumper in Munich traffic, is robbed of all four tires by pranksters during a camping stop, and even gets mistaken for scrap near an auto junkyard, an obvious metaphor for the DDR running out of gas—as it lurches toward unity. Go, Trabi, Go! begins with DDR German teacher Udo Struutz deciding to fulfill a long-deferred dream: his first journey to the West will be to travel from his hellhole hometown of industrial Bitterfield, the dirtiest city in all of Eastern Europe, to balmy Naples, thereby tracing the footsteps of his beloved Goethe, whose Italian Journey recorded his own (less quixotic) southern pilgrimage from Weimar in the 1780s. Herr Struutz packs his wife and daughter into little Georg, a family member for 20 years whom Herr Struutz lovingly wipes down with his own washcloth. “See Naples and Die!” scrawls Herr Struutz on Georg’s trunk, recalling Goethe’s clarion call to self-actualization: “Sterbe und werde!” (“die and become!”). The adventure turns out to be a story of Innocent Ossis Abroad and their psychological collision with the West. Numerous scenes in Go, Trabi, Go! allude to the region’s plight: putt-putting along on the Autobahn, little Georg strains to do his maximum speed of 60 mph as contemptuous Mercedes-Benzes, Porsches, and BMWs fly by; broken-down in Bavaria, Georg costs the Struutz family a steep (an outrageously inflated) price for repair, which the intrepid socialist entrepreneurs earn by charging curious Bavarians DM 5 for a “Trabi Peep Show” and a five-minute joy ride in Georg. Reassuringly, the Struutz family eventually does reach its destination, albeit with the accident-prone but indomitable Georg—now minus his top—as a breezy convertible.