In the summer of 1990 I spent a couple of months backpacking around Europe with a good friend of mine from school. As most backpackers do, we visited the usual countries in Western and Central Europe, such as England, West Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and even Sweden. But what was slightly unusual for that time was to have the ability to travel rather easily around Eastern Europe, unusual in the sense that it was possible to enter these countries without a visa or with ones that were more or less easy to acquire. This was just six months after the Berlin Wall opened up and other Communist countries of the former Warsaw Pact began falling like dominos and transforming into young democratic countries, some for the very first time and others again after many decades of Communist rule. With people now suddenly given the gift of traveling wherever they wanted to, they were streaming both west (to live and work) and east (out of curiosity), making it much easier for Americans to visit these countries, with or without a visa. To most young people today, the events of 1989 and 1990 are ancient history, and to them it’s no different than the events surrounding the Treaty of Westphalia or the Franco-Prussian War, just another batch of dates and events to learn for their high school history tests.
But by the time I visited Europe in the summer of 1990, these events were still very vivid in the minds of people around the world. One of the countries we visited in Eastern Europe at that time was Czechoslovakia, a country still recovering from its peaceful Velvet Revolution of a few months earlier led by Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček. Just a few weeks before, a ban from Communist times on playing music in the streets of Prague had been lifted by the new government led by Mr. Havel, making the center of Prague a very festive place to be at that time. Musicians of all sorts were performing throughout the city, whether it be on the Charles Bridge or in Wenceslas and Old Town Squares. Music ranging from gypsy, the Beatles, klezmer and more could be heard everywhere. Prague of 1990 was quite different than the tourist trap the city has become since then, without the hordes of hand crafts stores and portrait painters that can be found all over the city today. In addition to the music groups, other forms of art were on display such as painters, theater groups and more. One particular item stuck out for me, a Trabant car stuck atop what looked like four elephant legs (see picture above). It was difficult to imagine such a scene just a few months earlier under the Communist government, but times had quickly changed and people were enjoying a life that wasn’t available to them just a few months earlier. In fact, it felt as if the scenes of musical and artistic groups as well as the giant walking Trabant were a sort of collective middle finger to their former Communist overlords now that they were suddenly tossed into the ash heaps of history.
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Below is an East German Trabant TV commercial from the 1960s with the cinematography quality of a Monty Python sketch, not to mention having the feeling that John Cleese might pop up somewhere sitting at a table saying “And now for something completely different…”
Additional Reading:
- Trabant car listed at number 27 on Time’s 50 Worst Cars of All Time.
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