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- <text id=91TT0660>
- <title>
- Apr. 01, 1991: World Notes:Germany
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Apr. 01, 1991 Law And Disorder
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 50
- World Notes
- GERMANY
- Oh, How They Love That Trabi
- </hdr><body>
- <p> During 40 years under communism, East Germans most missed
- the freedom to travel, to see the world that lay hidden beyond
- walls and fences. Perhaps that accounts for the runaway success
- of a thin little comedy called Go, Trabi, Go, which is filling
- movie theaters across united Germany.
- </p>
- <p> The Trabi, of course, is the legendary two-stroke Trabant,
- the fume-spewing plastic jalopy built for nearly 27 years in
- what used to be East Germany. The movie stars "Schorsch," a
- baby-blue Trabant 601 that takes the Struutz family--father,
- mother and daughter--from the grimy Saxon town of Bitterfeld
- to the balmy bay of Naples.
- </p>
- <p> Along the way, Schorsch engages in a heap of high hilarity--choking to a stop on the autobahn, losing its bumper in
- Munich traffic, getting roughed up by West German car snobs,
- losing all four tires to pranksters during a camping stop,
- careening on two wheels in Rome, finally shedding its top in
- a near fatal spill near Mount Vesuvius and becoming a
- convertible.
- </p>
- <p> Such Trabulations have drawn nearly a million German
- moviegoers since the film opened in mid-January. Director Peter
- Timm used 12 Trabis to shoot what will undoubtedly go down in
- film annals as the definitive, perhaps only, Trabi film.
- Production of the valiant sputterer will end at Zwickau in
- April.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
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