Go Trabi Go

Go Trabi Go is a fantastic film, and I recommend the splendid subtitled version for all German students. Georgie the car is my hero and if there was a Trabi motorbike I'd get one. The movie is very funny (as it's a comedy) yet also has some sad tear-jerking . A delight all the same.

This movie is one of my favorite films because I also come from East Germany and I like Trabis! If you don't know a Trabi: "Trabi" is the short form of "Trabant", a little car that nearly Everyone had in the GDR, even it was not very comfortable. Udo Struutz, the main character of the film, loves his Trabi, calls it "Schorsch" and treats him like a real family member. So in the first summer after the Berlin Wall has fallen he travels to Naples with his wife Rita and their 17-year-old daughter Jacqueline. Their guide is "Italienische Reise" (Italian Voyage) by the famous German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe from the year 1787. Of course their holidays are not without complications. The fact of the film that I really find fascinating is that it is not shot in a later time as other "Wende" films like Good Bye Lenin, but it is really from that time (it was shot in Summer 1990) and so it catches the real wall fall feeling - the neighbors in GDR who have now all cars from the west and laugh about Udo and his Trabi; Rita's sister and her family in West Germany who make a business out of the fall of the Iron Curtain (they rent out their caravan to refugees from Eastern Europe), or Udo himself who tries to speak Russian to the people in Rome. And I also like the music, which contains lots of styles, from girlie pop over rock to techno. I give the movie nine points.

This film was a great success in Germany in the year 1990. That was the time when the Berlin Wall and the iron curtain just fell down. Director Peter Timm was right on the tracks and could fast present this movie -with popular, mostly TV-Actors of East and West Germany. It features a East-German Family, enjoying the new freedom and following on J.F.W Goethes steps to their first holiday in Italy. An odyssey with a lot of lame jokes and not very impressive actors - like the most successful german comedies.

This is not necessarily the best movie ever made, but it is a very precise look at a weird moment in history. Mankind had been sliced in half for more than 40 years by the Cold War. Suddenly it is all over and some people suddenly feel they have a lot of catching up to do.

I enjoy watching this movie with my friends from East-Germany as they always laugh at the Struutz-family's impossible misadventures, because it reminds them of their first contacts with the west. Like cheeky Jacqueline always getting the upper hand in all her encounters with respect-less and unsuspecting boys from the west. Or Udo Struutz marveling at the beauty of a West-German public toilet. Or Rita Struutz's attempts at communicating with an Italian police officer. And of course the unforgettable Diether Krebs serving up a never ending assortment of "Trabbi"-jokes as a manic, arrogant West-German trucker. These moments reflect upon many "Ossis'" (East-Germans) experiences when they first visited the west after the wall had fallen.

If you look for a document of the times, this is probably the most truthful you will find, although some scenes are pure satiric overstatement and Jacqueline makes an absolutely unnecessary escape from her family at one point just to come up with an unconvincing song, possibly directed at starting a singing career for Claudia Schmutzler, which luckily never really took off.

Stay away if you want to learn German, however! The Struutzes speak in a very, very broad Saxon dialect which sounds very different from "clean" German.

"Go Trabi Go" is a movie that consists of two elements: It is the story of a travel, but also a comedy. The Italian landscapes and sights are shown in beautiful pictures when the trip of the Struuz' passes camping sites, nudist beaches (a new experience for the people from GDR), lakes and finally Rome. Their guidebook is a diary from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Mr. Struuz is German teacher), their car a Trabant. This typical Ossi-car is one of the funny elements. The owner of the car is the father, he loves his car (which he calls "Schorsch") and this leads to many funny moments. The main comical sources are the archetypes. All the wessi's clishés towards the ossis and vice versa are put together and packed into figures, situational humor and funny dialogues. The film has many highlights, when the society of German revue artists and comedians appear in the film (e.g. Diether Krebs telling the shocked Udo Struuz 109 jokes about Trabants). I enjoyed viewing the film and I think not only people with knowledge about the wessis and the ossis will do so, too. All in all a wonderful story about a family getting away from the ex-GDR to see how the world out there really is...