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Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, one of the most pervasive media images consisted of East Germans on a frenetic, collective shopping spree. For many western Germans, as well as for much of the world, the “triumph” of capitalism and democracy seemed to be reflected and confirmed in the “consuming frenzy” (Konsumrausch) of the “Ossis” (East Germans). Although these images of consumption following the collapse of socialism were new, they were structured by and contributed to a dominant narrative of “democratization” and national legitimacy in which access to consumer goods and consumer choice are defined as fundamental rights and democratic expressions of individualism. Indeed, many observers have since suggested that the transitions of 1989 were not about demands for political or human rights, but for consumer rights (e.g., Bauman 1992; Borneman 1992; Drakulic 1991). They were also, I would add, about consumerrites—about the making of citizen-consumers.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a small boxy car made of fiberglass and pressed cotton captured the imaginations of Germans East and West. Long the object of affection and frustration in East Germany, the Trabi quickly came to be a key symbol not only of the German Democratic Republic but also of socialist inefficiency and backwardness. In the mid 1990s, however, the Trabi reemerged as an evocative symbol of Eastern German distinctiveness and postsocialist nostalgia. A central figure in the "argument of images" surrounding the politics of German re-unification, then, the Trabi has moved from thejokebooks of 1989 to a new status as the "cult automobile" of the late 1990s. Drawing on James Fernandez's theory of images and symbolization over time, I trace the symbolic formation of the Trabi before, during, and after re-unification.

This article interrogates the production of historical memory in the former GDR. It addresses the politics of memory and museum representations in terms of the ongoing complex and often contradictory struggles over the production of knowledge about the East German past, the contexts of this production, and the ways in which the struggles themselves shed light upon larger social and political processes within reunified Germany more generally. I am concerned with the politics of memorymaking and the various domains in which memory is constructed and deployed. I also consider the cultural implications and effects of such memory-making practices.

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