A Trabant appears breaking through the wall in Birgit Kinder’s East Side Gallery mural. The compact car was one of the most recognizable products of East Germany and became a powerful symbol of life behind the Iron Curtain.
The Trabant, often called the “Trabi,” had a two-cylinder engine in many versions and a body made largely from duroplast, a hard plastic material. Production limitations and long waiting periods made ownership significant for many East German families.
Kinder’s image uses the car’s familiar shape to represent movement through a barrier that had restricted travel for decades. The mural is one of the best-known works at the East Side Gallery, a 1.3-kilometer open-air gallery painted in 1990.
The mural is sometimes confused with political portraits elsewhere at the gallery. Its subject is not a tank or a Western automobile: it is the East German Trabant, deliberately chosen for its everyday connection to the people who lived on the eastern side of the border.