As the beige car approached the former Soviet barracks, the clatter of its half-century-old engine overpowered the noise of people preparing for the day’s festivities at a temporary fairground.
A man dressed in the dark green uniform of a 1950s traffic cop, with an old-fashioned leather cap, blew his whistle loudly and waved the car (a 1980 Wartburg in good condition, a classic despite of engine noise) towards the parking lot. batch.
The driver of the small sedan, once considered the Mercedes of Eastern Europe, hit the clutch, lurching the car forward. The mistake earned him a reprimand from a costumed parking attendant.
“Now you are entering the GDR,” he shouted in mock anger, referring to the defunct state of East Germany. “Leave your Western ways behind!”
For more than a decade, the GDR Museum in Pirna has hosted a May Day event in Pirna, just a few kilometers from the Czech border in eastern Germany, where people can celebrate iconic cars from the communist era .
Built after the war in state factories, the cars are smaller, less powerful and less flashy than most Western cars of the same era. But for Pirna’s excited visitors, who often wear contemporary clothing that matches the vehicles they arrived in, the polished and pampered cars embody local pride.
The hundreds of motorcycles, buses, trucks, cars and agricultural vehicles on display exuded the nostalgia that many here feel for a vanished country that, despite its oppressive dictatorship, was their home for decades.
“As a proud Easterner, I’m happy to help revive this iconic car,” said Tom Grossmann, standing in front of his lime green 1985 Trabant, best remembered for a chassis made of reinforced cardboard. “If that means there will be more cars of this type on German roads, all the better.”
Born in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, Grossmann expressed a sentiment typical in Pirna.
For years, he had despised old cars made in the East, but, in middle age, his opinion changed. In part, he was attracted to the community that had developed among the people who owned the cars.
When he bought his sedan five years ago, he paid 3,000 euros, about $3,250, but then spent more than double that to renovate his vehicle, adding a sunroof, wider tires and custom upholstery.
Uwe Röckler, 23, neatly dressed in a GDR police uniform from the 1980s, paraded among cars handing out fake parking tickets and posed for photographs with passers-by. Mr. Röckler is a stickler for details: the tickets he carefully filled out and pinned under the windshield wipers were written on an exact reproduction of the form used by the East German police in the 1980s.
“It all starts with a belt buckle found at a flea market,” he said. “And pretty soon you’ll be wearing a full uniform,” she added, noting that he had several spares hanging in the closet at her house.
For Röckler, whose parents worked hard under the communist regime, the era holds a fascination. “It wasn’t all bad, it was just everyday life,” she said. Of the East German police, which many see as one of the most obvious manifestations of a repressive state, he said: “They were actually quite good criminologists, in many ways the same as those in the West.”
May 1, formally known as the “International Day of the Struggle of the Working Class and the Oppressed Peoples of the World,” was one of the most important dates on the socialist calendar. Although it was a public holiday and no one had to work, attendance at state-organized parades was mandatory and civilian brigades of factory workers, socialist youth groups, and politicians were expected to march with banners celebrating progress and socialism.
Waiting in line to board a carefully maintained 1958 bus that would take him around Pirna, Thomas Herzog, 62, remembers well the demands of that era. “I’m here because no one is forcing me to be here,” he said, laughing.
Among those celebrating in Pirna this May Day, 35 years after East Germans last celebrated in a functioning communist state, many said the era had been plagued with problems, including restrictions on freedom of expression and travel, and that citizens lived under the yoke of one of the most restrictive state security systems behind the Iron Curtain.
But as that time fades into the past, memories of the communist country have become more attractive to many, especially as discontent with the current system grows.
According to a December poll, 82 percent of Germans nationwide are at least somewhat dissatisfied with the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz. Given that level of discontent, it’s no surprise that some people are looking back.
In eastern Germany, where disaffection is often most pronounced, many look to the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, for solutions. In the state of Pirna, Saxony, where voters go to the polls in September, the AfD wins 30 percent, more than any other party at the polls.
Conny Kaden, 60, founder of the GDR Museum, said that despite the benefits that reunification brought, there were also disadvantages.
He noted that the socialist state, in addition to offering jobs in state-owned companies, had fostered a sense of community through mandatory meetings in youth, workers and community clubs. “I’m not saying it’s about raising the GDR flag,” said Kaden. “But we lost something: we lost cohesion.”
Kaden built his museum dedicated to all things GDR in 2005 and said ticket sales have been trending upward.
The May Day car rally has also become more popular. This year, he estimated he had received up to 3,500 visitors and hundreds of cars, likely breaking last year’s record.
Some Western cars also participated in the meeting. Two customized Volvo limousines, used by the leaders of the East German regime, were parked on a prominent corner. A tape of police conversations illegally recorded in 1989 was played on a loop through the huge radio inside one of them.
Röckler, who played the fake cop who handed out fake tickets, grew up in what had been West Germany, where his family moved after losing their jobs following reunification. As an adult, he returned to the former East Germany, in part because he said his hobby of dressing up as a communist police officer was poorly understood in the West.
He also wasn’t sure his late father had fully understood.
Pointing to his carefully ironed suit, he said, “I wonder what my dad would say if he could see me wearing this.”