Ossies better than the reaction to the Trabant, or Trabi, the People's Car of East Germany. With no catalytic converter, Trabis are an environmental menace. Made of fiberglass and pressed cotton, Trabis are also known to be rolling coffins. Getting into an accident in sub zero weather means that if you aren't killed by the impact of the crash then you're in grave danger of being impaled by Trabi shards--a frozen Trabi doesn't crumple, it shatters. And yet, for nearly forty years, East Germans strove to own a Trabant, essentially the only game in town.

The night the Wall fell, the Trabi was the star attraction, as hundreds of them rolled through various checkpoints to the cheers of West German bystanders. It wasn't unusual, in the days following the opening of the Wall, for an East German to return to his or her Trabi parked in West Germany and find a West German mark note tucked under a windshield wiper. But it wasn't long before driving a Trabi on the streets of Berlin became an invitation to be abused. Germans tend to be aggressively self-confident drivers as it is, and they do not tolerate tentativeness from others. Unfortunately, the Trabi's two-stroke engine has hesitation built into it. Where BMWs and VW Golfs zip and zoom, the Trabi lurches and sputters and smokes. Western drivers shake their heads at Trabis, curse from behind their closed windows and honk at the slightest excuse. "People here saved for half a lifetime for a spluttering Trabant, remarked Hans Joachim Maaz, an eastern German psychotherapist. "Then along comes the smooth Mercedes society and makes our whole existence, our dreams and our identity laughable."

While I lived in Berlin, I drove a Trabi. I bought it because, at $600, it was cheap, and practical for making the daily twenty-minute drive from my apartment in Berlin to the house in Potsdam. But the novelty wore off for me rather suddenly when, one morning in 1992, I came down and saw an aluminum foil wrapped package on the windshield. Inside the foil was dog feces.

While I was in Germany, neo-Nazis and skinheads began to emerge. Violence against foreigners was in the news regularly. With nearly as much regularity, determined to show that the skinheads were a minority not to be tolerated, tens of thousands of Germans joined mass demonstrations opposing the violence. In the four years after the Wall fell, Germany was not so much unified as it was frayed by the process of unification.

The house at the center of this book bore silent witness to these