trabant | just gaby stuff

Two youth subcultures helped pave the way for mod fashion by breaking new ground; the beatniks, with their Bohemian image of berets and black turtlenecks, and the Teddy Boys, from which mod fashion inherited its "narcissistic and fastidious tendencies" and the immaculate dandy look.

The regimentation of these youth, that continues into adulthood is not really conservative, but rather revolutionary: to not confine future women to an ill-defined role in the home as in the past, instead they are being educated like boys in the cult of the Fatherland, for once they become adults, they will become ideal German women.

A school teacher asks little Fritzie, "Fritzchen, why are you always speaking of our Soviet brothers? It's Soviet friends."
"Well, you can always choose your friends."

If every day a man takes orders in silence from an incompetent superior, if every day he solemnly performs ritual acts which he privately finds ridiculous, if he unhesitatingly gives answers to questionnaires which are contrary to his real opinions and is prepared to deny his own self in public, if he sees no difficulty in feigning sympathy or even affection where, in fact, he feels only indifference or aversion, it still does not mean that he has entirely lost the use of one of the basic human senses, namely, the sense of humiliation.
- Vaclav Havel

By 1969, no pay phones in the capital of Moscow were functioning because all the innards had been removed to make underground guitars.

[ “Free from the Daily Grind” ]

East German Children's Homes -- content warning for every imaginable abuse + suicide

ok but napster they're basically made of sugar #fakemechboys

What do you get when you cross a trick question with a rhetorical question?

The official GDR line during the 1960s and 1970s was that the Western feminist movement was "man-hating."

Driving the Trabant, East Germany's terrible car that will never die + 22 pages of onscreen Trabants

The GDR, which by its own definition was located somewhere between capitalism and communism, repeatedly faced the problem of reconciling economic and political objectives.

my friends found this sleeping cat in istanbul and dressed her up.
warning: image heavy