The post-war development of the automotive industry in East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) is quite a different story from that of the West. For many years after the Second World War the industry in the two halves of Germany grew in different directions. Automotive development in West Germany was aided and abetted by cash and investment from America and the Allies, while, for a time, industry of all types in East Germany suffered a certain amount of asset stripping and disinvestment. There was also a stark contrast between the state-driven production methods in the German Democratic Republic and the market-focused development in the West, which today, two decades after the collapse of the GDR, is hard to imagine. The GDR automotive industry and the vehicles it produced are explored in this book with neither political or economic biase, nor really with emphasis on the technical expertise that went into the cars' development - instead, the book celebrates the vehicles themselves. It is a pictorial documentation of over forty years of automotive manufacture in the GDR, and the most comprehensive record of these vehicles ever published.

Photographer(s): Ralf Weinreich