Quality Across the Wall

In East Germany, quality assurance helped make the most of scarce resources

I recently had an opportunity to learn about quality in industry in a Soviet Bloc nation, the former German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany. I was invited to dinner with a family that included somebody who worked in a cotton mill during the final decades of East Germany.

I had heard stories of the famous East German Trabant car (East Germany’s answer to the Volkswagen Beetle). I had heard about how production and economic data in the Soviet sphere of influence were often poorly collected or outright faked. I had also heard about how poor quality was in the USSR. This dinner seemed like an excellent time to learn about quality in a world that had ended before I entered the field of quality.

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the Trabant

We have friends in Germany who were born & raised in the East, were 'selected' to immigrate west before the wall fell, and now live about an hour west of Munich. They have a Trabant in the barn - I spent an hour or two looking it over. Fascinating!

Trabant means Companion

It comes from slav space language. I don't know much of East Germany or beyond Iron Curtain indusry quality, but my wife was born in Croatia when Tito was still alive, and Jugoslavia a united nation. She still points out how little, sturdy cars, like the Trabant or the Renault R4, named "Katriza" over there, were the most appreciated by the people, who didn't care much for emissions or comfort or optionals, but for traveling in Countries where public transportation took eons to move people from one village to another. I don't know what's happening in the rest of EU, but italian sales of Dacia and Tata models are dramatically increasing: like the Trabant, they may not be so fancy, but who cares, as long as they take you home, safely and cheaply?

Quality behind the Iron Curtain

My cousin was a director of a flour mill in Prague, Czechoslovakia. I had the opportunity to visit him before the wall came down. The mill had machines that were constantly breaking down. We made a trip to visit relatives in the countryside. While on the trip my cousin had to stop at a machine shop to pick up a part for the mill. The machine shop was a disaster. The car park was littered with rusting pieces of metal and the staff had a difficult time locating the part that my cousin was after. While driving away, I thought to myself that there was no doubt which side would win the cold war. No need to drop a bomb or fire a bullet.