East Germany's trusty socialist van still has a loyal following

The last of East Germany’s Barkas vans to come off the assembly line is now on display in a museum. But many earlier models are still going strong. Photo: dpa

The bug-eyed Barkas van was a socialist mule. There are still 3,800 of them on the road in former East Germany where enthusiasm for the old-school commercial vehicle runs high.

The van never attained the popularity of the VW transporter of hippy fame, but then again eastern Germany had little counterculture. The Barkas was, above all, the people’s workhorse.

Why the makers decided to name their van after the ancient Catharginian general Hamilkar Barkus, who was famed for his swift victories more than 2,000 years ago, is anyone’s guess.

The Barkas 1000 had a smelly, two-stroke engine like the Trabant and was available in a full range of body styles from minibus to pick-up. It was commonly used by the police, fire brigade and ambulance services.

Lucky families were able to buy secondhand versions or else they needed to persuade western relatives to lend them the 16,500 Deutschmarks needed to buy a new one for Western currency.

The Barkas was conceived at a time when eastern German engineers were determined to show that their socialist economy could compete with the West.

Production of the B 1000 started at a factory of the IFA collective in the Saxony town of Hainichen on June 14 only a few months before the Berlin Wall split the German capital in half (in 1961).

The van was shown at the 1962 Leipzig trade fair. Visitors admired a modern, light commercial van which was up to European standards in terms of low weight and all-metal self-supporting construction. It had front wheel drive and a bigger loading capacity than most vans.

Despite the primitive, fume-belching, three-cylinder engine borrowed from the Wartburg 311, the Barkas remained in production for nearly 30 years.

“In international terms, the first Barkas was on top of its tree,” enthuses Siegfried Buelow, who was in charge of Barkas assembly at the end and later worked for Volkswagen and Porsche.

Unlike the comical Trabant runabout, the Barkas found buyers abroad too and examples were sold to customers throughout the eastern bloc as well as in Belgium, the Netherlands and Sweden.

Former Barkas Werke engineer Juergen Rehm recalls that the factory put a lot of energy into developing the van. But sadly a complete revamp, the projected Barkas 1100, never saw the light of day.

Communist officials saw no need for the modernisation and only a few prototypes were built. Staff at Chemnitz University even came up with an electrified version in 1972, but the batteries took up so much space that the vehicle had only a puny payload.

The electric Barkas would have had a range of 100km between charges, while top speed was restricted to just 50kph.

With no attempts made to keep up with the times, the Barkas soon fell behind its Western rivals. Like the Wartburg and Trabant, it came to symbolise the moribund east German economy.

German Reunification saw markets in eastern Europe fall away; even a new model with a modern four-stroke engine from Volkswagen failed to save the Barkas. Demand dried up and production ceased on April 10, 1991.

A total of 175,740 Barkas vans were made and fans of the brand remain loyal to the marque. Restored examples are especially popular at car shows in the eastern German states.

One Internet forum caters to enthusiasts trying to track down spare parts. There is even an owners club in the Netherlands.

The Barkas nearly found a new lease of life in Russia after tools and machinery used to make the can were exported to that country. The boxes were sent to a plant near St Petersburg, but investors ran out of money and the project was halted in 1994. – dpa/Andreas Hummel