Using a “Trabant” ad in a German lesson – D Nutting 1

Working with a Trabant video-advertisement

A 5-10 minute reading, viewing and listening activity

If you are spending any time with students looking at

the “DDR”, whether they be senior students or

perhaps Years 9-10, this activity might complement a

look at the Trabant car. This 28-second advert from

1969 uses fairly simple vocabulary in short sentences.

Find a class-room set-up where you can show digital

video to students through a laptop or desktop. Look at

the short video at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWdAmh83h6s

Alternatively, and more simply, go to the YouTube website, and type into its search

box “Trabant 601 - the legend still lives”

First: Download the video to your hard disk (save as a

discrete file; see below for tips).

Here is the short monologue text of the advert. Type it

into your preferred word-processing program and enlarge

the whole text so that it fills one page (i.e. one page for

each group of students). Cut the lines up into appropriate

pieces. The forward-slashes in the text below indicate

where I chose to cut up the printed-out text into pieces.

Vier Trümpfe mit / dem Trabant 601.

Bequem für / vier Erwachsene.

Viel Raum für / Ihr Gepäck.

Wendig. / Schnell. / Ausdauernd und robust.

Ihr zuverlässiger Begleiter.

Der neue / Trabant 601

Using a “Trabant” ad in a German lesson – D Nutting 2

Step 1) Jumble the pieces of paper/card and give one set to each student group. Students are

to work together to try to lay out the text in the order they think it probably appears in

the ad. Dictionaries may help.

Step 2) On the interactive white-board (or other projection screen) play the ad for the first

time, with sound turned right down. The ad gives clear visual clues for the ordering of

the words vier Trümpfe, wendig, schnell and ausdauernd.

Step 3) Play the ad a second time, with the sound turned up. Students check their ordering.

Further possibilities:

a) You could show students a video ad for a West German car, the VW Käfer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkDhoSiagGU&NR=1

(search title: “VW Käfer Werbung einen Volkswagen müsste man haben”)

This ad is older than the 1969 Trabant ad, but it too

uses relatively simple and fairly slowly spoken

German. You could ask students to compare the

western and the eastern ad. Similarities? Differences?

Are any cultural aspects more obvious in one than the

other?

b) Students could read the Wikipedia pages on the Trabant, and among other things

see some exotic pictures of Trabis that have been extensively and creatively modified

in recent times:

(English) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant

(German) http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant_(Pkw)

Downloading/Saving the video: It may be that access to the YouTube website is

blocked in your school. Ask a computer assistant/techie or someone else in your

school for help. Ask that person also for help with software to play the downloaded

file in the classroom. If you're not allowed to access YouTube in your school, you

could download the video file at home or elsewhere. You are welcome to contact me

for advice. The VW-Käfer ad is 1:36 mins long and 7 Mb in size. I have the videos in

.mp4 format, which provides pretty good quality and can be played back on a laptop

using software such as Quicktime or the VLC player (both are free programs).

Dave Nutting, McKinnon Secondary College