While West Germany was struggling financially to reunify with the East, I walked into my classroom and saw my adult students huddled around a desk, staring at a large book. I was teaching in a government retraining program, which existed because, after nearly forty years of communist rule, East Germans had no English ability, no computer skills, and little practical job experience.

On paper, many were technically trained, but they had never been given the proper tools or materials to work with. As a result, they were unemployable in the new, competitive market economy.

I asked what they were reading. The class leader smiled and said, "It's a catalogue, teacher." I was puzzled and asked what was so fascinating about a catalogue. He turned the book around to show me a page and said, "We never knew you could have a whole page of hammers." In the former East German Democratic Republic, there had only been one hammer. It came in a plain brown box labeled "hammer."

The same principle applied to everything. There was one coffee maker—it came in a brown box marked "coffee maker" and included two cups of coffee. Variety and personal choice played no role in communist production planning.

Even automobiles offered almost no diversity. East Germans could choose between two models: the Trabant and the Wartburg. The Trabant's body wasn't made of steel but of Duroplast, a plastic-like material pressed from recycled cotton waste and phenol resin, because East Germany couldn't afford metal.

It had a two-cylinder, two-stroke engine that belched blue smoke and produced barely 26 horsepower. The car had no fuel gauge, no seat belts, no air conditioning, and in many cases, no working heater. Owners scraped frost from the inside of the windshield in winter and roasted in summer. Some early models even required drivers to operate the windshield wipers by hand.

Everyone in communism is equal, but, as George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, some are more equal than others. For the Communist elite, there was the Wartburg, East Germany's so-called luxury car, produced in Eisenach.