BERLIN The axles and gearbox come from a World War II tank, the engine is from the 1920s and the chassis was welded together by the farmer himself - this is the world of homemade East German tractors.

In rural parts of the now-defunct communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), many people made ends meet by keeping a few pigs or cows or by tending a small piece of land, selling any excess to the local collective.

With the large machines used on huge collective farms unavailable to these smallholders, and no smaller ones available for purchase, necessity became the mother of invention.

People were forced to use whatever they could find - rusty construction machinery, bits of old cars, old Nazi or Soviet military vehicles and even pre-war motorbikes.

The results, as photographed by Bernd Hiepe and Erasmus Schroeter between 1992-1994, are now on show at an exhibition at Berlins Museum of Technology.

The pair travelled around the country photographing dozens of people along with their bizarre-looking contraptions, some adapted to have as many as 16 foward and nine reverse gears.

“A friend of mine who took some snaps gave me a few addresses, saying you have to go here and you have to go there. It snowballed as we went from village to village, people would tell us where others were,” Hiepe told AFP.

“I thought to myself, this is a piece of GDR technological history. The technology was fascinating in its simplicity, and they worked so well. These vehicles were technology stripped down to the bare bones.”

The project, carried out just a few years after reunification in 1990, has tapped into the fascination and nostalgia some feel for the old East Germany.

One survey found that 21 per cent of the countrys 16.7 million easterners felt nostalgic about the Berlin Wall which separated them from the rest of Germany after it was erected by the East German communist regime in 1961 to stop a flood of refugees to the west.

For Hiepe the photographs are as much about the people and a lost way of life as the machines.

“People did things together. Nowadays everybody is out for number one,” he said.

“Poverty pushed people to help out their neighbours. Like in Cuba, where people still drive around in their 1930s cars, people improvise, try to make it with what there is at your disposal.”

And he said the intervening decade-and-a-half since the photographs were taken had seen the passing of a generation shaped by Cold War history.

“Nowadays you dont really see any more the kind of people that we took photos of. It was a generation that isnt really around as much these days.

Lots of them have since died,” Hiepe said.

“They would tell us their life stories as we took photos of them. As a photographer its not every day that you get so fascinated by the subjects. In this case it was exciting,” he said.

One such subject was Siegfried Goebser, a mechanic famed for being able to reel off technical specifications as easily as the birthdays of his grandchildren, and whose name was a byword for reliability.

The fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago this November and German reunification the following year sounded the death knell for a way of life led by people like Goebser and much that was cherished in the GDR - including homemade tractors.

It was no longer profitable for east Germans to farm a small plot of land, and their vehicles failed to pass muster under the strict new road traffic regulations imported from the west.—AFP