What’s with all the stickers?

In my seventeenth summer I spent seven weeks in what was then West Germany. I loved noticing the differences between Europe and the US. One thing I found fascinating were the stickers on the backs of the cars. “D”, F”, “DDR”, “A”, “CH”, and so on. What were they for?

I found out that they were part of the registration of the car, identifying the country of origin. Each one-, two-, or three-letter code stood for a country. I enjoyed spotting the stickers and finding out what countries they signified. “F” is France and “A” is Austria, of course. If you know some foreign languages, you can guess that “D” is for Deutschland, which is what Germans call Germany (but then why doesn’t Austrians use Ö for Österreich?).

Some of them are a little more obscure. For instance, “DDR” was for Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the official name for behind-the-iron-curtain East Germany. And “CH”? Why, Confederation Helvetica, of course, the official name (in Latin) of Switzerland.

Several years later I saw these stickers reappear on American cars. Rather than indicating legal registration, they were a special kind of souvenir. Someone with a “D” sticker on their car wanted to say that they had been to Germany. But they didn’t want to say this to everyone, or they would have gotten a sticker that said “Germany” on it. Instead, they wanted to say it in a way that only people who had visited Germany would know they were saying it. In this way the stickers became a secret emblem, in this case for the club of germanophiles.

Now these stickers are all over the place, and they’re not just for countries. You’ll see “DMB” on the cars of Dave Matthews Band fans, “OBX” for those who’ve been to the Outer Banks (Banx?) of North Carolina, and “HW” Holiday World.

Lots of people feel these stickers are snobbish, but I still enjoy finding out what they stand for. I don’t feel the need to belong to the club, I just want to know the secret handshake. So this blog is to document my findings.