Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- A fun read. It's interesting to think about the trade limitations imposed on East Germany and how those impacted daily things we take for granted.by curmudgeon22
- The 1977 GDR coffee dilemma is wellknown. Everyone had a different name for the cheap fake coffee then. Even in West Germany the prizes made people try the fake one.
But what is not wellknown to me, why both parties forbid cross partnerships, where they agreed to a longterm economic partnership.
by rurban - Excellent article. I am a fan of approximation, but this is a great moment to pause & be thankful for access to non-ersatz coffee.by shoo
- Little known fact - Vietnam modernized their Public Security apparatus in the late 1950s with help from GDR’s Stasi.
Vietnams surveillance system, population database and use of biometrics were all adopted from the GDR.
by refurb - Heh, it's funny how the article calls it an "embargo" when the west didn't sell coffee to the GDR, but when the Soviet Union didn't do it, it's just "decided".by boxed
- > West Germany attempted to isolate East Germany with the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, which amounted to a pretty solid trade embargo.
The first sentence is true, and is what I know. The second economical leg of this sentence is new to me.
Basically, Hallstein Doctrine was what "One China" politics is. The BRD assume that is is the sole legitimate (since democratically elected) government. For example, someone from east germany fleeing to west german already had the (west) germanship citizenship, no paperwork needed to get it.
However, Hallstein doctrine had --- to the best knowledge ... very unspecified reactions. Germany e.g. stop diplomatic relationships with Cuba. But not economical ties, I know that my father continued to smoke Havanna cigars (eeeek!). They stopped diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia ... but all the Winnetou Films were recorded there, and it even became a holiday destination for west germans. Also all payments continued, it was not an economical embargo.
In the case of Egypt it could be seen like that. When Egypt accepted the state-hood of east-germany, then West-Germany broke it's diplomatic ties AND stopped its economical aid. I'm not aware of it stopping buying oil from Egypt, thought.
Fan fact: there is also two inverses of the Hallstein doctrine. The first one is the Ulbricht Doctrine. That doctrine mandated that socialist countries mustn't normalize their diplimatic ties to west-germany until it recognized east-germany.
And the second inverse is that other countries only saw west-germany as the legal succession of the 3rd Reich and even the german empire. So it was West-Germany had hat to fulfill contracts of that time. Except for the reparations. The USSR took (or stole) more stuff from East Germany than the western allied forces took from West Germany. About 30% of the industrial infrastructure was removed, e.g. 11800 km of railway tracks. And even after they stopped removing the infrastructure itself, they still demanded a percentage of the production.
- I was just in Hanoi, and some of their roasters are incredible value for money.
Lots of co-fermented specialty Vietnam-grown Robusta and Liberica at incredible prices, far cheaper than what people would find from roasters that import their beans from Colombia or any of the other big coffee-growing countries.
by ValentineC - This went much further:
The GDR imported workers from Vietnam and even now there are sizeable Vietnamese communities e.g. in Leipzig.
I interviewed a few old men who fought in the Vietnam war as child soldier, for a school project I did as a kid.
Turned out: GDR did not treat this people well e.g. heavily encouraging abortion in case of a pregnancy, which was traumatic for the women.
https://www.projekte.hu-berlin.de/de/migrationddr/migration-...
by niemandhier