Brewing Socialism: Coffee, East Germans, and Twentieth-Century Globalization 9781800736702

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Brewing Socialism

Studies in German History Published in Association with the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC General Editor: Simone Lässig, Director of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, with the assistance of Patricia C. Sutcliffe, Editor, German Historical Institute Recent volumes: Volume 27 Brewing Socialism: Coffee, East Germans, and 20th Century Globalization Andrew Kloiber Volume 26 End Game: The 1989 Revolution in East Germany Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk Translated by Patricia Sutcliffe Volume 25 Germany on Their Minds: German-Jewish Refugees in the United States and Their Relationships with Germany, 1938–1988 Anne C. Schenderlein Volume 24 The World of Children: Foreign Cultures in Nineteenth-Century German Education and Entertainment Edited by Simone Lässig and Andreas Weiß Volume 23 Gustav Stresemann: The Crossover Artist Karl Heinrich Pohl Translated from the German by Christine Brocks, with the assistance of Patricia C. Sutcliffe Volume 22 Explorations and Entanglements: Germans in Pacific Worlds from the Early Modern Period to World War I Edited by Hartmut Berghoff, Frank Biess, and Ulrike Strasser Volume 21 The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History Edited by Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann Volume 20 The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians Edited by Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, and James J. Sheehan Volume 19 Fellow Tribesmen: The Image of Native Amerians, National Identity, and Nazi Ideology in Germany Frank Usbeck Volume 18 The Respectable Career of Fritz K: The Making and Remaking of a Provincial Nazi Leader Hartmut Berghoff and Cornelia Rauh Translated by Casey Butterfield For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/studies-in-german-history

Brewing Socialism Coffee, East Germans, and Twentieth-Century Globalization

S Andrew Kloiber

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 by Andrew Kloiber

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kloiber, Andrew, author. Title: Brewing Socialism : Coffee, East Germans, and Twentieth-Century Globalization / Andrew Kloiber. Description: [New York] : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Series: Studies in German history ; volume 27 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022019189 (print) | LCCN 2022019190 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800736696 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781800736702 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Coffee industry—Germany (East) | Coffee—Social aspects—Germany (East) | Socialism—Germany (East) Classification: LCC HD9199.G42 K56 2023 (print) | LCC HD9199.G42 (ebook) | DDC 338.1/737309431--dc23/eng/20220511 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019189 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019190 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-669-6 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-670-2 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736696

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

vi

List of Abbreviations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. “A Word on Coffee”: Coffee and Everyday Life in East Germany

18

Chapter 2. Coffee and the “Modern Comforts” of Socialism

41

Chapter 3. Bitter Grounds: East Germany’s “Coffee Crisis”

78

Chapter 4. Bread and Guns for Coffee: Searching for Coffee in Ethiopia and Angola

118

Chapter 5. Cultivating Coffee: Brewing Solidarity in Laos and Vietnam

147

Conclusion. The Taste That Remains

180

Bibliography

190

Index

202

–v–

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 2.1. “For friends of good coffee!” Moketta II—advertisements, illustrated by P. Becker (DEWAG). Für Dich 16 (Apr. 1965): 26; Für Dich 17 (Apr. 1965): 26; Für Dich 18 (May 1965): 39 (combined here). Published with permission.

54

2.2. The modern socialist woman: Electric coffee grinders, 1957. Kultur im Heim 4 (1957): 38.

61

2.3. New apartments and the East German coffee service “Drei neue Küchenmodelle,” Kultur im Heim 1 (1957): 3.

64

2.4. “Virtuous leisure,” Kultur im Heim 1 (1957): 4.

65

Tables 1.1. Raw coffee imports, 1953–1965 (in t). Source for coffee: “Einfuhr ausgewählter Erzeugnisse, 1953 bis 1959,” Statistisches Jahrbuch der DDR, Log 105 (1966): 580. https://www.digizeitschriften.de/dms/ toc/?PID=PPN514402644, accessed 30 November 2021. Source for other goods: “Wareneinfuhr ausgewählter Erzeugnisse 1955 bis 1961,” Statistisches Jahrbuch der DDR, Log 103 (1963): 554 http://www .digizeitschriften.de/dms/img/?PID=PPN514402644_1962|log103 &physid=phys590#navi, accessed 30 November 2021.

28

1.2. GDR raw coffee imports from ICO countries, 1961–1985 (bags of 132.3 lbs. of raw beans). Source: Foreign Agriculture Circular, US Department of Agriculture, Foreign Agricultural Service Washington DC, 1961–1989. https://archive.org/search.php?query =subjectpercent3Apercent22Coffee+industry+Statistics+Periodicals, accessed 3 Sept. 2020. Note: The average quoted above excludes the 1980s because by this time, the quota system (and the nonmember provisions of the ICA) had been suspended.

33

– vi –

Illustrations | vii

2.1. Introductory pricing scheme for Mona and Kosta, 1959. Note that these prices were proportional by volume. Source: DE 1 25084, Gesetzblatt der DDR, Berlin, 24. September 1959 Sonderdruck Nr. 1151. Preisanordnung Nr. 1556: Anordnung über Preise für Roh- und Röstkaffee vom 24. September 1959.

44

2.2. Per capita roasted coffee consumption in Europe (in kg). Source: Barch, DL 102/394, Lutz Roland, Petra Leopold, Ursula Krause, eds., Prognose zur Entwicklung des Verbrauchs von Röstkaffee bis 1980, Teil 1 (Leipzig: Institüt für Marktforschung, 1969), Tabelle 29: “Pro-KopfVerbrauch von Röstkaffee in ausgewählten Ländern,” 49.

49

2.3. Coffee purchasing habits by income level (percent of households purchasing given brand), 1968. Source: Barch, DL 102/394, Lutz Roland, Petra Leopold, and Ursula Krause, eds., Prognose zur Entwicklung des Verbrauchs von Röstkaffee bis 1980, Teil 1 (Leipzig: Institüt für Marktforschung, 1969), 36.

50

3.1. Coffee price per lb. in US cents, 1975–1978. Source: Research Institute of the Ministry for Foreign Trade, Berlin. BArchBL- SAPMO, DL 2/6071, Weltmarktpreise für Rohkaffee, Ministerium für Handel und Versorgung, Plannung und Finanzen (Juni 1978).

80

3.2. GDR import and export totals (in millions of Valutamarks), 1970s. Source: “Außenhandelsumsatz nach Ländergruppen,” Statistisches Jahrbuch der DDR, Log 74 (1979): 232. https://www.digizeitschriften .de/dms/img/?PID=PPN514402644_1978|log74&physid=phys260 #navi, accessed 13 December 2021. Note: data regarding import/export breakdowns not listed past 1973 edition of SJDDR.

81

3.3. Soviet and East European hard-currency debt (US$ millions). Source: Mark J. Ellyne, “Eastern Europe: Squeezing out of Debt,” SAIS Review of International Relations 5, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 1985): 173–88, 176. Ellyne’s work relied on figures from the Wiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche (Vienna Institute for Comparative Economics), Vienna, Austria.

83

3.4. Prices for roasted coffee brands in the GDR, March 1977 (in East German marks). Source: BArchB DY 30/25310, Rüscher an Günter Mittag, 17.03.77. Appendix: Vorschläge zur Neugestaltung einiger Genußmittelsortimente—Kaffee- und Kakaoerzeugnisse, 14.

85

3.5. Pricing scheme for packaged coffee as of 1 August 1977 (in East German marks). Source: BArchBL- SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Helmut

viii | Illustrations

Koziolek, Zentralinstitut für Sozialistische Wirtschaftsführung beim ZK der SED. Memo an Carl-Heinz Janson. 3.8.1977.

92

4.1. East German munitions to Ethiopia, 29 June 1977. Source (BStu, Stasi archives): BStU, MfS Abt. BCD Nr. 3292, Information zum Stand der Lieferungen von militärischer Technik und Ausrüstung an das Ministerium für Verteidigung Äthiopiens, signed by Colonel Metzler, no date, 46–48, 46.

125

4.2. East German munitions to Ethiopia, 6 July 1977. Source (BStu, Stasi archives): SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/IV/2/2033/87, Werner Lamberz, Entscheidungsvorschläge für die Sicherung der getroffenen Vereinbarung Äthiopien—DDR, 6. Juli 1977, 86.

129

4.3. ICO composite indicator prices for coffee, 1976–1981 (US cents/ lb.). Comparative analysis of world coffee prices and manufactured goods. Source: Annex II: Complete data on prices. International Coffee Organization, 17 February 2014.

137

4.4. GDR coffee imports by country (in t), 1977–1981. Source: (figures for 1977–1978) “Ausfuhr und Einfuhr ausgewählter Erzeugnisse nach Ländern,” Statistisches Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Log 74 (1980): 242–48, http://www.digizeitschriften.de/dms/ img/?PID=PPN514402644_1979|log74&physid=phys274#navi, accessed 21 July 2016; (figures for 1979–1981) “Ausfuhr und Einfuhr ausgewählter Erzeugnisse nach Ländern,” Statistisches Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Log 68 (1983): 235–46, https:// www.digizeitschriften.de/dms/img/?PID=PPN514402644_1982| log68&physid=phys262#navi, accessed 21 July 2016.

137

4.5. Average weekly household coffee consumption, 1972 and 1978 (in g). Source: BArchB, DL 102/1197, Petra Knötzsch, Die Bedarfsentwicklung bei Röstkaffee in der DDR und in den Bezirken im Jahr 1979, 30. Juni 1978, Anlage 3.

138

4.6. Average weekly household coffee consumption at the workplace, 1972 and 1978 (in g). Source: BArchB, DL 102/1197, Petra Knötzsch, Die Bedarfsentwicklung bei Röstkaffee in der DDR und in den Bezirken im Jahr 1979, 30. Juni 78, Anlage 3.

139

ABBREVIATIONS

ABI

Abteilung für Leicht-, Lebensmittel-und Bezirksgeleitete Industrie des Zentralkomitee der SED—Department for Light, Food-, and District-Led Industries of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party AHB Außenhandelsbetrieb—East German Foreign Export Company BZ Berliner Zeitung C.A.R.E. Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe CMC Ethiopian Coffee Marketing Corporation COMECON Council for Mutual Economic Aid (or CMEA) DM Deutsche Mark—West German currency DRL Democratic Republic of Laos FDGB Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund—Free German Trade Union FDJ Freie Deutsche Jugend—Free German Youth FNLA Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola—National Front for the Liberation of Angola FRG Federal Republic of Germany GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade GENEX Geschenkdienst und Kleinexport GmbH GDR German Democratic Republic HO Handelsorganisationen—East German state-owned retail chain IACA Inter-American Coffee Agreement IBC Instituto Brasileiro do Café—Brazilian Coffee Institute ICA The International Coffee Agreement ICO International Coffee Organization IfM Institüt für Marktforschung—Institute for Market Research KoKo Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung—Department of Commercial Coordination – ix –

x | Illustrations

MBL

MfA MfS (Stasi) MHV MPLA MR NSDAP NÖS NYCSE SED SPK SRV StaKo

UESP UNITA VEB VM WSLF ZIDA

Ministerium der Bezirksgeleitete Industrie und Lebensmittelindustrie—Ministry of District-Led Industry and Foodstuffs Industry Ministerium für Außenhandel—East German Foreign Trade Ministry Ministerium für Staatssicherheit—Ministry for State Security, STASI Ministerium für Handel und Versorgung—Ministry for Trade and Supply Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola—People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola Ministerrat—Council of Ministers National Socialist German Workers’ Party Neues Ökonomisches System—New Economic System New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands—Socialist Unity Party of Germany Staatliche Plankommission—State Planning Commission Sozialistische Republik Vietnam—Socialist Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) Staatliches Kontor für pflanzliche Erzeugnisse der Lebensmittelindustrie—State Controller for Vegetable Products of the Food Industry Unity of Economic and Social Policy União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola— National Union for the Total Independence of Angola Volkseigener Betrieb—People’s Own Enterprise Valutamark—East German measurement for foreign currency equivalency Western Somali Liberation Front Zentrum für Information und Dokumentation der Außenwirtschaft—Center for the Information and Documentation of Foreign Trade

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A book is the product of a sole author, but it would hardly exist at all were it not for the support and encouragement of many people along the way. I am extremely grateful to the community of family, friends, and colleagues on whom I have been able to rely these past years. First and foremost, I owe so much to Pamela Swett, without whose mentorship, patience and support this book would not be in your hands now. Thank you also to my partner in life, Chelsea Barranger, for your love, encouragement, and endless patience, as well as for reading and providing feedback on this manuscript. I am so fortunate to have you by my side for this project and beyond. Thanks are also due to Richard Wetzell and the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, D.C., for the opportunities they provided to showcase and publish my work; I am proud to have this book join their Studies in German History series. Thank you to Patricia Sutcliffe at the GHI, and to Sulaiman Ahmad and Keara Hagerty at Berghahn Books, for their extensive advice and assistance in preparing this manuscript for publication. Both of you made this experience an absolute joy. This book originated as a Ph.D. dissertation, which I completed at McMaster University in Canada. I am grateful to the faculty and staff of the History Department and Humanities offices at McMaster, especially Wendy Benedetti; Stephen Heathorn; Martin Horn; Debbie Lobban, and Tracy McDonald. I was fortunate in having the financial support needed to cover the research and travel expenses for this project. In this regard, I wish to offer my thanks to the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and McMaster University for their generous financial contributions. Some of the ideas of this book—notably elements of chapters two, four and five—appeared previously in “Brewing Global Relations During the Cold War: Coffee, East Germans, and Southeast Asia, 1978–1990,” published in Food and Modern Warfare in Germany’s Global Century, edited by Heather Benbow and Heather Perry (Palgrave MacMillan, 2019), and “Brewing Relations: Coffee, East Germans, and the World, 1977–1989,” in a special issue of Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies (17, no. 4, 2017). In Germany, I owe no small debt of gratitude to Thomas Wenzel, who offered both his home and his friendship to me while I conducted my research in Ger-

– xi –

xii | Acknowledgments

many. I miss our afternoon conversations about life, music, coffee, and politics. The staff and archivists at the Federal Archives of Germany (Bundesarchiv Lichterfelde) and the archives of the former East German Secret Police (Bundesbeauftragte für die Stasi-Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratische Republik, BtSU) were always helpful, and I thank them for their guidance and knowledge, notably Sven Schneidereit at Lichterfelde and Jeannette Madarasz-Lebenhagen at BStU. Thank you as well to the scholars in Germany who provided valuable advice and guidance during my research: Thomas Lindenberger; Andreas Ludwig; Matthias Judt. Thank you to Swen Kernemann-Mohr, owner of Bibliotheca-Culinaria bookstore in Berlin, for graciously granting access to his vast collection of East German culinary literature—and especially for the friendly conversations over coffee. Thanks are in order as well to the scholars I have met and relied on, some of whom read sections of this book, but all of whom graciously gave their time to talk about East Germany, coffee, or history more broadly: David Blackbourn; Donna Harsch; Dagmar Herzog; Katherine Pence; Christina Schwenkel; Stuart McCook. I’m grateful to Eli Rubin for his early mentorship and his continued encouragement throughout my work on this project. Thank you especially to Mary Neuberger, Heather Benbow, and Heather Perry, who provided opportunities to collaborate and publish earlier elements of this work. I would not have pursued history professionally had it not been for the mentors I had earlier in my life, who inspired me, believed in me, and gave me models to follow. At McGill University, I owe many thanks to Peter Hoffmann, who prophetically declared at the conclusion of our seminar that I was “going to be an historian,” and to James Krapfl, who made me a better teacher, and has influenced my thinking of East Central Europe in so many ways. At the University of Waterloo, Gary Bruce introduced me to the German Democratic Republic, and tirelessly encouraged me to pursue German history. Whitney Lackenbauer, Geoffrey Hayes, and Lynne Taylor taught me so much about the craft of history, and provided early opportunities to present my work and gain confidence in my abilities. Paul Malone was also influential in my thinking about German culture, and was kind enough to provide a translation of some materials for this book. Before my time at Waterloo, Jan Meier and Bill Blair both started me on the path to learning and teaching early in my life. I am grateful as well that all of these wonderful mentors have now become friends. I was blessed to have fantastic friends and colleagues in Canada and abroad, who all helped me stay motivated and focused throughout both the original project and preparing this book, whether it was helping hash out an idea or sharing laughs: Adam Blackler; Samantha Clarke; Oleksa Drachewych; Elizabeth Effinger, Curran Egan; Brittany Gataveckas; Hayley Goodchild; Scott Harrison; Mark Gulla; Kelsey Hine; Scott and Megan Johnston; Jacqueline Kirkham; Joshua Lovell; Aaron and Rebecca Malone, Grant McVey, Tim Mueller; Frank Nosic;

Acknowledgments | xiii

Andrew and Sarah Rath; Alexandria Ruble; Brian and Jen Smith; Larissa Stiglich; Shay Sweeney. Thank you especially to Julie Ault and Robert Terrell, who read parts or all of this manuscript, providing valuable advice as I was preparing the final drafts. Finally, and above all, I wish to thank my family. My sister has always had my back, even before I knew it. To my parents, Ron and Ildi Kloiber, there are no words that can do justice to all you’ve done for me. You’ve always been such selfless, graciously supportive, and generously loving parents, and I’m here today because you’ve always pushed me to chase my dreams. I love you both, and dedicate this book to you.

INTRODUCTION

S In the first week of August 1977, Rudolf M. arrived at his local grocery store in the East German town of Rötha in the hopes of restocking his pantry with his usual brand of coffee, Mocca-Fix-Gold, only to discover no packages remained on the shelves. When he asked a clerk about their stock, the employee told him that production of Mocca- Fix-Gold and Kosta, another popular brand, had been discontinued and replaced by a new product, Kaffee-Mix. The revelation disturbed Rudolf because, like many East Germans, Rudolf was accustomed to periodic goods shortages, but the outright removal of a particular product was another matter entirely. When staff were unable to provide Rudolf with any further information, he returned home and decided to write an official petition letter (Eingabe) to the local authorities. Describing his exchange in the store, Rudolf insisted that not only he but also many other coffee drinkers were astounded by this information. The abrupt changes in coffee supply frustrated him, he explained, because “now there was finally a coffee that was practical and quick to brew, as well as being flavorful, and suddenly it disappears from the market.”1 Rudolf ’s frustration in Rötha reflected similar experiences in stores across the country through the month of August as East Germans found their regular roasted coffee brands removed from circulation and replaced by Kaffee-Mix, a mixture of 51 percent roasted coffee and 49 percent “surrogate” products: chicory, sugar beet, and rye. Store staff throughout the country were unable to provide more clarity or explanation than they had for Rudolf except to say that the previously most popular brands were out of production indefinitely. These sudden changes caused mass confusion and upset across the country, inspiring thousands of avid coffee drinkers to write urgent complaint letters to industry and government officials over the following weeks. This public outcry sparked a nationwide “coffee crisis” that reached the highest levels of government, and staff in the country’s food ministry scrambled to resolve the issue. The direct cause of this coffee crisis, and the reason East German coffee drinkers like Rudolf found their coffee replaced, had occurred two years earlier in Notes from this chapter begin on page 14.

2 | Brewing Socialism

Brazil. In July 1975, a massive black frost swept through most of Brazil’s coffee-producing regions, killing nearly two-thirds of the country’s coffee trees over the course of a single weekend.2 World coffee prices quadrupled within weeks as global markets panicked over fears that existing coffee reserves would run out long before new trees could be planted and reach maturity—a process that would take up to five years. By the time Rudolf entered his shop in Rötha two years later, world prices remained twice as high as their pre-1975 levels, and East Germany was no longer able to afford new beans. The unannounced replacement of their coffee with a strange new mixture served as a reminder to East Germans of the country’s—and therefore their own—dependence on the world coffee market, a market dominated by an international quota system (which placed hard limits on the volume of coffee East Germany could purchase at the best of times) and susceptible to unpredictable changes in weather and climate conditions. Because the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had a very limited supply of hard currency (its own currency was nonconvertible, so it could not be traded on international markets), the country struggled to maintain a supply adequate for meeting the public demand. Yet the state’s attempt to stretch the supply through adulteration only angered the population. Public rejection of the coffee measures left industry and government officials once again scrambling to find new sources of raw beans that the country still could not afford. East German trade officials therefore sought alternative trading partners in the developing world, turning to decolonized, socialist-leaning states who were willing to trade directly for coffee through barter. In Angola, Ethiopia, Laos, and particularly Vietnam, East Germany sought both immediate and longer-term solutions to its coffee problems; export markets for its own finished goods; and the opportunity to strengthen its own political and economic ties to the broader socialist world through the development and expansion of meaningful partnerships. While some of these partnerships were short-lived, others evolved over the next decade and had lasting effects on the global coffee market. East German assistance, for instance, helped Vietnam launch a coffee development project in the 1980s that led to Vietnam’s rise to becoming the world’s second largest producer of Robusta coffee beans in the early 1990s. This book tells the story of how a particular commodity came to play a significant role in the everyday lives of East Germans; it explains how and why coffee—a simple, typical part of everyday modern life—triggered a nationwide crisis in 1977. Indeed, compared to the other major issues facing East Germany at the same time, such as a growing foreign debt crisis and the delayed onset of the second oil crisis, it seems that a coffee shortage ought to have been a much lower priority for the government, both politically and economically. Nonetheless, anxieties about this seemingly mundane food item spread throughout the public, industry, and government, leading to dramatic domestic and foreign interventions. This circumstance, this book argues, reveals two things: First, alongside

Introduction | 3

questions of adequate supply, certain expectations regarding cultural and social food practices, quality, and taste remained firmly entrenched in East German society to the extent that they influenced and helped determine government policy at home and abroad. Second, through its coffee agreements and projects in the developing world, the GDR played an active role in shaping the process of globalization in the second half of the twentieth century, and its contributions had effects lasting well beyond the fall of state socialism in Germany. Coffee was an odd commodity for a socialist state to have committed its scarce energy and resources to providing for several reasons. Germany’s climate does not allow for the domestic production of coffee, so coffee did not fit within the state’s ambitions of an autarkic economy. Coffee is a fickle crop, highly susceptible to even slight changes in climate that render entire batches of beans useless for consumption. For a centrally controlled economy that operated on fixed, five-year forecasts and that possessed very limited supplies of hard currency, there was a great deal of financial risk in maintaining a supply of such an unreliable good that was only available through the international market. Coffee possesses minimal nutritional value, and East Germans consumed it primarily for comfort, pleasure, and as a stimulant. East Germany’s limited industrial capacity to produce consumer goods, combined with its ideological fixation on eschewing luxuries and forms of ornamentalism, meant that early consumer production concentrated on staple goods and typically limited citizens’ access to luxuries. Finally, as a colonial foodstuff historically imported through the exploitation of colonized lands and peoples, coffee had its roots in European elite and later bourgeois civility. This legacy fit uneasily into East German communists’ commitment to anti-imperialism and their efforts to promote a modern, egalitarian socialist workers’ utopia that rejected bourgeois sentimentalities. Yet from the 1950s onward, the government committed to providing coffee for the population because, despite these drawbacks, officials believed coffee had a role to play in strengthening the state’s claims to political and cultural legitimacy. This book’s focus on a single foodstuff is a deliberate effort to demonstrate the connection between material culture and the GDR’s global entanglements. Coffee’s story in East Germany reflects a series of complex relationships, including patterns of sociability—as well as growing social tensions—between East Germans, state-civil relations, and East Germans’ deepening connection to an increasingly globalizing world. Foods (and material objects generally) are not inherently value-free; eating and drinking are personal and social practices through which people form and express identities with the choices they make about what and how they eat. In turn, these identities inform and reinforce broader cultural values from which social relationships can be built.3 Foods and foodways can also reveal the structures and flows of power—for instance, by examining how the imposition of national wartime rationing measures can lead to a renegotiation of public political power.4 In East Germany, coffee came to

4 | Brewing Socialism

be associated with a host of social and political meanings and values through which East Germans could form and express their own identities and social relationships. The state likewise tried to impose its own meaning onto both coffee and everyday life—meanings that, as this book discusses, the population both internalized and contested. The meanings that came to define and surround coffee in the GDR were not all new, nor even unique to East Germany; many were borrowed and transformed from earlier ideas about the beverage, dating back to its first appearance in Europe in the seventeenth century. In present-day Germany, coffee belongs to a category of foods known as Genussmittel—a term used to describe both stimulants and luxuries or delicacies. When it first appeared in Europe during the mid-sixteenth century, coffee was initially regarded as a strange, foreign substance fit only for use as a medicine, and its eventual identity as a vital element of everyday life was anything but preordained. Indeed, coffee’s emergence within the culinary traditions of European consumer society was “less revolutionary, and more evolutionary,” relying on people gradually adopting a taste for both the beverage and the changes in urban sociability taking place around them.5 Coffee first appeared in Venetian markets as early as 1624, from there spreading to the Netherlands, England, France, and the Habsburg Empire by the mid-1660s. The German states—still a loose configuration of over three hundred independent kingdoms at the time—encountered coffee later than their neighbors, with the first recorded commercial shipments of the beverage occurring in 1669, forty-five years after those in Venice.6 The first coffee houses appeared in German lands in the final decades of the seventeenth century, at roughly the same time as those in other European states.7 Yet these sites were still sparse, and coffee remained an expensive drink in German territories, consumed only in noble houses, until the early eighteenth century.8 Beginning in 1711, coffee was served at a coffee house in Leipzig, renamed Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum (At the Arabic Coffee Tree), which continues to serve guests fresh coffee to this day.9 The drink was so popular that Johann Sebastian Bach chose coffee as the focus of his 1732 Coffee Cantata, a comedy in which a spoiled daughter declares to her father that any potential suitor would first have to “present [her] with coffee!” if he “wish[ed] to please [her].”10 Several factors contributed to Germans’ slower adoption of coffee drinking. Generally, in most states, Germans drank beer or wine at public events during the eighteenth century.11 Coffee’s origins outside of Europe meant the beverage met with uncertainty and occasionally suspicion, which slowed the drink’s expansion through the German states.12 Politics, as well, created barriers to coffee drinking. By the mid-eighteenth century, German princes had gained considerable authority and power in their kingdoms, and coffee drinking’s rise in prominence threatened their tax revenue, particularly in beer-producing states. Increasing the tax rate in Prussia only led to coffee smuggling. In response, Frederick the

Introduction | 5

Great imposed a ban in 1777 on the sale, trade, or brewing of coffee in all states under the Prussian crown’s control, even deploying “coffee sniffers” to investigate suspected coffee smugglers. Frederick’s ban failed to curb coffee drinking, however, as people found better ways to hide their beans, and the ban was lifted by 1780.13 The imposition of these very prohibitions, sparked by a concern over taxation revenue and coffee’s potential disruption of the beer economy, demonstrate the extent to which people had “naturalized their experiences with coffee.” Furthermore, not only did the prohibitions fail to slow coffee consumption; by restricting the beverage, the state authorities drew more attention to it, increasing its novelty and desirability, ultimately opening the way for its gradual spread into new classes of people. Because coffee remained too expensive for most people to afford, the introduction of coffee surrogates helped facilitate coffee’s adoption by the lower classes.14 Coffee’s popularity continued to grow in Germany, though consumption often differed greatly between regions and class. By the turn of the nineteenth century, coffee was more common in northern German regions, but generally limited to Sunday brunches or entertaining guests, rather than part of a daily routine, whereas coffee featured regularly in servants’ daily rations in the southern states of Westphalia, Hesse, and Saxony. Most farmers, however, still drank mostly tea and ate porridge with their morning meals.15 Even so, regardless of region, coffee remained a drink consumed primarily for socialization and conversation—for relaxation—within bourgeois circles and had not yet made its way to the common people. The industrial revolution facilitated coffee’s emergence in the everyday lives of the working class, in particular as a drink that could increase sobriety and alertness in urban workforces.16 As larger populations migrated into cities, women— at least, women in the upper classes, with leisure time—started meeting in private groups for coffee, and while these casual meetings came to be known as Kaffeeklatsch (“coffee gossip”) by male detractors, they also offered women a socially acceptable means to discuss politics as they were prohibited by custom from participating in similar discussions in public houses.17 Through the industrial revolution, coffee finally became more accessible to the broader public as factories began to offer coffee in their canteens in an effort to keep workers alert, stave off hunger, and encourage sobriety on the factory floor.18 Yet workers still typically relied on the far less expensive ersatz or Malzkaffee (a sweetened form of chicory substitute in Germany), produced by the Kathreiner Malzkaffee roaster in Magdeburg as early as 1908.19 Coffee brands with higher caffeine content, or those offering richer flavors, remained expensive and a symbol of social status—or a very important occasion, like a holiday or family celebration.20 By the twentieth century, coffee was an established part of everyday life. In part, it was precisely coffee’s association with the everyday that provided the impulse for the East German government’s early financial and political investments in coffee drinking. East German communists claimed that through socialism—

6 | Brewing Socialism

the combined effects of a command economy and international solidarity—coffee had been made more accessible for everyday workers and less exploitative of producers, thereby becoming successfully disentangled from its past association with bourgeois elite culture and colonialism. I argue that state planners deployed these claims as a means to legitimate both the East German state and society by suggesting that drinking coffee in the present linked East Germans to an older, well-established European cultural activity. At the same time, making coffee more available could not necessarily disassociate it from notions of relaxation and leisure, which could seem anathema to a state fixated on an ideology of productivist labor. Whether among aristocratic elites’ afternoon coffee circles, or inside the early coffee houses, coffee was historically something one paused to enjoy, something intended to stimulate socialization and discussion. Even when coffee entered the worker canteens of factories, it was consumed primarily during formal breaks from work. Coffee’s story in the GDR is interesting precisely because the official imagery and rhetoric concerning both its substance and the cultural practices related to its consumption, in fact, encouraged its association with relaxation and leisure—its use as a stimulant for productive work appeared more often as a secondary, if useful, benefit. In engaging in similar practices, East German citizens partook in and perpetuated a European culture and identity that remained palpable but was now supposedly bereft of its more troubling legacies. Coffee’s “emancipation” from its past—and its association with leisure—served to reinforce the state’s claims that it was improving living standards and meeting the consumer expectations of its population. Additionally, coffee’s scarcity in Germany for the first few decades of the twentieth century—brought about by two world wars, political and economic strife, the Great Depression, and strict rationing policies by various governments—also proved useful for the ambitions of East Germany’s Socialist Unity Party (SED). East German planners believed that the return of this beverage and its related cultural practices would not only give the population a sense of stability but would strengthen the government’s message of socialism’s capacity to deliver a high quality of life—a vital goal in the GDR’s broader Cold War struggle with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). At its Fifth Party Conference in July 1958, the SED issued a series of sweeping policy changes that saw the official end to postwar rationing and a new concentration on consumer goods production through the Seven Year Plan (1958–1965). At that conference, party chairman Walter Ulbricht declared that the “main economic task” of the GDR was now to overtake West German per capita consumption by 1961.21 Living standards generally improved throughout the 1960s as the supply of staple goods like bread and meat were more widely and consistently available, but alongside these developments, coffee also became increasingly visible, both through advertisements and imagery in print media, and as the state’s efforts to improve the supply of roasted coffee blends intensified during the decade. When the SED changed

Introduction | 7

leadership in 1971, the new party chairman, Erich Honecker, declared the new “principal task” of socialism and heralded the GDR’s supposed entry into a new phase of “real existing socialism.” During the 1970s, government policies prioritized meeting the consumer needs of the population over industrial production while avoiding any perceived abandonment of Marxist-Leninist principles and criticism of consumption.22 Meanwhile, East Germans’ increased access to coffee over the previous two decades reinforced expectations of its continued availability, especially in light of real existing socialism. Culturally, coffee had ceased to be considered a luxury good and now occupied a space alongside other staples of everyday life for most East Germans. By the 1970s, coffee drinking had become part of an official discourse about a modern, socialist “living culture,” promoted as a foodstuff to be enjoyed alone or with peers and as a symbol of one’s participation in a modern society, one in which socialism had allegedly achieved social equalization and unity.23 Coffee drinking, in other words, was not only compatible with a modern socialist utopia but, in fact, aided in its construction. If East Germans were to be successfully convinced of this vision of a socially equal, modern utopia, however, they would require regular and consistent evidence of socialism’s alleged benefits, especially access to the desirable foodstuffs they had been promised. By committing to supplying the population with coffee and encouraging its consumption for enjoyment, the state created a set of expectations that politicized the beverage in the eyes of the public. The state’s capacity to meet these expectations was always challenged by both the limits of the planned economy as well as the constraints imposed by an ideological fixation on currency.24 The government’s inability to maintain a steady supply of consumer goods challenged its political legitimacy at several key points in its history (for instance, as early as the 1953 uprising, during which—among calls for free elections and civil liberties—the population demanded the reversal of a 40-percent hike in consumer prices and investments into consumer goods production).25 By the 1970s, many shoppers had grown accustomed to frequent shortages and a lack of variety in consumer goods (such as limited size variation in clothing); nonetheless, the coffee crisis of 1977 sparked particular, acute, and immediate reactions from East Germans across the country, which reflected anger and frustration at a state that—even more than thirty-five years after World War II— seemed unable to maintain a supply of what many considered such a staple of everyday life. Yet coffee’s importance lay in more than simply its availability on store shelves.26 In an environment in which East Germans could—and inevitably would—compare their own material lives to those of West Germans and one another, coffee led to a crisis of both economics and culture. East Germans understood that their material living standards did not compare with those of West Germans, a point of contention to which consumers pointed during the coffee crisis when they complained about the adulteration of “their” coffee despite

8 | Brewing Socialism

similar actions not taking place in the West. The coffee crisis arose out of fears about supply shortages, yet it became a national matter “of the utmost political importance” because of coffee’s association with notions of quality and perceptions of social inequality, which the crisis exacerbated.27 As the public’s reaction to the changes in coffee supply demonstrated, planners neglected the extent to which consumers’ perceptions of value prioritized quality. East Germans expected more than merely the ability to drink a cup of coffee every day; they demanded a coffee that consistently met their flavor expectations; they would not tolerate a product whose taste did not appeal to them. Furthermore, the crisis highlighted growing social inequalities that by 1977 were becoming increasingly apparent to most East Germans. Although their complaints mostly targeted officials in government, industry, or retail, consumers’ concerns about coffee often reflected personal anxieties about their relative social position and perceived inequalities that—under state socialism, they had been told—were not supposed to exist. With the most common retail brands of coffee either adulterated or removed from store shelves, the only places one could find alternative coffees were specialty stores like Delikat, Exquisit, or Intershop. These retailers either charged prices far beyond those of “normal” retailers, or they required payment in hard currency—that is, convertible foreign currency, which until 1974 had been illegal for East Germans to possess—placing these brands out of reach for most East Germans.28 Many felt that a reduction in the quality of “their” coffee (that is, the coffee they could consistently afford to purchase) forced them to compete with wealthier citizens over perceptively better tasting coffee, which belied the state’s claims to social equality under socialism. Despite media portrayals of coffee drinking as a “German” activity, the beverage itself originated in far-away lands and was never truly German; coffee thus tied the GDR to the world market and defied the regime’s attempts to limit its reliance on the capitalist West. In many ways, the Cold War determined the rigid structures of power in which East Germany could maneuver and created the very domestic crises it faced. As well, East and West Germany’s political rivalry came to embody a microcosm of the global ideological war being fought between the two superpowers: the Soviet Union and the United States. When West Germany introduced the Hallstein Doctrine in 1955, it attempted to isolate East Germany from the international community by claiming the sole right to represent Germans on German soil and threatening to cease diplomatic and trade relations with any nation (save the Soviet Union) that recognized East Germany.29 Until the two German states signed the Basic Treaty in 1972, which nullified Hallstein by granting East Germany official recognition, the GDR’s options for trade partners were extremely limited, leaving East Germany to spend most of its diplomatic efforts seeking—though not receiving—international recognition. This book considers East Germany’s foreign policy goals on their own terms, and what the nation’s pursuit of those goals reveals about how the GDR saw itself

Introduction | 9

in the world, as well as how it contributed to the processes of globalization. The GDR’s success or failure in foreign policy did not begin and end with Hallstein and the Basic Treaty; the GDR pursued other, specific goals by fostering meaningful relationships with countries around the world, including cultural and educational exchanges, trade agreements, and even long-term development projects that had lasting effects on global systems of exchange. The coffee agreements discussed here illustrate that, in spite of challenges, the GDR was ultimately able to find alternative sources and develop lasting partnerships. The example of coffee and the trade agreements it spurred suggests the need to move beyond binary interpretations of Cold War relations, in which relationships between East Germany and its partners in the developing world are understood primarily in terms of their role within a larger geopolitical struggle between capitalism and socialism. Certainly, East Germany’s involvement in the developing world formed part of a broader exercise that sought political and ideological partners who could be brought onto (or encouraged to continue on) the path to socialism in an attempt to build an international socialist movement. Yet the work here suggests there was often more at play in the GDR’s foreign endeavors than merely bringing additional countries into the global communist fold. To this end, this book joins a growing body of literature in seeking to challenge an interpretation of Cold War relations that is still dominated by high-level politics and geostrategic interests. The metanarrative of global bipolarity has traditionally emphasized the global contest of power balances. This is limiting and actually presents a false understanding of the relationship between the superpowers and “middle” or marginalized actors. Instead, interpretations of the Cold War could benefit greatly from considering the conflict as occurring within the context of increasing economic, political, and, indeed, cultural globalization. The politics that determined and delimited the GDR’s options for securing coffee sources were the byproduct of superpower geopolitics inasmuch as both capitalist and socialist camps competed for allies and trade partners in the developing world broadly, and the international bodies controlling the coffee market (such as the International Coffee Organization, or ICO) were themselves Cold War enterprises. Competition with the West also certainly lay at the center of why the East German state worked so hard to provide its population with coffee. However, the politics that sent East German diplomats and technical specialists to the developing world to bring back Angolan, Ethiopian, Laotian, and Vietnamese coffee were also deeply domestic. East Germany’s competition in a cultural war with the West hardly constituted its sole ambition in international affairs, and its trade agreements with Angola, Ethiopia, Laos, and Vietnam demonstrate the GDR’s capacity to cultivate bilateral agreements to resolve domestic issues. Decoupling the GDR’s foreign relations from a strictly bipolar interpretation permits a more nuanced examination of the individual goals, successes, challenges, and outcomes of East Germany’s engagement with the developing

10 | Brewing Socialism

world. What the East Germans considered a success or failure in international diplomacy could often have less to do with the international balance of power than it did with pursuing these more finite sets of ambitions in specific regions.30 Hoenik Kwon also argues against a uniform characterization of the Cold War, noting that “the bipolarized human community of the twentieth century experienced political bifurcation in radically different ways across societies” that defy a single narrative. The Cold War was “a globally staged but locally diverse regime of ideas and practices.”31 Put another way, while humanity experienced and lived the Cold War in a global moment, this experience was not universal or consistent.32 In its search for additional coffee sources, the GDR approached countries with socialist governments (or those with socialist leanings) that either already produced coffee, such as Angola and Ethiopia, or possessed the climate necessary to cultivate it, such as Laos and Vietnam. Whether the GDR had existing relations with the given country or forged brand new relationships with them, East Germany claimed its proposed trade deals would benefit all parties mutually. The East Germans believed that a shared ideology would foster a desire for international solidary among its partners, and that each country would be willing to barter coffee in exchange for GDR finished goods to fill gaps in their local economies; this second assumption stemmed from a goal of finding export markets for East German goods, which the GDR found challenging by this time. In reality, the coffee agreements required a great deal of difficult negotiation between the partners and were guided as much—if not more—by practical considerations as by a commitment to a shared ideology. The East German technological specialists sent to assist in the trade projects in each country brought with them a set of beliefs and assumptions about science and technology, and socialism’s ability to harness both effectively—beliefs that often guided their perceptions of their hosts and the nature of these trade and development projects but that did not always match the realities they faced on the ground. The GDR found that its trade partners had their own interests as well and were not always willing to accept its terms of exchange, leaving coffee-starved East Germany little choice but to capitulate. In other cases, implementing longterm projects posed several practical challenges, many of which originated in certain assumptions among East German technical experts about the supposed superiority of European scientific agricultural practices, which did not match local circumstances. Some of these challenges derived from the view among some East German officials that the GDR was the senior partner in these arrangements, believing that East Germany’s position as an advanced industrial nation gave the GDR not only the ability but also the ideological, moral, and political imperatives to guide “less developed” nations toward development along socialist lines. At times, this paternalistic attitude prompted coffee-producing trading nations to call the GDR’s claims of solidarity with the socialist world into question. Thus, although coffee can help reinsert the GDR into a global history of

Introduction | 11

the twentieth century, scholars must take care to not overly “romantici[ze] East German rhetoric of anti-imperialist solidarity.”33 Despite these challenges, East Germany and its partners were able to find ways to cooperate in the short or long term, which brought coffee to East Germans and had direct effects on the local economies or political situations of its trade partners. The relations between socialist and nonaligned nations during the Cold War should be examined in ways that acknowledge and try to understand their complexity, including the confluence of competing political and economic interests, cultural and social differences, and preconceptions of the various parties. This book grapples with a central duality of East German foreign relations. On the one hand, the GDR’s entanglement with the global economy was primarily defined as a struggle to work within the constraints of the capitalist global market when the country lacked a convertible currency.34 In this sense, the government sought alternative sources of coffee to shield itself from the effect of capitalist globalization. On the other hand, these coffee projects also provided a means for East Germany to circumvent the global capitalist system—either finding or creating new sources of coffee across the world to fulfill the needs of domestic consumption, thereby securing greater political stability. The coffee projects in Angola, Ethiopia, Laos, and Vietnam constituted an attempt to disentangle the GDR from that framework by creating socialist alternatives to capitalist globalization. Forming partnerships in the developing world served far more than an economic end; these relationships formed an important part of the SED’s attempts to improve the GDR’s image on the global stage, as well as to convince East Germans of their vital role in an international community. Coffee provided an opportunity for collaboration between these countries, demonstrating that relatively marginalized nations found ways to maneuver the complicated geopolitical and economic circumstances brought about by both decolonization and the global Cold War conflict. The coffee projects in Laos and Vietnam could also help stabilize the SED’s domestic political legitimacy. Public messaging in East Germany promoted the coffee agreements with Angola, Ethiopia, Laos, and Vietnam as strong symbols of international solidarity among socialist nations and the GDR’s lasting commitment to the principle of mutual benefit in its dealings with these nations. Demonstrating solidarity with the developing world could provide a counterweight to the incongruities of consumer supply by showcasing the GDR’s capacity to guide “young” nations and take a role in shaping the course of socialist development in the coffee-producing countries. East Germans formed their own conceptions of the global divisions of the Cold War world and, furthermore, the GDR had its own ambitions, self-image, and approach to what constituted “socialism.” The book is organized in a manner that reflects both specific themes but also follows a general chronology. Chapter one begins by examining the culture of shortages within the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR, showing the lengths

12 | Brewing Socialism

to which East Germans proved willing to go to obtain this highly desirable good. State officials in the newly formed GDR saw peoples’ reliance on the black market as a challenge to their political authority and legitimacy. Finding a way to supply coffee to the population—even during a time when this task would prove difficult—was a way to demonstrate the new regime’s capacity to stabilize the economy and daily life. When food supplies stabilized and rationing ended in 1958, the regime undertook an extensive reconstruction of its coffee roasting industry, specifically to introduce and increase the supply of “East” German coffee. However, the GDR still relied on an inconsistent world market for raw coffee, and the chapter discusses some of the structural barriers East Germany faced in securing beans—notably the signing of an International Coffee Agreement (ICA) and the founding of the ICO in 1963. The second chapter explores the messages and visions that comprised official portrayals of coffee as an important part of a comfortable, modern life in a socialist state. In the GDR, images and articles in state-run periodicals blended traditions of hospitality with modern socialist values, drawing on a “usable past” to promote a bright socialist future. These images fostered and encouraged East Germans’ perceptions not only of what they should come to expect from socialism but of what was expected of them, drawing on what Katherine Pence and Paul Betts call a “patriotic vernacular” of German culture and tradition.35 The greater emphasis on consumer socialism in the 1970s reflected a “social contract” between the state and citizens—a bargain struck by a government that increasingly understood the intimate ties between its political legitimacy and meeting the consumer demands of its population.36 When the regime publicly committed to maintaining a constant supply of desired consumer goods under its 1971 policy of “real existing socialism,” it further cemented the perceived links between the supply, quality, and fair distribution of coffee and the SED’s political stability. Chapter three traces the effects of the severe Brazilian frost of 1975 on the price of coffee worldwide, and the East German coffee industry’s attempts to stretch supply through the latter half of 1977. Industry leaders, bureaucrats, and political officials each viewed the shortage as a serious issue with far-reaching political ramifications, but it took some time before the government was aligned on a solution. It was clear that state administrators recognized the importance of coffee in helping avoid public panic as East Germans faced growing anxieties about broader economic crises in the late 1970s. Even at the highest levels of government, officials were unwilling to force the public to go without coffee altogether and committed to stretching their supply as far as possible in the hopes that the world price situation would abate in time to permit a return to regular trade by the following year. Yet efforts to maintain a sufficient supply ultimately sacrificed taste and quality over availability. As chapter three argues, to understand both East Germans’ vehement reaction and the regime’s response, it was not merely a question of sufficient supply but rather one of quality that prompted

Introduction | 13

East Germans like Rudolf to express their outrage over changes to what they considered “their” coffee. Chapters four and five explore the GDR’s attempts to secure coffee from decolonized countries in the developing world. The GDR attempted to use the coffee deals to showcase its own achievements as a modern state and thereby assume a leading role in guiding developing nations toward constructing a socialist modernity. In Angola and Ethiopia, the GDR provided weapons for coffee, while contracts with Laos and Vietnam led to long-term development projects to “modernize” each country’s coffee industry. Coffee provided the parties on both sides of these agreements with a means to address their own specific concerns, assigning a degree of agency to both parties that is largely absent in current historiographical analyses of smaller nations during the Cold War. The GDR invested heavily in these developing countries’ coffee industries, sending technical equipment along with agricultural and technical experts to help these countries meet East Germans’ import needs. The GDR’s lack of hard currency meant it approached these agreements with a considerable amount of pragmatism and self-interest but also required compromise and collaboration with its partners. While East German society experienced a number of important shifts over its forty-year existence, many cultural traditions remained in place, particularly with regard to food and eating practices, highlighting continuities in East German society with the broader German past. Coffee shows that in the GDR, despite the government’s attempts to foster a new set of cultural values based on a commitment to the collective, ideas regarding individual sociability remained largely tied to interpersonal relationships and expectations regarding social behavior that stretched back decades before the GDR’s founding. Coffee highlights the regime’s willingness to draw upon traditions when convenient—to link its visions of socialist modernity with themes and practices familiar to Germans. Indeed, the official messages in advertising and policy regarding coffee aimed precisely at encouraging Germans to recognize how, despite all the changes around them, the simple pleasures in life had not disappeared. East Germans could still enjoy a warm cup of coffee in the same ways to which they were accustomed while state planners worked to ensure that East German coffee possessed a consistent smell, taste, and appearance—effectively reinforcing the public’s association of particular labels with specific tastes and encouraging their expectations that those aromas and flavors would remain consistent over time. In other words, continuities not only remained in place but were in fact part of the ideological, political, and cultural fabric that made up East German society: coffee was political and personal. The state’s inability to maintain that consistency over time—and, indeed, its deliberate adulteration of that quality during the coffee crisis of 1977—contributed to growing public concern about the viability of the socialist project. If the regime could not provide so basic an item as coffee, how could it claim

14 | Brewing Socialism

to uphold, much less speak of improving, living standards for its people, which formed the primary basis upon which the success of socialism’s legitimacy rested? Brewing Socialism qualifies and complicates our understanding of the importance of East German consumer culture not only for the regime’s own political and social stability but also for East Germans’ own self-consciousness within a globalizing economy. To East Germans within the government, industry, and the general public, questions of personal taste mattered, memories of the past mattered, and international reputation mattered. Coffee proved an important catalyst for the GDR’s activities in the developing world, but this engagement stemmed from more than merely the need to acquire a particular good: it was East Germans’ own personal taste preferences, mixed with state planners’ misconceptions and misjudgments of these taste preferences, that sparked this need in the first place.37 Although the trade deals themselves abruptly ended with the GDR’s collapse, they nonetheless represent large-scale development projects that, beyond bringing coffee into the GDR, contributed to East Germans’ understanding of the GDR’s place in the world, its international reputation, and East Germany’s own self-image. Because some of these coffee development projects in fact led to broader economic and social change in the host countries that expanded after 1990, coffee helps remind us of East Germany’s role in shaping global economic developments, as well as highlighting its lingering legacy, particularly in those countries in which it invested so heavily.

Notes 1. Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv [SAPMOBArch] BArchB, DY 30/25310, Bericht an Genossen Hermann Pöschel: Leicht-, Lebensmittelund Bezirksgeleitete Industrie. 19.08.77, Anlage 1, Eingaben, 2. 2. Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971–1989 (Munich: Econ&List, 1998), 171. 3. Marsha Richins, “Special Possessions and the Expression of Material Values,” Journal of Consumer Research 21, no. 3 (1994): 522–33; John Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Christine Du Bois and Sidney Mintz, “The Anthropology of Food and Eating,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 99–119; Yonatan Mendel and Ronald Ranta, “Consuming Palestine: Palestine and Palestinians in Israeli Food Culture,” Ethnicities 14, no. 3 (2014): 412–35, 414; Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), 13; Melissa Caldwell, ed., Food & Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009), 3. Some scholars have also considered the role of food in the formation of national identity, arguing that food is often used by national movements “as a means of asserting the uniqueness of their nation while, at the same time, placing it on par with other

Introduction | 15

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

nations, which, it is perceived, have unique food cultures,” (Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta, Food, National Identity and Nationalism: From Everyday to Global Politics [New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016], 4). More broadly, Arjun Appadurai explored the meanings assigned to commodities through cultural understandings of a given society (e.g., politics) to complicate the idea that a commodity’s value is determined solely through the process of exchange. See Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3–63, especially 20–24 and 56–57. Mintz, Sweetness and Power; Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Alice Autumn Weinreb, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Brian Cowen, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 2. Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), 66. Bremen’s first coffee house opened in 1673, for instance, following ones in Amsterdam (1665) and Paris (1671), and just ahead of cafés in Venice (1683) and Vienna (1685). See Morris, Coffee, 66. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants. Trans. David Jacobson (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 79. See also Günter Wiegelmann, “Das Eindringen des Kaffees in die Werktags- und Festmahlzeiten,” in Alltags- und Festspeisen in Mitteleuropa, ed. Günter Wiegelmann and Barbara Krug-Richter, 157–75 (Münster: Waxmann, 2006), 166. Hans-Joachim Schulze, ill. Frank Wahle, Ey! Wie schmeckt der Coffee süße: Johann Sebastian Bachs Kaffee-Kantate in ihrer Zeit (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1987), 3. Quoted in Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How it Transformed the World (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 33. Schulze, Ey! Wie schmeckt der Coffee süße, 6. Ibid., 8. Wiegelmann, “Eindringen,” 167. Ibid., 167. Ibid., 171. Britta Zietemann, “Germany,” in Coffee: A Comprehensive Guide to the Bean, the Beverage, and the Industry, ed. Robert W. Thurston, Jonathan Morris, and Shawn Steiman (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 201. Joel Shapira, David Shapira, and Karl Shapira, The Book of Coffee & Tea, 2nd ed. (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1982), 23. Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 38. Monika Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum: Kaffeekonsum in beiden deutschen Staaten (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), 87. On chicory’s use as a substitute, see Karl Hartl, Wie? Wann? Wo?—Wie das Alltägliche zum Alltäglichen wurde (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1949), 58. During the early twentieth century, argues Schivelbusch, “the family that drank genuine ‘bean coffee’ assumed higher status than those who drank ersatz coffee” prior to the 1950s; see Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise, 79. Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 33. Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 66–69. While the topic of consumer socialism will be discussed further in chapter two, a sample of relevant discussions can be found in Ina Merkel, Utopie und Bedürfnis. Die Geschichte der Konsumerkultur in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999); Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, eds.,

16 | Brewing Socialism

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008); Rubin, Synthetic Socialism; Zatlin, Currency of Socialism. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 3. Gary Bruce, Resistance with the People: Repression and Resistance in Eastern Germany 1945–1955 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Christian F. Ostermann, Uprising in East Germany 1953: The Cold War, the German Question, and the First Major Upheaval behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Central European University Press, 2001); and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Armin Mitter, and Stefan Wolle, eds, Der Tag X—17. Juni 1953: Die ‘Innere Staatsgründung’ der DDR als Ergebnis der Krise von 1952/1954 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1995). Merkel, Utopie und Bedürfnis; Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: East Germany Between Productivism and Consumerism, 1948–1961 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Albert Norden to Honecker, 28.6.1977, 111. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 252. Helga Haftendorn, Coming of Age: German Foreign Policy Since 1945 (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 126; William Glenn Gray, Germany’s Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949–1969 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Oscar Sanchez-Sibony makes this point regarding the Soviet Union, arguing convincingly that scholars need to look beyond the global contest of power to understand the USSR’s foreign ambitions, which could more often be motivated by specific regional, economic, and political interests than they were by the Soviets’ struggle against the United States or the capitalist West more broadly. See Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khruschchev (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Sanchez-Sibony is not alone in this regard. Recent works have begun to ask similar questions. See, for example, Tobias Rupprecht’s study of cultural exchange between the Soviet Union and Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s from the perspective of the Latin Americans: Tobias Rupprecht, Soviet Internationalism after Stalin: Interaction and Exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Elizabeth Bishop argues that Soviet intents and plans for development policies cannot be taken at face value but must be understood by examining the “back channels” of cultural exchange between the Soviets and their partners. See Elizabeth Bishop, “Assuan 1959: Sowjetische Entwicklungspolitik—die Perspektive der ‘Gender-History,’” in Die Sowjetunion und die Dritte Welt: UdSSR, Staatssozialismus und Antikolonialismus im Kalten Krieg 1945–1991, ed. Andreas Hilger, 67–81 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2010). On economic relations between the Soviets and the developing world, see Sara Lorenzini, “Comecon and the South in the Years of Détente: A Study on East-South Economic Relations,” European Review of History: Revue Européenne D’histoire 21, no. 2 (2014): 183–99. Hoenik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 6, 32. In a similar vein, Young-Sun Hong’s comparative study of East and West German humanitarian projects shows that “local events” were not merely a side stage for the proxy wars of the global cold war. Rather, many local events “signify something beyond [themselves],” and are “capable of mediating between the global logic of superpower rivalry and local conflicts, which are implicated in this rivalry, but which cannot be reduced to it.” Her work calls for scholars to “situate the space of German history—and that of Eastern Europe more generally—on a much larger global canvas.” See Young-Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 319. Hong, Cold War Germany, 320. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 167.

Introduction | 17

35. Pence and Betts, Socialist Modern, 14. 36. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12. 37. I use the term “developing world” in this context, a contemporary term deployed by East German state officials both in private correspondence and in public messaging. The term is, of course, loaded and implies a set of problematic assumptions that have historically been used to categorize nations according to comparative levels of (capitalist) economic development, often in an attempt to distinguish between “modern” and “not quite modern” countries. In so doing, this approach tends to reinforce and reproduce settler colonial narratives that place nations into an arbitrary global hierarchy rather than study them on their own terms. My use of the term in this book is intended to merely reflect the language used by contemporaries, who, as the book argues, also reproduced some of these same narratives, whether intended or not.

Chapter 1

“A WORD ON COFFEE” Coffee and Everyday Life in East Germany

S On 2 September 1954, the East German state newspaper Berliner Zeitung published an anonymous letter from an East German shopper complaining about coffee. “A few days ago,” it stated, “our housewives discovered that suddenly” different types of coffee had appeared on the shelves of state retail stores, each offered at a different price. The newspapers contained no information about these new products, the letter quipped, so the arrival of these different kinds of coffee had been disorganized and caused confusion for shoppers. Not all stores carried all three varieties, the letter claimed, and retailers apparently received no information about the products ahead of time, leaving them unable to answer customers’ questions.1 While the writer described the arrival of new coffee as “a generally welcome step,” the changes felt like a half-measure because they were implemented “too early and without the necessary care,” which undermined the effort. Expanding the variety of coffee was premature because the GDR could not yet “guarantee a continuous supply” throughout the country. Instead, the author suggested that the Ministry of Trade should “temporarily stay clear” of coffee and only begin offering multiple varieties “when our foreign trade situation allows enough coffee to be imported for the entire GDR” without having to rely on coffee imports.2 The letter highlights both the importance consumers associated with coffee, as well as the challenges East Germany faced in procuring and supplying it at that time. The population was still recovering from the devastation of World War II and the subsequent occupation, and rationing measures continued throughout the country into the 1950s. Consequently, promises of a stable food supply could provide hope for East Germans, but only if they had reason to believe those promises would translate into real food on their tables. Coffee Notes from this chapter begin on page 35.

“A Word on Coffee” | 19

proved to be a highly desirable good in the immediate postwar years because its historical association with prewar comfort and tradition imbued it with a high degree of cultural, economic, and (ultimately) political resonance. Government planning officials recognized this cultural significance and hoped providing coffee would be a relatively inexpensive, easy way to help calm public anxieties about economic uncertainty. They were not merely acquiescing to public demand but seeking to provide the population with bean coffee—an endeavor that came to be bound to the project of building socialism more generally as it exemplified the state’s capacity to stabilize a centrally controlled economy, helping it to earn the public’s trust in that economic system. In turn, the state’s efforts effectively reinforced the public’s growing expectations for bean coffee, and—especially as East Germans witnessed growing prosperity in West Germany—access to coffee became a barometer for East Germany’s broader economic, social, and cultural health. To provide this coffee, East German planners had to overcome two challenges. First, the government needed to restore and improve its industrial capacity to process and roast beans, capacity it had lost to the war and reparations. Second, as Cold War anxieties and tensions mounted around the globe, the GDR’s increasing diplomatic isolation placed hard limits on the volume and quality of beans it could import. Those same tensions made the state’s attempts to provide coffee more important because, although the government could—and certainly did— deploy state power and violence to reinforce its political authority, its claims to that authority were also tied to its own repeated messaging about socialism’s capacity to improve living conditions and solve a wide variety of social ills. As East Germans witnessed explosive economic growth in the West, their own material lives appeared to fall behind, and the state’s promises of a better future under socialism appeared increasingly hollow. This chapter examines the East German government’s efforts to supply the population with coffee as it sought to harness the hope coffee represented to a population struggling to come to terms with destruction and occupation while experiencing profound political, economic, and social transition. It also positions East Germany’s need for coffee within the broader context of competition with the West and dependence on global markets. Coffee was a resource, a fuel as politicized as oil—and the international trade system that controlled its global distribution was a construct of the Cold War, no less influenced by the geopolitics of containment than the maneuverings of the superpower military alliances. East Germany’s promises to fulfill domestic desire for coffee relied on an international system of trade that it was poorly equipped to navigate; yet, as this chapter shows, the state did indeed remain committed to this aim, regardless of how challenging it became, and managed to overcome these challenges to fulfill—at least partially—these promises.

20 | Brewing Socialism

Coffee after War: Scarcity and Illegal “Schwarzkaffee,” 1945–1954 It is difficult to imagine that many Germans would have any particular concern over coffee in 1945, living under occupation following their country’s utter defeat in World War II. Between the devastation wrought by Allied bombing raids, missing or dead family members, the pillaging and mass rape committed by occupying forces—especially in the Soviet occupation zone—and daily struggles to secure basic needs, most Germans had far more immediate and pressing concerns.3 Yet coffee became a highly sought-after commodity in the rubble of all German occupation zones, including the territory that would become the GDR. This demand was driven by a number of factors, including coffee’s physiological effects—mainly its ability to keep one alert and to stave off hunger for a short time, the comfort that a warm cup of coffee could provide in the aftermath and devastation of war, and the economic value it was assigned through its scarcity. In fact, coffee had been scarce since World War I when the British blockade prevented the importation of beans.4 By the terms of the Paris Peace Accords following that war, Germany lost access to coffee-producing colonial territories such as Tanzania. Hyperinflation in 1923, together with trade embargoes, created hard barriers to trade on world markets, a situation that only worsened under the economic constraints of the Great Depression.5 After seizing power in 1933, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) moved quickly to orient the economy toward mobilization for war, prioritizing heavy industry and agricultural production for military need and reducing the public’s ability to afford many consumer goods.6 Meanwhile, an official fixation on achieving economic autarky meant that, in order to be selfsufficient, Germany continued to use surrogate (Ersatz) products to fulfill domestic needs; consequently, much of the coffee available in the Third Reich relied on black market trade and still consisted of chicory-based substitutes.7 During the war years and especially under occupation, real bean coffee was considered a luxury and possessed “an air of exclusivity” that “became a gauge for normality in the public consciousness.”8 Thus, the coffee shortages of the post-1945 period reflected continuity with shortages and surrogate products stretching back over the previous three decades. In terms of coffee, the GDR inherited shortages that remained rather than ones that materialized; there was no Stunde Null for coffee in Germany. The motivation to maintain a consistent supply of coffee in the GDR lay in the rubble of these years and was intimately tied to memories of shortage, uncertainty, and the power possessed by a single cup of warm coffee to bring a moment of reprieve for those fortunate enough to imbibe its contents. The Allied occupation forces tightly managed the distribution of foodstuffs by establishing their own regimes of rationing in their respective zones. These rationing systems prioritized immediate basic needs, and Germans could at best hope for a small allotment of substitute coffee in their ration packs. Access to real bean coffee remained tightly controlled and could only be obtained with a special

“A Word on Coffee” | 21

permit and at a regulated maximum price.9 Despite the living conditions and the scarcity of coffee, Germans in fact put considerable effort into obtaining this humble brown bean. A cup of coffee could offer a “remedy” to the many “shocks” they were facing amidst the destruction of war, a moment of calm and serenity, and the promise of a future. For Germans seeking coffee’s comforts, however, finding sources proved extremely challenging. To some extent, the Allies’ rationing systems provided relief. In the Western zones, the private American aid organization C.A.R.E. (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe) began distributing aid packages to Germans under their authority in 1946. These “C.A.R.E.” packages, comprised of materials donated by American citizens, were an important source of basic supplies for Germans in these zones and “almost always contained a ‘standard’ two pound bag of real coffee.”10 The Soviets provided a limited number of aid packages as well, but in contrast to Western C.A.R.E. packages, Eastern residents could only receive Soviet packages if they had connections in the West. To obtain a package, a resident was required to write to friends or family abroad and instruct them to send a payment to a Swiss holding firm. Furthermore, the packages were subject to almost complete state control. The packages traveled to the Soviet zone via closed transport to the Berlin warehouses of the SED’s welfare organization “People’s Solidarity” (Volkssolidarität, from which these “SOLI” packages derived their name).11 The uneven manner in which foodstuffs, let alone coffee, were distributed throughout occupied Germany frequently exacerbated shortages. Unable to secure desired goods legally, many Germans turned to illicit activities such as trading on the black markets to fill the gap. As recent scholarship has shown, Germans had in fact been participating in an active black-market economy since the late 1930s in reaction to the shortages brought about by Nazi Germany’s extensive regulation of goods.12 In 1940, the state introduced new rationing laws aimed at combating the “harmful behavior” of “war profiteers and hustlers” who “contributed significantly to the collapse of the home front” during World War I. Berlin’s public prosecutor specifically cited the illegal trade of tobacco and coffee as particularly “harmful” to the Volksgemeinschaft.13 Coffee’s scarcity and desirability gave it a high degree of economic power, contributing to its use as a currency, not unlike cigarettes. American soldiers’ monthly rations typically contained about 453g of ground roasted coffee, as well as coupons to purchase up to 1.81 kg more. Soldiers could use these allotments to purchase “mementos” on the black market.14 Soviet soldiers, too, traded goods like cigarettes and coffee they could then use to barter on the black market.15 Some soldiers engaged in even more illicit activities. British military officials complained in 1948 that pilots allegedly sold their planes’ supplies during the Berlin air lift, including coffee and tobacco, on the city’s black markets “to obtain Marks to enable them to have a night out” in the city.16

22 | Brewing Socialism

Yet fluctuations in both the price and availability of foodstuffs meant that even the black markets provided little stability. Black markets were inconsistent in their offerings and prices, which undermined state attempts to stabilize economic exchange; this meant they were sites of “constant insecurity” that “promoted a culture of mistrust” among Germans.17 Bartering on the black market required customers to adapt quickly to constantly changing circumstances. To avoid being tricked into paying an unfair price, customers had to be able to immediately distinguish “genuine” or “authentic” products from imitations.18 This dynamism often changed existing meanings and values assigned to particular goods, causing many Germans to reconsider what terms like “necessity” or “luxury” meant in this new context. Constant changes in supply and demand could mean goods considered a staple or necessity one day could become a luxury item overnight, a process that also reflected “individual privation and desire.”19 A strong desire for coffee could make one a target for exploitation by profiteers. A report in the daily newspaper Berliner Zeitung warned readers of a man who approached city residents and “took cash in advance” for bacon, coffee, and other scarce goods and then simply “turned and fled.”20 If illegal trade constituted a common practice of everyday life in Germany by 1945, the growing insecurity and “culture of mistrust” to which it contributed nevertheless posed a serious problem in terms of restoring some semblance of order. Authorities worried in particular about the black markets’ move into public spaces, fearing that trading “[would be] seen as a symptom of a comprehensive process of disintegration.”21 These concerns, combined with fears of postwar inflation and the growing tensions between the Allied powers, prompted the Western Allies to enact a currency reform on 20 June 1948 in the Bizone.22 In response, occupation authorities in the Soviet zone, together with the newly formed SED, announced their own currency reform on 26 June. The reforms in both zones were bids for power and control—the Western Allies deliberately pursued their reform only in the Bizone (rather than a pan-German reform) to block Soviet influence over the rest of the German economy, and the Soviets reacted in kind. Yet the reforms were also genuinely about trying to stabilize economic activity by restoring faith in legitimate exchange. Introducing a new Ostmark (Eastern Mark) helped stabilize prices and expectations of exchange in the Soviet zone. The SED also used the reform for another political benefit: controlling the rates at which the old currency could be converted served to redistribute wealth from the beneficiaries of National Socialism to those the SED deemed more deserving.23 Although the currency reforms did slow black market trade in the West, coffee remained on the list of rationed goods in the East, keeping the commodity too expensive in the Soviet zone to obtain legally. As a result, many Germans continued to seek out illegal “black” coffee (Schwarzkaffee as it came to be called).24 Hoping to further combat illegal trade by offering material goods, Soviet officials

“A Word on Coffee” | 23

introduced a state-run retail chain, or Handelsorganisationen (HO), in November 1948. As they were designed to improve citizens’ access to goods in an egalitarian way, the HO stores and restaurants offered foodstuffs and industrial goods at “free” prices: that is, prices that were set just above the ration-card costs and just below black market prices, attempting to undercut both alternative sources of goods.25 Through the HO, the Soviet authorities also hoped to eliminate illegal trading and absorb the “surplus” purchasing power of Germans who could afford to buy goods at black market prices.26 HO stores were primarily intended to offer basic foodstuffs, but state planners, in their early discussions, called for some Genussmittel, including 25 to 50 tons of coffee.27 The decision to include coffee in these stores aimed to work around the lack of hard currency in the Soviet zone and its successor state after 1949, the GDR, because dividing up what little real bean coffee was available among the entire population would provide each German with only a negligible quantity.28 Instead, HO planners felt it prudent to prioritize select individuals, namely, the (male) “activist” workers who achieved particularly high levels of production, to motivate other workers to follow their example and earn “achievement wages.”29 Yet, because prices were not substantially lower than those on the black market, the HO struggled to compete with illegal trade.30 To prevent black marketeers from purchasing goods to resell at a profit, the HO stores charged an excise tax on Genussmittel, levying one of the heaviest of them—966 percent—on coffee. These prohibitive taxes also served to unofficially distinguish between goods the SED considered to be “basic staples” and those it labeled semiluxuries, or goods East Germans could expect to have to go without.31 Despite improvements to the supply of other material goods in the HO stores, coffee remained either unavailable or unattainable into the 1950s, forcing coffee drinkers to continue to rely on the black market. Thus, contrary to the state’s aims of democratically “leveling” society, “the system of consumption embodied by the HO was actually rife with hierarchical categorizations.”32 Illegal trade in coffee rose in the newly formed German Democratic Republic with increasingly brazen incidents.33 By April 1949, the Berlin police had reportedly seized 84 t of foodstuffs alone, including luxuries like 30 t of sugar, 38 t of coffee, and 1.3 million cigarettes.34 By the founding of the GDR, then, the humble coffee bean posed a number of problems for state officials despite—or precisely because of—its special status as a Genussmittel. Coffee challenges the story of the black market as a desperate zero-sum game. Recent scholarship indicates that Germans came to purchase as much black market coffee as legal coffee by 1950, a parity that suggests citizens actively sought out coffee in whatever form they could acquire it and were less concerned with the source than with obtaining the beans.35 Possessing minimal to no nutritional value, coffee was important on account of its properties as a stimulant and its ability to provide some pleasure in an otherwise chaotic and

24 | Brewing Socialism

uncertain postwar world. Food scarcity, hunger, and starvation became part of the intimate experience of defeat and occupation in Germany.36 In an urban landscape covered in rubble, Germans often lacked adequate—especially safe, dry, and warm—shelter, which deprived many of sleep, leaving them overly tired and distracted in their day-to-day activities. Under these conditions, drinking coffee could temporarily mitigate the pangs of an empty stomach or increase alertness. For those who could obtain it, a cup of hot coffee also may have meant being able to enjoy a brief emotional respite from the trauma of their postwar material and emotional environments. Obtaining coffee nonetheless remained difficult for average East Germans unless they benefited from privileged positions within industry or had connections in the West. Although coffee was hardly a national priority at this point, planners made some tangible efforts to provide workers with coffee, particularly around the holiday season. In November 1952, district councils received instructions from the Free German Trade Union (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, FDGB) related to a special operation entitled “Sonderaktion Kaffee” (Special Operation Coffee), slated for 1–10 December. The FDGB claimed that the operation was designed to supply “all wage earners” in the GDR with a special allotment of roasted coffee “of at least 125g.” District HO stores were responsible for distributing coffee to workers directly, though recipients were prioritized according to a detailed list of types of “wage and salary earners” and “freelancers.”37 By timing this operation so close to the Christmas holidays, state planners tacitly acknowledged that people expected to be able to enjoy coffee as part of their annual family gatherings, as tradition demanded. Providing a special allotment demonstrated the state’s power through its capacity to provide for its people at precisely a time when such an action would be most visible and appreciated. The Sonderaktion Kaffee formed part of “an early symbolic ritual marking transition from postwar privation to future abundance” under socialism, which also aimed to counter images of abundance in the shop windows of West Germany.38 Meanwhile, ranking recipients reminded workers of the rewards for hard work and loyalty to the building of socialism and confirmed the special status—and political power—of coffee. Yet the FDGB’s ranking of beneficiaries could also have contributed to social division as workers lower on the list watched those higher up receive their allotments before them. Economic planning in the first half of the 1950s prioritized heavy industrial production—primarily for reconstruction efforts and reparations payments to the Soviet Union. The government’s policies regarding food production focused on staples like bread, meat, dairy products, and vegetables. In 1952, East German farm production reached 91 percent of its 1936 level, though consumer demand remained difficult to manage for some time.39 At the Second Party Congress of the SED in July 1952, Party Chairman Walter Ulbricht proclaimed that the party’s new initiative was to “construct socialism” throughout the GDR. The policy

“A Word on Coffee” | 25

implemented a new economic structure, including the expansion of collective farms and a 40-percent increase in industrial production quotas.40 While the policy was promoted as a great new step in the GDR’s history, associated with economic growth, stability, and a bright future for all East Germans, in reality it aggravated workers, who saw little in these measures that benefited them. The increased production norms were not met with corresponding increases in wages, nor could workers see the results of these quotas as the empty store shelves attested to continued material deprivation. Frustrations over stagnant living standards caused thousands to emigrate to the West over the following year.41 Perceiving the opportunity for better job prospects, greater material wealth, and political freedom, many East Germans chose to flee to the Federal Republic through West Berlin, leading to a mass exodus (Republikflucht) of nearly 3.5 million East Germans to the West over the course of the 1950s, most of whom represented the GDR’s youngest professionals.42 Joseph Stalin’s death in March 1953 marked a clear turning point in Soviet policy regarding economic priorities and consumption in the USSR and throughout Eastern Europe. The interim leadership in Moscow introduced a “New Course,” a policy aimed at pursuing a more moderate approach to socialism. The SED also adopted the New Course, pulling back on some of its recent agricultural appropriations and easing some agricultural production requirements.43 Nevertheless, the regime’s commitment to the New Course appeared inconsistent as the State Planning Commission (Staatliche Plankommission, SPK) dramatically cut back on commodity investments from DM 41 billion to 38.2 billion, removing goods like fruits and vegetables, meats, butter, cocoa, and coffee.44 The policy changes made absolutely no mention of the hated industrial production norms, which led directly to a revolutionary upheaval throughout the country on 17–19 June 1953. In cities and towns across the GDR, an estimated one million people participated in the uprising, and protests occurred in approximately seven hundred cities by the end of the first day.45 Citizens’ demands prioritized an immediate reduction in production quotas, a cut in consumer prices by 40 percent, and free elections.46 Soviet armed forces quelled the uprising, but the episode sent a clear signal that the people wanted genuine improvements to their daily lives—concerns the state needed to address moving forward. Improving the supply of foodstuffs like coffee was one way the government could try to demonstrate its commitment to the New Course. With basic staples becoming more widely and consistently available, state planners finally felt able to expand the supply of luxuries in the hope that doing so would provide a visible sign that the state was not only committed to improving living conditions but could deliver on this promise. Indeed, coffee was one of the first luxury items identified as a priority under the New Course. In March 1954, the Ministry for Trade and Supply (Ministerium für Handel und Versorgung, MHV) warned the Minister for Foreign and Inner German Trade that with both Easter and Jugend-

26 | Brewing Socialism

weihe celebrations approaching in April, “the supply for the population is not secured. Since 27 February 1954 hardly any coffee has been available for purchase over the counter in retail shops.”47 The memo’s linking the supply issues to these two important holidays reveals the extent to which planners understood coffee’s cultural significance. Citizens would be hosting family gatherings related to both events and expected to be able to serve their guests coffee as a matter of course and tradition. Coffee’s absence from these gatherings could thus spark renewed discontent and distrust among the population. This memo was also revealing for what it did not say. Its claim that coffee had been unavailable “over the counter” (über den Ladentisch) in retail stores for a month invoked a specific turn of phrase that referred directly to legal purchases of coffee. In describing the shortages in this way, the MHV indirectly warned of the political problems of coffee being purchased “under the counter,” and therefore beyond the state’s control. The continuation of black market trade in this luxury was intolerable to officials like Curt Wach, the Minister for Trade and Supply, who called this situation “unsustainable” and urged his subordinates “to do whatever is necessary in order to meet the legitimate demands of the population for coffee beans.”48 Wach’s words, written a year after the 1953 uprising, affirmed consumer desires, even for semiluxury goods like coffee, which was no longer to be treated as an object of conspicuous consumption by officials. An important alternative source of coffee in the 1950s was the West. Above all, tourism and regular traffic across the German-German border provided opportunities to move coffee across the divide—legally or otherwise. Before August 1961, when the government erected the Berlin Wall and closed the inter-German border, thereby cutting off most avenues for travel (or escape) westward, both East and West Germans could and did cross the border every day, whether for work or to visit loved ones. Between 1953 and 1961, for example, approximately 14.2 million people traveled from East to West Germany, while 13.5 million West Germans traveled eastward in the same period.49 For Germans living on either side of the border itself, crossings were common, especially for work or public sporting events.50 For those who lived in the East and worked in the West, this travel provided many opportunities to purchase goods like coffee and bring them home at day’s end. East Germans regularly purchased both common items as well as semiluxury goods, from spare bicycle parts and children’s toys to fruit and coffee. In the capital, official reports from 1954 estimated that East Berliners had spent roughly “DM 200 million (Ostmark) per month” in West Berlin.51 Those fortunate enough to have friends or family living in West Germany could hope to receive coffee as part of a gift package. Sending these Westpakete, or packages from the West, was a regular practice throughout the 1950s and 1960s.52 Approximately 42.7 million gift packages crossed the border during the height of the 1950s, briefly declined in 1960, and rose once more to 53.5 million packages after the construction of the Wall.53 Although the regime limited the amount

“A Word on Coffee” | 27

of coffee sent in gift packages to 250 grams in 1954, Westpakete represented as much as between 10 and 15 percent of the GDR’s coffee supplies in the early 1950s, and trade officials recognized the need to avoid disrupting this source too greatly.54 By 1958, production of basic staples reached a level sufficient for meeting East Germans’ basic nutritional needs and ending twenty years of domestic rationing. At the Fifth Party Congress in July 1958, Ulbricht proclaimed that the party’s new “Main Economic Task” was for per capita consumption to overtake Western consumption by 1961; he also announced a Seven-Year Plan that would see a major shift in focus to consumer goods production into the 1960s. The policy represented a shift away from the decade of heavy industrial production, (so-called Tonnenideologie) and promises of a bountiful future through hard work in the present, which had dominated the 1950s. While the Main Economic Task certainly responded directly to public pressure for a greater emphasis on living standards, it was also intended to garner public faith—especially after the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961—in the government’s ability and willingness to deliver on the promises of a bright future through socialism.55 Managers and planners within the coffee industry took to the new main task with alacrity. In her analysis of ministry correspondence, Monika Sigmund identifies a common attitude among planners that the aim of improving coffee supply was, above all, “to regain the population’s trust in our coffee.”56 The SPK coordinated its efforts with the food ministry and launched dramatic plans to more than double the production of cocoa and coffee products by 1961, including the introduction of three new blends of coffee in the coming years.57 Despite new confidence among GDR’s leaders that they could now provide more than just the basic necessities, when it came to commodities like coffee, a great deal of work remained. A first step in improving coffee provisioning relied on rebuilding a coffee-roasting industry that had largely been inactive since the end of World War II. Through a previous survey conducted from winter to spring 1954, the SPK had determined that the GDR’s coffee-roasting industry was nowhere near prepared to meet the needs of the population. Most plants still used manual labor for tasks like sorting, cleaning, and packaging, and only half of the factories were “fully mechanized” for roasting.58 During the first quarter of 1954, coffee firms had only fulfilled 77 percent of the planned production volume, making it clear that the industry would fall far short of its 1954 target of 42,500 t.59 By 1958, the per capita consumption of coffee in the GDR sat at 712 g a year, compared to roughly 450 g of coffee per month in West Germany.60 Planners hoped that modernizing the coffee industry, and thereby increasing production yields, would serve to encourage the public’s trust in the GDR’s coffee, which would translate into trust in the party’s visions of a prosperous future. The coffee bean was an expensive commodity, difficult to obtain on the world market due to a lack of hard currency and the reluctance among most coffee-

28 | Brewing Socialism

producing countries to trade coffee through barter. State planners nonetheless committed to improving supply of the beverage, calling access to coffee “a barometer of public opinion.”61 Import figures for the period indicate that the GDR made a genuine commitment to increasing the supply of coffee as coffee imports surged after the Fifth Party Congress of 1958, as shown in Table 1.1 below. Improving the supply of foodstuffs like coffee was one way the government could try to make the GDR a more attractive place to live and thus improve the morale of workers, who in the view of the SED formed the front line in the global—cultural—Cold War. As their material lives improved, East Germans came to gauge the quality of their lives no longer in relation to the experience of destruction, scarcity, and loss of the immediate postwar years but rather in juxtaposition to what they perceived life to be like for others in the present. Increasingly, their frame of reference turned westward, coinciding with important shifts in the tone of Cold War rhetoric both at the highest political levels and among the general public, which linked matters of political and economic conflict with culture and everyday life. Culture came to sit at the heart of the broader global conflict as exemplified by the infamous “kitchen debate” between then American Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev on 24 July 1959. Standing before a physical re-creation of a “typical” American kitchen at an exhibit in Moscow, the two politicians argued over which economic system offered greater convenience for the modern family. The event has been described by historians as a key turning point in the broader Cold War because of the ways in which the American and Russian publics interpreted that “debate.” The exchange revealed the fact that, at its core, the Cold War was about far more than direct military or political conflict but rather represented deeper social and cultural questions: which economic system offered its citizens the superior lifestyle, and which could sustain improvements to living standards into the future?62 Table 1.1. Raw coffee imports, 1953–1965 (in t). 1953

1954

1955

1956

1957

1958

1959

1960

Raw Coffee 4,341

6,273

6,599

8,852 12,067 15,780 22,557 23,245 35,825

Tea

1,646

1,595

1,645

1,737

1,812

Cocoa Beans

5,425

5,137

5,887

9,198

14,881 12,438 14,455

Beer (1000ml)

144.6

140.4

130.6

129.0

128.3

88.8

78.6

Cigarettes (mil. pcs)

931.5

927.8

580.5

421.2

330.7

354.6

906.6

Wine (1000ml)

235.9

217.4

311.0

373.6

388.5

531.1

642.5

1,340

1965 1,445

“A Word on Coffee” | 29

Thus, East Germans’ ability to offer their guests coffee at Easter and other social gatherings was important not only because planners acknowledged that these social expectations existed, but also because they understood that East Germans would quickly turn to the state if supply disappeared. By the 1960s, coffee’s presence or absence at these festivities (or, indeed, its availability for Sunday visitors) constituted a metaphor for the relative success or failure of East Germany’s socialist system, especially as East Germans witnessed their own economy stagnating compared to the growing prosperity evident in West Germany’s “economic miracle.”63 Planning officials were acutely aware of this reality, and their commitment to meeting the demand affirmed the public’s expectations. Delivering on this commitment was challenging since East Germany could not grow coffee and therefore relied on the world market to secure beans, a market undergoing broad structural change under the influence of growing Cold War tensions and shifts in global consumption patterns. Brazil had dominated the world coffee market since the nineteenth century, accounting for between 67 and 77 percent of global production.64 During the 1930s, in response to the Great Depression, Brazil introduced the practice of destroying surplus stocks of coffee beans in an attempt to avoid excess supply driving prices too low.65 Unfortunately, these efforts to control supply could not keep pace with the negative effects of the depression, and prices continued to decline, at one point reaching as low as 7 US cents a pound.66 The outbreak of war in 1939 removed the European import market, further reducing prices and engendering anxiety among producing countries about how to stabilize prices, as well as fears within the US government that the situation would cause fascist or communist revolutions in producing countries.67 Representatives of the South American producing countries and the United States met in the summer of 1940 and signed the Inter-American Coffee Agreement (IACA) on 28 November 1940. Through the IACA, the United States agreed to import nearly 16 million bags of coffee annually, thus securing a stable market for producing countries, who would also agree to limit overall production to ensure a consistent price for the beans.68 The agreement had the desired effect almost immediately; coffee prices doubled by the end of 1941, and by the mid-1950s, supply and demand reached balance; consequently, the IACA was allowed to lapse.69 Although the coffee market stabilized in the postwar years, East Germany’s options for securing beans on that market became greatly hindered by political and economic isolation. In 1955, West Germany declared a new foreign policy, the Hallstein Doctrine, by which West Germany claimed sole right to represent Germans on German soil. According to the doctrine, any nation (save the Soviet Union) that granted East Germany official recognition risked punitive measures from the Federal Republic, up to and including the cessation of diplomatic and trade relations.70 Thus, the GDR’s list of potential trade partners shrank dramatically at precisely the time it sought to expand its coffee reserves.

30 | Brewing Socialism

Adding to these complications, the coffee market once again experienced dramatic structural changes at the end of the decade. After World War II, consuming markets—notably, the American and European markets—reopened (or in the case of America, price controls lifted), and demand for coffee surged in the following years. Yet, at the time, world supply could not match growing demand because there had been little incentive over the previous decades to expand cultivation when the Great Depression and World War II had limited the potential export markets. Thus, prices began to climb in the early 1950s. In response, producing countries planted more trees, but these trees would take several years to reach maturity. By the time beans from these trees could be harvested, demand had slowed, and the addition of new beans to the market reversed the supply problem by the end of the decade, driving prices back down.71 A second change was the rise in prominence of a different type of coffee. Prior to the 1950s, the vast majority of the world’s coffee came from Brazilian Arabica plants, whose beans, when roasted, produce sweet, mild-tasting coffee.72 A considerable limitation to Arabica plants is their high vulnerability to diseases (such as leaf rust) or even slight changes in weather or temperature (they will die if temperatures fall below freezing); consequently, this type of coffee can only grow in very specific regions. These ecological limitations precluded many growers in producing countries from growing Arabica.73 By contrast, a second type of coffee plant, Robusta, is far more resilient against disease and can grow in a slightly wider range of climates and altitudes. The trade-off for its resilience is taste; Robusta beans produce a much more bitter drink than Arabica beans.74 However, these factors meant Robusta coffee could be produced and sold at a much lower price than Arabica. For several nations in Africa—including Ethiopia, and, in particular, the former British, French, and Belgian colonies, whose climates were more suitable for the hardier plant—Robusta coffee presented a viable export commodity through which they could earn much needed hard currency. Robusta’s dramatic rise also facilitated the increased consumption of instant, soluble coffee blends like Nescafé and Maxwell House, which were much less expensive to produce than full bean coffee because an average blend typically contained only 50 percent Robusta beans. By the end of the 1950s, soluble coffee already accounted for 20 percent of world coffee sales.75 Consequently, the 1950s saw shifts in the ways people consumed coffee, favoring a trend toward mass consumption, which demanded higher volumes of more affordable coffee. Together, the general rise in production and Robusta’s surge into the market drove prices down, which opened the door for new producing countries to claim a significant stake in the market. This change also meant that communist countries, which were perennially cash-strapped, had a viable means for securing large volumes of inexpensive coffee. The situation alarmed many Arabica producers, especially South American countries like Brazil, who had dominated the market until then. In response, these producers approached the United States with a

“A Word on Coffee” | 31

proposal to establish an international commodity agreement that would stabilize and control pricing. Because most US coffee roasters relied heavily on Brazil and Columbia for their beans, they were willing to lobby the US government in favor of such an agreement. Cold War anxieties as well as President Kennedy’s strong interest in South America combined to create the conditions for American support for such an agreement. Following the Cuban Revolution in 1959, fears grew in Washington of a South American collapse into communism. Coffee was the most important regional export commodity and its largest industry; if unstable prices led to significant loss of revenue and jobs, the resulting social tension could spark revolutions throughout the region.76 The Kennedy administration launched an “Alliance for Progress” initiative, which sought to provide economic aid to South America in the hopes of propping up the coffee industry.77 With American interests secured, the UN held a conference in 1962 to open formal negotiations, culminating in the signing of the first International Coffee Agreement (ICA) by forty-four exporting and twenty-six importing countries. The stated objectives of the agreement were to strike a “reasonable balance between supply and demand” for consumers and producers and to avoid “excessive fluctuations” in coffee prices.78 The agreement established the International Coffee Organization (ICO), whose London-based council held broad powers, including the right to categorize coffee by type, determine price bands for those categories, as well as set import and export quotas for members and nonmembers.79 Functionally, the quota system provided a mechanism for controlling global prices: when prices rose above the average cost per kilogram (as determined by the council), import and export quotas would be relaxed to increase volume and bring prices down; the opposite took place when prices sank too far below average. By stabilizing the market in this way, the ICA ostensibly served the broader interest of “further[ing] international cooperation in connection with world coffee problems.”80 In both its origins and many of its structures, the ICA was a Cold War enterprise influenced primarily by geopolitics. By keeping prices stable, consuming countries could rely on a stable supply of beans and producing countries could ensure consistent and sufficient revenue for their export goods. At the same time, the ICA was also clearly motivated by a desire to avoid labor unrest and political agitation in producing countries by working to ensure economic stability. Still, it is unclear how effective the ICA could be in this regard: the preamble of the 1962 agreement claimed that a key objective was to “contribute to the development of productive resources and to the promotion and maintenance of employment and income in the Member countries, thereby helping to bring about fair wages, higher living standards, and better working conditions.”81 Yet the agreement seemed to take for granted that stable export prices and revenue streams for producing countries would necessarily translate into better living conditions and higher wages, as it contained no clauses pertaining to this objective. Thus, the

32 | Brewing Socialism

ICA provided no guarantees or protections for plantation workers, who were left to the whims of their employers and national coffee boards. In its organizational structure, the ICA also reinforced global Cold War divisions by concentrating power in the hands of Western, capitalist producing and consuming countries; no socialist countries signed on to the agreement, nor were they invited to participate. The ICO council, comprised of all member states, determined the annual quotas and prices for the market. However, voting rights on the council were unequal. Countries were divided into exporting and importing countries, and each category of member had one thousand “basic” votes in total, divided between members of that category, proportionate to their export or import volumes.82 This system disproportionately favored those countries with the largest import and export volumes, notably Brazil, which controlled thirty-five percent of producer votes, and the United States, with forty percent of consumer votes.83 This structure served two key purposes: both Brazil and the United States were well positioned to control ICO policy while effectively limiting the opportunity for newer, Robusta-based industries—such as those of decolonizing nations in Africa—to grow. Further, the United States hoped the economic stability brought about by the ICA would facilitate political security in producing countries and counter the threat of leftist revolution throughout South America.84 The quota system established separate import and export limits for member and nonmember states. Article 40 of the agreement allowed producing member states to sell a portion of their reserves to a specific list of nonmember states, which was reviewed annually. The ICA claimed the purpose of this separate list was to “encourage market growth in countries of low per capita consumption,” though it was comprised mostly of socialist and nonaligned countries from the developing world. Sales to nonmembers were still subject to strict volume limits (set annually by the ICO Council), and member states were required to submit sales records to the council on a monthly basis to ensure compliance. Member states were to label all coffee bags destined for these countries as “New Market” and were expected to “require adequate guarantees to prevent re-exportation or diversion by [these] countries.”85 Despite these restrictions, however, many producing member states were still motivated to engage in sales to nonmembers. For one thing, the volumes exported to nonmembers did not count against producing countries’ total export quotas. Because they occurred outside the quota system, these exchanges were also not subject to the quota prices, so member states could sell excess production (or coffee of poorer quality) to nonmembers at a discount (or attempt to sell this coffee at a profit). Finally, the ICA prohibited member states from bartering coffee “in traditional markets” but placed no such restrictions on sales to nonmembers, providing a unique opportunity for currency-poor consuming nations, such as the COMECON countries, to obtain coffee in exchange for goods.86

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Thus, while the GDR could access coffee through this international system, it had to navigate several strict barriers to its trade, operating through intermediaries, leaving the country more susceptible to fluctuations in global supply chains. East German state media accused America and Brazil of forming the ICA to secure profits and limit coffee for noncapitalist states. Eulenspiegel, the GDR’s principal satire magazine, told readers that only 42 of 73 million sacks of coffee were sold on the world market because “the lords of speculation” had destroyed the remainder.87 Similar criticisms appeared in other publications, such as a 1969 article in the household advice journal Guter Rat, which told Germans the world coffee price “comes not from good or bad harvests, but rather from monopolies. Record breaking harvests are destroyed in order to raise the prices.”88 Nonetheless, the GDR consistently took advantage of the ICA’s provision for nonmember trade, importing an average of 175,000 bags of coffee per year between 1961 and 1979, the highest volume among the COMECON countries, as shown in Table 1.2 below. Table 1.2. GDR raw coffee imports from ICO countries, 1961–1985 (bags of 132.3 lbs. of raw beans). Note: The average quoted above excludes the 1980s because by this time, the quota system (and the nonmember provisions of the ICA) had been suspended. Year

Brazil

Colombia

Guatemala

Mexico

Total

1961

209,274

1962

179,660

26,505

206,165

1963

261,732

80,043

341,775

1965

705,082

78,658

783,740

1966

285,511

121,750

407,261

1968

310,000

136,559

446,559

1969

301,940

144,629

446,569

1970

242,824

106,533

349,357

1972

379,650

49,533

1973

467,107

45,866

1974

277,106

92,270

1975

446,531

64,876

1978

236,340

61,273

1979

284,366

68,120

352,486

1980/81

178,000

178,000

1981/82

190,000

190,000

1982/83

167,000

167,000

1984/85

67,000

67,000

209,274

429,183 11,500

524,473 369,376

42,667

554,074 1,517

347,013

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The structure of the ICA effectively created a two-tiered system of trade on the coffee market and relegated currency-poor countries to nonmember status. Thus, socialist and developing consumer countries like the GDR were placed at the mercy of member states, who—dominated by Brazil and the United States, in terms of voting rights—determined the conditions in which nonmembers could obtain coffee. While this system allowed socialist countries to secure beans for trade instead of cash, it also partitioned the market, preventing these countries from being able to purchase (at least, officially) the higher quality beans that producing countries hoped would secure higher profits on the regular quota market, thus ensuring that the price remained fairly consistent year after year. The entire system, therefore, served to reinforce Cold War divisions and to ensure that the economic and political power balance of the coffee market remained squarely in the hands of the largest consumer and producer countries.

Conclusion Both the New Course and the Main Economic Task proclaimed socialism’s capacity to provide a higher standard of living than capitalism; now planners hoped the return of this beloved beverage after so many years might imbue the state’s messages with a degree of popular support and prove that socialism could deliver on its promises. It was precisely coffee’s special status as a Genussmittel that planners sought to use to help East Germans move beyond the war’s devastation because its association with comfort could bring a sense of stability and security to the population during a time of crisis. As gradual improvements to the basic food supply helped stabilize the everyday material experiences of Germans after the occupation years, coffee ceased to function as a means to fight against hunger and exhaustion and instead became an object of everyday comfort and desire. At the same time, coffee’s absence from the pantry served to highlight the growing anxieties about comparative living standards in East and West—a contention government leadership understood was tied inextricably to the broader Cold War struggle for the hearts and minds of citizens and the political legitimacy on which civil stability rested. In the context of its forced diplomatic isolation, together with the coffee market’s restrictive system, which placed currency-poor countries at a distinct disadvantage, the GDR had few options open to it other than relying on trade between fellow socialist nations or barter-trade with countries that did not rely on their own relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. Yet, in spite of these challenges, East German planners continued to work toward improving the coffee industry; and over the coming decades, official efforts to promote coffee drinking inserted the beverage into the cultural milieu of East German society, only increasing the population’s expectations that this

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beverage ought to be a fixture of everyday life in the modern, socialist utopia the state claimed to be building.

Notes 1. “Ein Wort zum Kaffee,” Berliner Zeitung, 2 Sep. 1954, 5, author unknown. The lack of author may suggest that the Berliner Zeitung (BZ) published this piece as an editorial, reflecting its own view, though the article, as well as surrounding articles that day, gives no indication that this was the case. Furthermore, officials in the Ministry for Trade and Provisions were aware of the article, and while they believed it “did not look satisfactorily” on the coffee situation, they dismissed the article, suggesting that “it cannot be given much importance.” See BArchB, DL 2/889, Protokoll über das Exposé zur Kaffee-und Tee-Situation in der DDR, 154–55. 2. “Ein Wort zum Kaffee,” 5. 3. Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (New York: Harper, 2009), 393. 4. Belinda Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 204. For the interwar period, see Monika Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum: Kaffeekonsum in beiden deutschen Staaten (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), 25. 5. Katherine Pence, “Grounds for Discontent? Coffee from the Black Market to the Kaffeeklatsch in the GDR,” in Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, ed. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, 197–225 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 199. 6. It should be noted that the trend to juxtapose the National Socialists’ military spending with domestic consumption—that is, to argue that the Nazis disregarded domestic consumption in favor of militarization—is, as Adam Tooze points out, misleading. Although the Nazi government did prioritize industrial raw materials for import over goods like coffee, and Nazi taxation policies aimed to increase spending on rearmament, the subsequent effects on domestic consumption—greatly limiting the German public’s ability to buy consumer goods or investments—were not necessarily the desired outcomes of these policies. Rather, rearmament, he argues, was always part of a broader ideological plan to secure a higher living standard through military conquest. Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008), 162–65. 7. Malte Zierenberg, Berlin’s Black Market, 1939–1950 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 82. 8. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 25. 9. Pence, “Grounds for Discontent?,” 200. 10. Ibid. 11. “Was muß ich über die Soli-Pakete wissen?,” Volkssolidarität 3 (Jan. 1947): 12; reprinted in Christoph Kleßmann and Georg Wagner, eds., Das gespaltene Land. Leben in Deutschland 1945–1990. Texte und Dokumente zur Sozialgeschichte (Munich: C.H. Beck 1993), 78–79. 12. Malte Zierenberg argues that in Berlin, black market trade in the late 1940s in fact represented a continuation of a system that had been in place since the mid-1930s, and that the dynamic of that trade is what changed after the war. What had previously involved personal contacts and secret rendezvous in private dwellings now shifted to large-scale meetings in public spaces. Consequently, the black market became “an influential everyday space of consumer experience during the 1940s,” such that “[the ‘long’ 1940s] then can be seen as a period of dissolution

36 | Brewing Socialism

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

and reformulation of social norms.” See Zierenberg, Berlin’s Black Market, 210. As well, Paul Steege argues against a simplistic explanation of the popular turn to the black market as a desperate response by Germans, instead suggesting that the need to adapt to a changing market required great expense in energy and time for commodities that were even more valuable than fresh coffee in the postwar period. See Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946–1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56. Zierenberg, Berlin’s Black Market, 43. Zierenberg provides no specific source for this citation, though the introduction of new laws was certainly aimed at countering black market trade. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 36. Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945– 1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 35. Zierenberg, Berlin’s Black Market, 175. Zierenberg cites “Schwarzhandel der Post,” Tribüne, 10 November 1947, 175. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 8. Indeed, many things formerly taken for granted now constituted “luxuries,” including, as Hanna Schissler points out, bathing. See Hanna Schissler, The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8. “Vorsicht schützt vor Schaden,” BZ, 1 February 1949, 6. Zierenberg, Berlin’s Black Market, 16. The reform introduced a new currency, the Deutsche Mark (DM), in the Western zones and provided each resident of those zones with a 40 DM handout. Additionally, the government eased controls on consumer goods and production norms. See “Extracts from the British Military Government Law No. 61: First Law for Monetary Reform (Currency Law) (June 20, 1948),” Military Government Gazette 25, no. 848; reprinted in Beata Ruhm von Oppen, ed., Documents on Germany under Occupation, 1945–1954 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 292–94, German History in Documents and Images, http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc .org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=2843. Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 41. An additional side effect of the currency reforms in both Germanies was that they complicated and solidified the matter of Germany’s division during a time when, officially, occupation authorities were at least still discussing the possibilities for Germany’s possible future reunification. In the West, the currency reform also replaced the Reichsmark, which had side effects, such as a sharp rise in unemployment, as the new Deutsche Mark made paying workers more expensive. See Elizabeth Heineman, “The Hour of the Woman: Memories of Germany’s ‘Crisis Years’ and West German National Identity,” in The Miracle Years, ed. Schissler, 21–56, here 37. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 38–39. The situation in Berlin became especially strained during the yearlong blockade, where the black market “flourished in both halves of the city, even as the Berlin Airlift delivered coffee in its relief packages to West Berliners.” See Pence, “Grounds for Discontent?,” 200. The East German paper Neue Zeit praised “the end of the little dark men who peddle their stolen wares” but also lamented how particular goods like chocolate, coffee, and “Amis” (American cigarettes) were still available “in any desired volume, on every second street corner.” See “Es lohnt wohl nicht mehr?” Neue Zeit, 16 June 1949, 1. André Steiner, The Plans That Failed: An Economic History of East Germany, 1945–1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 54. See also Annette Kaminsky, Wohlstand, Schönheit, Glück: Kleine Konsumgeschichte der DDR. (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2001), 25. Zierenberg, Berlin’s Black Market, 153. See also Steiner, Plans That Failed, 54. The HO stores played an important political role, argues Mark Landsman, as they were meant to reintroduce a sense of “normalcy” into everyday life in the Soviet zone, offering Germans “the first legal

“A Word on Coffee” | 37

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

means of shopping ration-free” since the war. See Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: East Germany Between Productivism and Consumerism, 1948–1961 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 55. These HO stores were to “usher in socialism through retailing” and provide “the appearance of material abundance” in a period of intensifying East–West political conflict. See Katherine Pence, “From Rations to Fashions: The Gendered Politics of East and West German Consumption, 1945–1961” (PhD diss., The University of Michigan, 1999), 230. On offerings in HO stores, see Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand, 55; and Annette Kaminsky, Wohlstand, Schönheit, Glück, 27; on coffee specifically, see Pence, “Grounds for Discontent?,” 201. Pence, “Grounds for Discontent?,” 201. The distinction of “real bean coffee” here is important, as ersatz coffee blends came off rationing in June 1949. See Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand, 77. The Hennecke or “activist” movement was a production scheme intent on encouraging overproduction on the part of industrial workers in the Soviet Occupation Zone/early GDR and was based on the tradition of the Stahkanovite movement in the Soviet Union. For more on the activist movement and Adolf Hennecke, see Sandrine Kott, Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East German Society, trans. Lisa Godin-Roger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 88–95. On the gendered aspects of the state’s attempts to create a perfect, idealized “Socialist consumer,” see Pence, “From Rations to Fashions,” chapter 4. Annette Kaminsky, Wohlstand, Schönheit, Glück, 27; Pence, “From Rations to Fashions,” 224; Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 178–80. These taxes also contributed to the public’s criticism of the HO stores as “the state-run black market” since most Germans could not afford to shop there. See Pence, “Grounds for Discontent?,” 202; see also Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 94; Ina Merkel, Utopie und Bedürfnis. Die Geschichte der Konsumerkultur in der DDR. (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 30. Pence, “From Rations to Fashions,” 243. In March of 1949, authorities in Berlin uncovered seven sacks of coffee beans totaling around 250 kg in a “camouflaged garage” in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. “Kleiner Berliner Chronik,” BZ, 3 March 1949, 6. “Wachsame Volkspolizei,” BZ, 9 April 1949, 4. Also, East Germany used tons (1,000 kilograms) in its measurements of coffee, whether in public media or private correspondence and government reports. The abbreviation “t” will be used for this throughout the book. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 59. Alice Autumn Weinreb, Modern Hungers: Food and Power in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 122–63. BArchB DY 34/9567, “Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, Anweisung über die Durchführung der Sonderaktion ‘Kaffee (Verkaufsaktion) für die werktätige Bevölkerung der DDR und des demokratischen Sektors von Berlin,’” 24 November 1952. Pence, “From Rations to Fashions,” 228. For more on mass rituals in the early years of the GDR, see Monika Gibas and Rainer Gries, “‘Vorschlag für den Ersten Mai: Die Führung zieht am Volk vorbei!’ Überlegungen zur Geschichte der Tribüne in der DDR,” Deutschland Archiv 5, no. 28 (May 1995): 481–94. Weinreb, Modern Hungers, 129. Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 34. During the first half of 1952 roughly fifty-two thousand East Germans fled to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). By late 1952, those numbers had increased to seventy-eight thousand. By mid-1953, emigration estimates indicated that approximately eighty-four thou-

38 | Brewing Socialism

42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

sand people had fled the GDR. See “Memorandum from Lavrentii Beria to the CPSU CC Presidium regarding Mass Defections from the GDR, 6 May 1953,” Woodrow Wilson Center, The Cold War International History Project digital archive, http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter .org/document/110409.pdf?v=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e, accessed 10 October 2016, 157. Fulbrook, People’s State, 36. Gregory R. Witkowski, “Peasants’ Revolt? Re-evaluating the 17 June Uprising in East Germany,” German History 24, no. 2 (2006): 243–66; here 251–52. Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand, 126. Gerhard Ritter, “17.6.1953—Eine historische Ortsbestimmung,” in Volkserhebung gegen den SED-Staat, ed. Roger Engelmann and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, 16–44 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), here 27. Report from A. Grechko and Tarasov in Berlin to N. A. Bulganin, 6:30 p.m. Source: AGSh, f. 16, op. 3139, d. 155, ll. 8–9. Provided and translated by Viktor Gobarev. Woodrow Wilson Center, Cold War International History Project Digital Archive, http://digitalarchive.wil soncenter.org/document/113123, accessed 17 November 2016. For a sampling of secondary literature regarding the uprising, see Arnulf Baring, Der 17. Juni 1953 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1983); Gary Bruce, Resistance with the People: Repression and Resistance in Eastern Germany 1945–1955 (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Gareth Dale, Popular Protest in East Germany, 1945–1989 (New York: Routledge, 2005); Torsten Diedrich, Der 17. Juni 1953 in der DDR (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1991); Bernd Eisenfeld, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, and Ehrhart Neubert, eds., Die verdrängte Revolution: Der Platz des 17. Juni 1953 in der deutschen Geschichte (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 2004); Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Armin Mitter, and Stefan Wolle, eds., Der Tag X—17. Juni 1953: Die ‘Innere Staatsgründung’ der DDR als Ergebnis der Krise 1952/1954 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1995); Christian F. Ostermann, Uprising in East Germany 1953: The Cold War, the German Question, and the First Major Upheaval behind the Iron Curtain (New York: Central European University Press, 2001); Rolf Steininger, 17. Juni 1953: Der Anfang vom langen Ende der DDR (Munich: Olzog Verlag, 2003). BArchB, DL 2/889, Memorandum von Schneiderheinze (Staatsekretär bei dem MHV) an Gregor, 29.03.1954. BArchB, DL 2/889, Memorandum von Minister Wach (MHV) an Minister Gregor (MAI), 09.07.1954, 170–71, emphasis added. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 110. Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 85–90. Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand, 144. In 1957, East Germany formed a specific enterprise to handle the volume of packages from the West, the Geschenkdienst und Kleinexport GmbH (GENEX). West Germans could order specific items for their care packages through GENEX, and the firm would assemble and send them to the recipients, thus adding another layer of control to the process. See Pavel Szobi, “Konsumsozialismus in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren am Beispiel der DDR und der ČSSR,” in Die ČSSR und die DDR im historischen Vergleich: Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede zweier staatssozialistischer Systeme in Mitteleuropa, ed. Miloš Řezník & Katja Rosenbaum, 49–62 (Leipzig: Kirchhof & Franke, 2013), 51. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 185. She discusses the gift packages at length; see 183–91. Jutta Voigt, Der Geschmack des Ostens: Vom Essen, Trinken und Leben in der DDR (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, 2005), 159; Pence, “Grounds for Discontent?,” 206. Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics & Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 33; Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand, 173; Steiner, Plans That Failed, 81–100.

“A Word on Coffee” | 39

56. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 99. She cites BArchB DE1/25062, Schreiben des VEB Kaffee und Nahrmittelwerke Halle und die SPK vom 3.10.1959. 57. BArchB DY42/1401, Beschluss der Zentralen Konferenz der Süss-, Dauerbackwaren-, Kaffeeund Teeindustrie vom 29.4.1959 zur Lösung der nächsten Aufgaben bei der Entwicklung der Süss-und Dauerbackwaren- sowie der Kaffee- und Teeindustrie, 12. 58. BArchB DE 1/25085, Walter Haltrich and Erich Klose, Bericht über die Kapazitäts-Überprüfungen in der Kaffeemittelindustrie, 12.06.1954, 3–13. 59. Ibid., 13. 60. BArch DC 20-I/4/344, Ministerrat der DDR—Sitzung des Präsidiums des MR vom 24.09.1959. 61. BArchBL-SAPMO, DE 1/25085, Verlesen von Röstkaffee 25.06.1960, 1. 62. Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2010), vii–xxiv. 63. Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 42. 64. Francisco Vidal Luna and Herbert S. Klein, The Economic and Social History of Brazil since 1889 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 355–59, cited in Morris, Coffee, 102. 65. Paul C. Daniels, “The Inter-American Coffee Agreement,” Law and Contemporary Problems 8 (Fall 1941): 708–20, here 709. 66. Robert W. Thurston, “The Global Trade in Coffee: An Overview,” in Coffee: A Comprehensive Guide to the Bean, the Beverage, and the Industry, ed. Robert W. Thurston, Jonathan Morris, and Shawn Steiman, 111–15 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 111. 67. Daniels, “The Inter-American Coffee Agreement,” 711; Thurston, “Global Trade in Coffee,” 111. 68. Daniels, “The Inter-American Coffee Agreement,” 714, cited in Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), 114. . 69. Thurston, “Global Trade in Coffee,” 111. 70. Helga Haftendorn, Coming of Age: German Foreign Policy Since 1945 (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 126; M. E. Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil: East Germany, Détente, and Ostpolitik, 1969–1973 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 12. 71. John Talbot, Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 55. 72. Luna and Klein, Economic and Social History of Brazil, 355–59, cited in Morris, Coffee, 102. 73. Stuart McCook, “The Ecology of Taste: Robusta Coffee and the Limits of the Specialty Revolution,” in Coffee: A Comprehensive Guide, ed. Thurston, Morris, and Steiman, 248–61, here 250. 74. McCook, “Ecology of Taste,” 251. 75. Morris, Coffee, 126. African coffee cultivation expanded such that by 1965, it represented 23 percent of total world coffee production, of which 75 percent was Robusta. 76. Morris, Coffee, 142; Thurston, “Global Trade in Coffee,” 111. 77. Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 58–59. 78. Preamble, The International Coffee Agreement, 1968, United Nations Treaty Series, 1976, 3. 79. Morris, Coffee, 142. 80. Preamble, The International Coffee Agreement, 1968, United Nations Treaty Series, 1976, 3. 81. The International Coffee Agreement, 1962, United Nations Treaty Series, 1976, 172. 82. Ibid., 184. 83. The International Coffee Agreement, 1973, United Nations Treaty Series, 1976, Annex D. 84. The ICA’s susceptibility to national interests is not unique. In their analysis of food, nationalism, and global politics, Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta have suggested that although most international organizations are perceived to act as unifying bodies that “suppress nationalism

40 | Brewing Socialism

85. 86. 87. 88.

and impose global/universal norms and standards,” in reality, member nation-states have often used these international bodies to promote their own national interests and identities. Atsuko Ichijo and Ronald Ranta, Food, National Identity and Nationalism: From Everyday to Global Politics (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 146–63. The ICA differs in that the national interest dominated the organization by design. The International Coffee Agreement, 1962, United Nations Treaty Series, 208. The International Coffee Agreement, 1962, United Nations Treaty Series, Annex D, 396. “Kaffee verkehrt,” Eulenspiegel 5 (Feb. 1961): 3. “Schwarz wie die Nacht, heiß wie die Hölle, süß wie die Liebe, so soll er sein, der Kaffee,” Guter Rat 3 (1969): 8.

Chapter 2

COFFEE AND THE “MODERN COMFORTS” OF SOCIALISM

S In November 1961, while reflecting on his experience in Espresso Hungaria, a small café on Berlin’s Stalinallee, East German journalist Jupp remarked that he had “succumbed to the graceful seduction of this dearly beloved drink,” much like the customers who wrote in the guest book, “I’d say the coffee here is the best in Berlin.”1 Continuing in a similar tone, Jupp depicted an evening scene: There you sit with me at a small table inside Espresso Hungaria. It’s evening. The stores are closed. Across the street the neon sign for “Möbel-Passage” [a furniture store] invites you over. Outside on the asphalt median of Stalinallee, parked cars reflect the colorful neon light. The café is full; the tables are occupied. Girls nibble biscuits, four young men spoon ice cream with cherries, a mother rocks a stroller with her left hand, while her right brings a cup to her mouth. A young man writes—a love poem? Modern sociability [Gemütlichkeit], entertaining relaxation, sweet reflection . . .2

Jupp’s article weaved the night life of this café into the surrounding urban landscape, presenting coffee drinking as a “modern” experience of comfort, relaxation, and sociability, and the fulfillment of the socialist state’s promises of providing a better life. To Jupp, Espresso Hungaria’s “exemplary contribution” to socialist society was its atmosphere of “modern comfort.” Emphasizing certain “modern” elements of the scene, such as the image of neon lights casting their colorful hues onto the cars parked on the paved streets, he described the café as “a small paradise of diversion at popular prices. To cultivate and construct such a paradise is a beautiful task, a valuable, exemplary contribution to the social life of the capital.”3 The article perfectly encapsulated the message and spirit of the “consumer turn” of the 1960s and the state’s greater emphasis on rising living standards. Jupp took for granted that Germans enjoyed their coffee and encouraged the view that Notes from this chapter begin on page 68.

42 | Brewing Socialism

coffee was best consumed for pleasure in relaxing surroundings, whether alone or with companions—and, above all, it was meant to taste good. At the same time, the article’s optimism also came at an important—and for many East Germans, uncertain—time. Published only three months after the erection of the Berlin Wall in August, Jupp’s message of the comforts and achievements of socialism seemed at odds with the closure of the borders to halt mass exodus to the West.4 Jupp’s article encouraged East Germans to imagine themselves enjoying a cup of coffee in the ambiance of a modern café at a time when the supply of coffee was hardly guaranteed.5 This chapter argues that in East Germany, coffee’s perceived value lay in a culmination of three factors: availability; associated social practices; and quality, both in terms of taste and aroma. The story of consumption in Eastern European socialism is not just about scarcity and shortage; for the people living there, consumption belonged to a set of experiences and practices in their everyday lives, experiences and practices that played a considerable role in shaping the contours of social interactions—from routinization to ruptures—and the setting of general expectations of consumption under socialism. While scholars agree that the government’s inability to maintain the supply of consumer goods challenged its political legitimacy, coffee’s importance lay in more than simply its availability.6 State and party officials consistently viewed consumer policy as a matter of managing demand and needs; but doing so ignored the degree to which demand was shaped by the personal and social value East Germans assigned to cultural practices surrounding a given food.7 Everyday practices informed the political and social culture of the GDR, from internalizing or challenging the “rules” of everyday life under socialism to navigating or contesting social hierarchies.8 These perceptions of value were not unique or new to the GDR and East Germans; each of them were constructs developed over the previous few centuries during which coffee drinking had expanded across Europe, eventually coalescing in a set of cultural traditions associated with the beverage. Coffee’s origins as a colonial good did not hinder its status in East German culture or politics. Rather than discourage coffee drinking by portraying it as a “false desire” because of its historical roots, the state’s official messaging around coffee in fact encouraged its consumption as a staple of everyday life in a modern industrial nation, fostering a sense among the population that a quality cup of coffee was supposed to be enjoyed as part of one’s daily experience. From party functionaries, state officials, and industry experts, the East German government referenced and affirmed older cultural practices surrounding coffee to promote coffee drinking as a desirable social practice. Through various media—newspapers, magazines, cookbooks, and household advice manuals—a range of messages inserted coffee into official imagery of a modern socialist way of life, visions that were internalized among the population over decades.9 Public frustration over consumer goods occurred not only during times of shortage but

Coffee and the “Modern Comforts” of Socialism | 43

also when people either did not enjoy what was available or could not access goods equally. Scholars have noted that the SED’s authority relied in part on its ability to cultivate an authentic East German material culture based on citizens internalizing the regime’s meanings of luxury and desire.10 The regime typically discouraged luxuries and delicacies, framing them as indulgences that encouraged “irrational consumption” for the sake of increasing one’s social status.11 By contrast, “rational” socialist consumers would instead purchase goods that fulfilled a functional or practical need, finding joy “in the beauty of utility.”12 In its ideological recategorization of consumer goods, the regime distinguished between “real” and “false” needs. Socialist leaders identified the capitalist market as inherently exploitative since it manipulated individuals’ understanding of their own needs, promoting “false desires” that gave birth to commodity fetishism.13 From 1958 onward, official parlance changed to adopt a more politically acceptable socialist aesthetic, which held that a consumer product’s value stemmed from its function, not only (or even necessarily) from its form. For example, designs for household porcelain were required to reflect a product’s function, that is, a coffee pot required clean lines and was not permitted to use “unnecessary” embellishments such as filigree and the like. When it came to food items, however, it appears as if these general rules either did not apply or were applied somewhat differently. In a material and experiential sense, coffee possessed (indeed, possesses) multiple meanings that proved useful for the regime’s attempts to depict East Germany as a modern state and society. As a substance, coffee acts as a stimulant capable of rejuvenating one’s alertness, a fact that fit well within an official discourse promoting a social and economic system heavily focused on productivity.14 East German household advice books, cookbooks, popular magazines, and trade journals frequently highlighted coffee’s caffeine content and its galvanizing effects on mental activity. Simultaneously, taking the time to prepare and drink a cup of coffee is a deliberate act that can help a person pause and relax. These two ideas—that coffee can both stimulate the mind and relax the person—seem rather inconsistent, or even contradictory, yet it was precisely this complicated duality that made coffee so useful because it could be portrayed as both a fuel and a reward for work.15 Coffee drinking was typically a social behavior: whether in the factory canteen, at a neighbor’s house, or in a café, people often drank coffee together while sharing discussions and reflections on their own lives. In official discourse, the beverage’s value also stemmed from its effects as a social stimulant, from the sheer pleasure of its consumption, and from its connection to older European traditions. Thus, coffee’s complexity granted it a flexibility that could be weaved seamlessly into the fabric of an official portrayal of a modern socialist way of life. Blending traditional patterns of sociability with “socialist” aesthetics and values that promoted thrift, functional design, and equality, German commu-

44 | Brewing Socialism

nists encouraged coffee drinking as a way to cultivate a virtuous, socialist life. Authorities highlighted Germans’ long history of coffee drinking; from the first coffeehouses founded within East Germany’s borders to its importance in the contemporary coffee break, official narratives used this past to suggest that coffee had been successfully democratized, transformed from an aristocratic indulgence to an object of everyday life, made accessible to German workers by virtue of socialism’s stable prices. Through such a narrative of democratization, state media identified elements of a “usable past” that were compatible with the state’s attempts to construct a modern socialist future. This usable past, in turn, helped insert the GDR into a broader and older European tradition of coffee drinking, one that predated the upheavals of two world wars, in an attempt to “normalize” the GDR’s place in a globalizing yet divided world.16 As a plant incapable of growing on German soil, coffee itself could never truly be “German”; therefore, it found its German identity through social practice. As a product that could stimulate both Germans’ labor and socialization, coffee could easily be discussed as a “socialist” drink. The next step in democratizing coffee for the workers’ and peasants’ state was developing and producing new blends for the public and ensuring that the coffee industry could maintain a steady production volume. In so doing, planners hoped to link the ideological recuperation of coffee from colonial to socialist good to the broader goal of demonstrating socialism’s ability to provide a higher standard of living. In September 1959, the Council of Ministers (Ministerrat— MR) approved a general price reduction for coffee, as well as the preparation of two new mixtures—Mona and Kosta—measures through which “the wishes and demands of the consumer will be met.”17 The new coffees were to be introduced according to the pricing scheme found in Table 2.1. The new brands were not merely aimed at increasing supply; rather, planners saw the introduction of these brands as a qualitative improvement to the supply. Table 2.1. Introductory pricing scheme for Mona and Kosta, 1959. Note that these prices were proportional by volume. Coffee Brand Mona (including “Melange”)

Quantity/Volume

Consumer Price

125 g

10 M

100 g

8M

50 g

4M

25 g

2M

Caffeine Free Coffee

100 g

8M

Kosta (including “Melange”)

125 g

7.50 M

100 g

6M

50 g

3M

Coffee and the “Modern Comforts” of Socialism | 45

Descriptions of the brands focused on their composition, provenance, and flavor, emphasizing quality and consumer opinion. Advertising and packaging characterized the brand Mona as “a fine, aromatic blend that combines spicy Indian green coffee with Columbia’s finest soft Santos to give this mixture the peak of flavor.” Meanwhile, public notices emphasized the “powerful flavor mix” of raw beans from Brazil, Africa, and Java in Kosta coffee, which, it was claimed, had “appeal particularly among consumers who prefer a strong, spicy coffee.”18 Packages highlighted the particular coffee blend’s name and included the logo of the roasting firm in which it was produced. By including the beans’ origins on packaging and advertising but rebranding the coffee blends themselves, East German roasters followed established patterns of the global coffee trade; typically, raw coffee beans are described by their origins while blends are named after the roaster or distributor of the final retail product. This practice dates at least as far back as the mid-nineteenth century—a time when branding rose to prominence in the trade of colonial goods. Until this point, food products had typically been associated with their geographical origins as a way of denoting a given product’s quality. As Richard Wilk explains, consumer concerns about adulteration in the mid-nineteenth century meant that over the next hundred years, producers gradually appropriated the claim to the quality of colonial food commodities; in some cases this meant replacing specific geographical associations for particular goods with company names, though the coffee trade experienced a sort of hybrid approach in which producers branded blends but unblended beans “retained their nationality.”19 That East German roasters branded their coffee in this way, therefore, reflected a certain continuity with international marketing practices established long before the GDR’s founding. Yet this very continuity seems conspicuous, given its origins in colonial commodity chain systems. Additionally, the notice indicated that Mona and Kosta were to be introduced in a variety of package sizes that “correspond to the wishes of consumers.”20 Retail workers were instructed to create displays offering alternative ways of preparing coffee to show customers that coffee was meant to be enjoyed in a variety of ways, suggesting that pleasure and leisure were key themes related to the public image of coffee drinking in the GDR.21 A third brand, Rondo, entered the market in the summer of 1960, with ads describing the product as simply “high end retail coffee” (hochwertige[r] Kaffee).22 Efforts to increase the volume and quality of East German coffee—especially when framed in terms of meeting the wishes of consumers—served the greater interest of convincing East Germans that life in the GDR was appealing, and, in particular, that life was better in the East than in the Federal Republic. This message became all the more pressing during a period in which the population was hemorrhaging as tens of thousands of citizens—above all, those under thirty years of age—migrated West in search of the apparent economic opportunities

46 | Brewing Socialism

there. Stemming the flow of emigration posed considerable challenges, especially because Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev initially refused Ulbricht’s request to close the border for fear of escalating Cold War tensions and only relented when Ulbricht finally convinced him of the need for a political solution to the emigration problem.23 During the night of 12–13 August 1961, crews erected fencing and barbed wire around the entire circumference of West Berlin, dividing and isolating the city. In the coming months, the GDR military fortified this wall and the inter-German border to secure it against civilian crossings, a process that would expand over the coming decades. In addition to blocking their physical movement westward, the border closure was also intended to cut off—or at least limit—East Germans’ view of Western life. This aspect of the plan was less successful; although the Wall did make it difficult to observe daily life in the West, East Germans nonetheless continued to compare their lives with their counterparts in the Federal Republic through communications with family and friends or Western radio and television for those who could access them. Even after the escape route to the West was closed, planners still faced enormous economic difficulties; for instance, shortages of meat, eggs, and butter in 1962 necessitated the reinstatement of rationing for those products.24 Thus, while the Wall provided some much-needed relief to a strained economy, that reprieve was at best temporary, and government officials recognized the need to address the broader demands for improvements to living standards. Bringing coffee under the control of the planned economy could provide tangible evidence that life was getting better under socialism—that is, so long as the flow continued. Beyond improvements in basic coffee supply, however, the state, in its official messages about coffee drinking, also emphasized the qualitative improvements to that supply. Messaging related to the new brands and to the broader conventions surrounding coffee drinking encouraged East Germans to not only expect coffee but to expect coffee of a distinct and consistent quality and taste. One concern about quality related to consumer trust in “freshness.” A new policy governing freshness in 1959 prohibited the sale of any coffee that “was roasted more than 14 days previously.”25 Timely deliveries to retail locations ensured “that the roasted coffee reaches the hands of consumers as fresh as possible and without any noticeable loss of taste.”26 The instructions included the stipulation that the roasting date of each batch of coffee be printed on the packages so customers could see for themselves how fresh their coffee was. Germans cared about freshness a great deal, too. One customer was so distraught by the package of Mona he had purchased that he wrote to Berliner Zeitung to complain “the 20th of February is stamped on the packaging—on 17 March! Please!” He returned the coffee the next day, “mindful of the ministry regulations” regarding freshness. The retailer apparently replied, “If we don’t take the coffee delivered by the wholesalers, we don’t get any!”—demonstrating the real limits to supply and available coffee. Berliner Zeitung seems to have supported the customer, reasoning

Coffee and the “Modern Comforts” of Socialism | 47

that perhaps “the viewpoint of wholesalers ought to be revised as well, because the customer is entitled to quality!”27 Frequent fluctuations on the coffee market in terms of both price and available stock plagued planners’ attempts to maintain a consistent supply and quality of coffee. Coffee is a fickle commodity, susceptible to a plethora of environmental, social, and market impulses that can have a dramatic impact on the volume and quality of any given harvest; in the GDR, this could frequently lead to delayed deliveries or shipments of beans not meeting quality standards. Industry planners documented at least half a dozen cases in 1960 alone in which raw coffee deliveries were either so late or of such poor quality that the beans could not be included in regular production.28 One way to compensate for trade shortfalls was by changing the ratio of raw coffee types in each blend.29 Some roasting firms complained about the frequent recipe changes, informing the state office for vegetable products that “we do not believe it is right that consumers must be offered a qualitatively declining roasted coffee (Kosta) when a good blend was in retail for so long previously. . . . [The state’s commitment to quality] should be taken into account with roasted coffee, and only high-quality products be made available.”30 Despite these calls for “high-quality products,” there existed no clearly defined standard for coffee roasting or packaging at the time, and, in fact, debates in the late 1950s and early 1960s over how best to upgrade the coffee industry included discussions of improving quality. For instance, some factory managers argued that new roasting machines would ensure a consistent and thorough roast of raw beans that in turn would ensure consistent quality in the finished product. Industry reports over the course of the 1950s had identified a clear and urgent need for new machines, from new roasters to cleaning, sorting, and packing machines. Upgrades to the coffee-roasting industry were but one element of a much broader effort to modernize the entire East German economy, particularly in the wake of the Wall’s construction, and planners sought ways to cut operating costs throughout the economy.31 A principal concern among officials was the cost associated with any upgrades since the GDR did not produce the required equipment and would need to purchase any machines from foreign—and usually West German or American—companies. Part of the drive behind modernizing the economy had been to reduce the GDR’s reliance on Western imports, a hope that would later facilitate the introduction of sweeping reforms under the New Economic System (Neues Ökonomisches System—NÖS).32 Some industry specialists doubted the need for a product of higher quality at all. Citing a customer survey at regional restaurants, one plant manager argued, “When purchasing coffee, people prefer the cheapest variety, a fact that is confirmed by Kosta’s 80 percent share of total sales.”33 One planner, Hans Gömann, advocated for new sorting machines, claiming they would ensure that the best possible beans made it into each roast without producers having to rely on a costly, time-consuming, manual

48 | Brewing Socialism

sorting process. Gömann wrote a series of frequent and lengthy letters to a wide range of industry and even state and party officials about his desire to establish a “coffee culture” in East Germany. The German people desired and deserved a quality cup of coffee after so many years without it, he argued, lamenting that some industrial experts treated coffee “only as a stimulant [Anregungsmittel] rather than a delicacy [Genussmittel].” Further, he claimed that his emphasis on quality reflected the desires of the population: A person is not a machine that needs to be goaded or pushed (coffee as stimulant), but rather we must strive to attempt to beautify [verschönen] the lives of workers in every direction. In any event, “the right cup of coffee” belongs to this [aim]. A coffee with culture! . . . I am of the view that whoever has something to do with coffee must be an idealist. . . . One does not roast coffee to earn money, as I observed in the expressions of a few roasters in a number of firms, but rather, one roasts coffee as a virtuoso for the enjoyment and joy of life of tens of thousands of working people.34

Ultimately, the planners approved the installation of new roasting machines aimed at increasing the volume of production and determined that sorting machines represented too great an expense for the potential benefit they might offer.35 State organs monitored developments in both industry and among consumers to determine and track the effects of their measures and the growth of coffee drinking. Over the course of the 1960s, the Institute for Market Research in Leipzig (Institüt für Marktforschung—IfM) conducted a series of surveys on coffee drinking, producing two reports by decade’s end.36 The study traced broad, general consumption patterns throughout the GDR but also examined 2,480 individual households based on a wide range of criteria, including gender, profession, and geography. Broadly speaking, the results indicated a general trend of increasing coffee consumption: over the course of the decade, annual consumption of roasted bean coffee more than doubled, from an average 0.69 kg per capita in 1958 to around 2.17 kg per capita in 1969.37 The IfM explained this increase as a result of rising incomes, the variety of brands, and consistent prices for goods.38 East Germans also continued to supplement their supply of roasted coffee with surrogate products, such as Kaffee-Ersatz and Malzkaffee. The IfM’s survey indicated that 61 percent of respondents claimed to drink at least one cup of roasted coffee per day, and just over half indicated they drank at least one cup of Kaffee-Ersatz per day.39 In particular, lower income households tended to drink higher rates of the more affordable Kaffee-Ersatz.40 Despite the significant increase in coffee consumption over the course of the decade, in terms of scale this figure nonetheless reflected a rather low rate of overall consumption compared to other European countries (see Table 2.2). What these comparative figures highlight is the aspirational motives of the GDR’s economic planners and a growing concern with measuring the success of the Main Economic Task announced in 1958. Increasing—or rather, encourag-

Coffee and the “Modern Comforts” of Socialism | 49

FRG

France

Italy

GDR

Great Britain

1.6

0.7

0.8

3.5

4.4

1.7

0.8

0.9

0.6

3.5

4.3

1.8

0.9

1.0

0.6

6.0

3.8

4.3

1.9

1.4

1.0

0.7

5.4

4.1

4.4

2.2

1.5

1.2

0.7

11.3

6.0

4.1

4.6

2.3

1.6

1.3

0.7

9.6

5.1

4.4

4.8

2.3

1.7

1.1

0.7

4.5

4.4

2.3

1.8

1.2

0.8

Year

Sweden

Switzerland

4.2

Denmark

2.9

1958

7.3

1959

7.5

1960

7.7

9.1

5.6

1961

8.1

9.5

1962

8.8

8.8

1963

9.4

1964

9.7

1965

Czechoslovakia

Table 2.2. Per capita roasted coffee consumption in Europe (in kg).

ing—coffee drinking in the GDR was not just about satisfying a desire the regime believed existed among the population: the point was to demonstrate socialism’s ability to match and outstrip Western material prosperity. Even after the Wall’s construction, the SED understood that for East Germans, the major referent for material prosperity was not chronological but geographical: East Germans did not compare their everyday lives to the postwar period but rather to the apparent abundance of West Germany.41 This gap would prove difficult to close: coffee drinking in West Germany nearly doubled between 1955 and 1961, stabilizing in 1970 at about 4 kg per capita per year.42 Meanwhile, East German coffee drinking jumped by 200 percent between 1958 and 1962, and again in 1971 by another 66 percent.43 The IfM survey was incomplete; researchers only considered the coffee brands manufactured within the GDR, ignoring the amount of Western coffee that made its way across the border through tourism or, especially after the border closed in 1961, Western “gift packages.” Monika Sigmund argues that the IfM’s figures likely represent a rate of consumption about 15 to 30 percent lower than the reality if the volume of Western coffee entering the East German market were to be included.44 The IfM’s report also noted increases over the course of the 1960s in both the rate of coffee purchases and the ratio of coffee purchases to total purchases of foodstuffs. In 1961, for instance, East Germans spent 5.5 percent of their total household food expenses on coffee, increasing this figure to 6.8 percent by 1969.45 While higher income households did see marginal increases in coffee consumption, the IfM found that drinking rates were not universally higher within

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them. Moreover, consumer brand choices varied only slightly across income levels. East Germany produced five principal coffee brands in the 1960s in a variety of volumes. Together, Kosta and Kosta-Melange brands accounted for over 60 percent of total coffee production throughout this period, as seen in Table 2.3 below. Respondents were instructed to select only one brand of coffee when indicating their preferences because “Every coffee drinker consciously prefers a particular brand of coffee.”46 When one breaks down consumption of each brand by income, a pattern emerges: purchases of Rondo increased with higher incomes, while those of Mona declined. Meanwhile, demand for Kosta fluctuated: as incomes increased, Germans consumed more Kosta than either Rondo or Mona in all but the highest income brackets. Larger households, regardless of income, tended to purchase the “cheaper Kosta” and avoided Mona.47 The IfM did not speculate as to the reasons for these discrepancies, simply concluding that “those with higher incomes still spend their money economically and are mindful above all else of quality.”48 Yet the report implied a degree of “choice” that many East Germans may not, in fact, have had. It was perhaps more likely that East Germans’ coffee purchases were largely constrained by access, availability, and affordability of certain brands. The most widely available coffee brands—Kosta and Rondo—were also the most affordable and could be purchased at standard retail stores when supplies permitted. Mona—a brand that even industry officials acknowledged was superior in taste—not only cost onethird more than Kosta but was not as widely available in normal retail outlets. Researchers believed that as socialism continued to develop over time, so too would consumer habits, including the rate at which people drank coffee.49 At the time of the report, East Germans spent an average 2.5 percent of their monthly income on coffee, an expense the authors noted surpassed the average amount spent on shoes.50 Nearly all the IfM’s recommendations prioritized improving Table 2.3. Coffee purchasing habits by income level (percent of households purchasing given brand), 1968. Monthly Household income in Marks

Mona

Rondo

Kosta (incl. Melange)

None of the available brands

Under 400 M

10.49

39.02

32.46

18.03

400–800 M

10.46

39.15

40.95

9.4

800–1200 M

7.78

42.67

44.44

5.11

Over 1200 M

8.33

44.26

36.08

11.33

Total percent of market by household

10.0

39.8

39.3

2.0

Retail Price of Brand (in M/ 125g)

10.00

8.75

7.50 (incl. Melange)

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access to coffee based on the assumption that as salaries increased, so too would Germans’ disposable income, which would also lead to higher volumes of coffee purchased “on the basis of sociability, relaxation and recreation.”51 The IfM’s conclusions regarding purchasing decisions reflected its authors’ focus on coffee as a problem of distribution, not quality—a focus that assumed consistent overall supply.

Quality and a Cup of “East German” Coffee In its January 1967 issue, the East German women’s magazine Für Dich asked its readers, “Can you manage to go without coffee for a day? For weeks, months, years—your entire life?” The article cheekily answered: “The annual consumption in our republic presents the opposite image: every year we import around 31,000 tons. . . . In homes, offices and factory cafeterias, 15 million cups of this ‘daily jolt’ are drunk every day.”52 This figure corresponded to about one cup per capita per day and suggested that East Germans enjoyed their coffee as a regular component of everyday life. But what role did coffee drinking play in fostering social ties among East Germans? What did it mean to enjoy a cup of coffee alone or with friends or colleagues? State rhetoric about coffee perpetuated three key ideas: first, that coffee drinking was a fundamentally European activity, drawing on the rich history of coffee drinking throughout the continent and especially in Germany; second, that coffee drinking was not only compatible with but in fact aided in the construction of a modern socialist utopia; and third, that coffee drinking was a pleasurable activity that cultivated leisure and relaxation. Germany—in particular, the Kingdom of Saxony—had a long and rich café culture dating back to the seventeenth century that East German media, including Für Dich and other popular magazines, exploited to further encourage their readers to draw connections between their present-day coffee habits and a much older European heritage. One of the first and most famous German cafés, “Zum arabischen Kaffeebaum,” began serving Leipzig customers in 1711. The Kaffeebaum was the first coffeehouse in Germany, and it happened to sit within the GDR’s borders, a fact about which state media wasted no opportunity to remind East Germans, pointing to it frequently in news stories related to the coffee trade or in magazine articles discussing coffee culture.53 As inheritors of this café culture, East Germans could partake in a European heritage every time they enjoyed a cup of coffee in one of the “modern” cafés they built. State media also drew on the works of baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who—by virtue of having lived in territories now within the GDR’s borders—could be claimed to belong to a broader, nebulous “East German” culture. Specifically, throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s, radio stations broadcast recordings of Bach’s “Kaffeekantate,” a satirical opera about the coffee bans in the 1770s–1780s under

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Frederick the Great, and magazines and newspapers also took up this theme. The opera follows the exploits of a nobleman’s daughter who claims that coffee “is lovelier than a thousand kisses” and informs her father that any potential suitor would first have to “present me with coffee” if he “wishes to please me.”54 From live performances to references to the opera’s most memorable line, “coffee, coffee, I must have it,” in popular magazines and state newspapers, “Kaffeekantate” was a visible reminder of this much older, respected heritage. Coffee ads, labels, and trademarks also contributed to the legitimation of socialist consumer practices by drawing on tradition to earn consumers’ trust. A 1954 essay in the state advertising trade journal addressed packaging and the significance of product labels, presenting a package of Kathreiner’s Malzkaffee as an example of “remain[ing] faithful to traditional packaging. The ornamental crest recalls the lace in our grandparents’ kitchen. This memory factor gives the packaging the trustworthy domestic character.”55 This essay appeared only a decade after the war’s end; rationing had not yet ended, and shortages—particularly for Genussmittel like coffee—still characterized many Germans’ day-to-day lives, despite the New Course. In physically manifesting traditional artwork and imagery in this way, these labels offered something familiar to Germans, acting as heralds for both coffee’s reentry to the market as well as the stabilization of everyday life. This use of the past specifically adopted imagery and cultural references from the imperial period and avoided any references to either world war or the years in between. Drawing on these particular elements of the past had less to do with recreating a specific past in the present than it did with fashioning expectations for the future and inserting the GDR into the social and cultural landscape of postwar Europe. Certainly, in part, avoiding references to the Third Reich and drawing on a much older cultural heritage was about erasing and avoiding the legacy and memory of National Socialism. Doing so contributed to a cultural amnesia in the East to an even greater extent than it did in the West.56 But in the GDR, “reaching back” in this way was not necessarily a search for “better times”; rather, it constituted an attempt to remind customers that, as East Germans, they still belonged to a much older, much broader European cultural heritage. This should not be read as an attempt on the part of the state to distance the GDR from the Soviet camp or Eastern Bloc networks, but rather serves to highlight that even in official discourse about food and culture, more than one identity was available to East Germans. Especially considering that average East Germans, by the 1960s, compared their material prosperity not with the immediate postwar years but increasingly with West German prosperity, it was important for them to view themselves as belonging both to a European identity and to the broader socialist world.57 Deploying this usable past was about legitimating the GDR’s existence because if East Germans still felt connected to a wider Europe, they might also accept the proclaimed cultural authenticity of German state socialism. From April to May

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1965, for instance, Für Dich featured a trio of ads for the “Moketta II” coffee brewer that boasted a capacity of “six cups in fifteen minutes!” The ad pictured a caricature of a bearded man wearing white robes and a turban sitting crosslegged inside an arch while holding a cup of coffee. Beside this cartoon, a large image of the mokka pot dominated the ad, while the text told readers, “Coffee expels melancholy; at least, thus claim the best coffee connoisseurs in the world, the Arabs. But isn’t it so? Its smell alone can conjure feelings of comfort.”58 The second ad portrayed a man wearing nineteenth-century clothing sitting at a quiet table reading the newspaper, a coffee pot in front of him, a cup in his hand. “Coffee gives comfort,” began the ad, referring to Viennese coffee drinkers who “spent a large amount of their free time in cafés. They appreciated the relaxing atmosphere.”59 Finally, a third ad proclaimed, “Coffee affects stimulation!” and featured an eighteenth-century aristocratic woman sporting an elaborate coiffure and bodice. She sat at a small table holding a small cup of “this fragrant and spicy drink” that “has now been at home in Germany for almost 300 years.” The third ad made use of the more archaic German Fraktur script, further linking it to older German cultural traditions, again invoking and romanticizing the past.60 With each cup of coffee they drank, East Germans partook in a deeper European cultural heritage. Although advertisements and journal articles often invoked phrases like “in our republic” to refer to the GDR, they always wrote of coffee as a permanent and long-standing fixture of this much broader culture—one that situates Europe, not the USSR or even Russia, at its pinnacle. Adopting such imagery appealed to that European past to authenticate East Germany’s place in the present.61 For all its utility in weaving the GDR into a European cultural heritage, this usable past nonetheless presented coffee in a way that often reinforced a racialized understanding of Germans’ place in the world. The “Moketta man” of the first ad was but a caricature of a Middle Eastern man, including exaggerated facial features, and the advertisement appealed to the authority of this racialized stereotype of Arabs as coffee “experts.” Such an appeal hardly represented anything new as the appeal to racial tropes characterized a long-standing trend in German advertising. Early German (and, indeed, European) advertising for colonial goods relied on “exotic motifs,” according to Wolfgang Schivelbusch, such as early advertisements for tobacco traders that frequently featured stock images of barely dressed “natives.”62 Even the spaces in which coffee was consumed contributed to these cultural biases, such as Viennese coffeehouses that portrayed “the Orient” in ways that Tag Gronberg argues played a crucial role “in the articulation of identities, for individuals as well as the city [Vienna] itself.”63 The Moketta man was not the only example of East German cultural media drawing on stereotypes or notions of racial difference. A 1950 edition of Wie? Wann? Wo?—a household advice book on everyday life—provided readers with guidelines for brewing coffee, saying of the beverage:

Figure 2.1. “For friends of good coffee!” Moketta II—advertisements, illustrated by P. Becker (DEWAG). Für Dich 16 (Apr. 1965): 26; Für Dich 17 (Apr. 1965): 26; Für Dich 18 (May 1965): 39 (combined here). Published with permission.

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The coffee is a Negro that robs us of our sleep, says an Arab poet. As far as we know, coffee is not yet a Negro, [because] it must be roasted before becoming dark brown. It is heated to 200 degrees Celsius in large, wide drums, thus preserving its brown color and good smell. Our grandmother used to “burn” the coffee. Today this occurs in a giant roaster. So now we have the Negro. But why does he rob us of our sleep? What is robbing us of sleep is no Negro, but a snow-white substance: the caffeine that is contained deep inside the beans.64

The casual way the book anthropomorphized coffee beans, conflated coffee’s dark color with “blackness,” and associated that “blackness” with theft exemplifies the extent to which certain ideas of race still lingered in the cultural milieu of East German society. German advertising had adopted racial motifs and tropes as early as the turn of the twentieth century, borrowing in particular from stereotypes and exaggerated portrayals of black people in American advertising.65 These tropes intensified during the Third Reich, where they took on even more overtly racist tones, ultimately contributing to National Socialist attempts to promote a racially pure Aryan state.66 In East Germany, a country explicitly and ostensibly founded on the principles of antifascism and anti-imperialism, and a society that claimed to have solved racial inequality, the appearance of such tropes in conspicuous places like household encyclopedias shows how little had changed in terms of casual, internalized, and everyday racism. The GDR’s official anti-imperialist rhetoric made Wie? Wann? Wo?’s racialized portrayal of the beans particularly striking, given coffee’s origins as a bean produced in countries that in 1950 were often still struggling to overthrow imperial rule. The appearance of these racial tropes is especially interesting given official guidelines for packaging standards laid out in the mid-1950s that explicitly discouraged racialized stereotypes in ads and labeling. An article about packaging labels in Neue Werbung declared, “Servile lackeys, tea-drinking geishas and other popular design elements of a time since overcome have no place with us. . . . As at the building of socialism a new ornamentation has developed without the bombast of the past, a new path must also be found for packaging.”67 Despite an official denunciation of these tropes as tasteless and out of place in a socialist society, these appeals to racialized “knowledge” persisted in state-controlled and state-sponsored popular culture, reflecting an important tension: on the one hand, socialist advertising could help establish a clear “break” with a negative past, fulfilling socialism’s ostensible aim of eradicating racial discrimination; on the other hand, the imagery in these and similar ads both betrayed the lingering cultural resonance of that past and revealed some of the limits to the absorption of socialist ideology. Portraying coffee drinking as a deeply European cultural activity provided a direct link between past tradition and a modern present. Even the names of the three principal brands of roasted coffee—Kosta, Rondo and Mona—were

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carefully chosen in order to blend together notions of tradition and hints of sensory impulses. The state advertising firm formed a working group in 1959 to determine names and trademarks for the new products. According to the state advertising trade journal, a product’s name held considerable importance in the development process because a trademark “lets something unknown become tangible to us and achieve a living form. The thing is to be trusted by us by its name.”68 As there were only two distinct price categories for coffee, assigning names meant choosing descriptions that would both accurately describe the physical coffee in each package but also reflect its quality according to pricing categories. To do this, the working group chose a series of adjectives they felt could be associated with coffee generally: flavorful, balanced, smooth, premium, thick, strong, mild, mature, vital, and full-bodied. Using these words, a survey asked participants “which features do you value in coffee?” The respondents most frequently ranked “premium” (edel) and “flavorful” (aromatisch) as their top choices; while “tangy (würzig), “strong,” and “balanced” (ausgeglichen) received average results; “mild” and “thickened” (gebunden) were frequently placed last.69 Finally, the working group used these survey results to finalize the names and descriptions of the new products as follows: • Mona: flavorful, premium • Rondo: mature, smooth • Kosta: strong, full bodied70 By drawing on customer surveys to get a sense of what images and emotions each name conjured in Germans’ minds, planners signaled their interest in developing products that could meet popular expectations. These surveys also relied on the application of market psychology to choose names that could conjure sensation: it was not just a matter of providing enough coffee but rather about supplying a coffee that conveyed meaning to those who drank it. A brand name was associated with a particular product and thus became inseparably linked to the customers’ own experiences with that product.71 The brand became a marker for the quality of a particular product—but only if that quality remained unchanged: “if the quality of goods change for the negative, so too does the trademark lose value, which can negatively affect consumers’ opinions,” argued Herbert Erasmus, editor-in-chief of Neue Werbung, in 1954. Erasmus argued that East German consumers were a “forward-looking, attuned, discerning and production-oriented group” who would “not be deceived or blinded by the glitz and glamour of a trademark once the product loses quality,” as he expected them to “exercise constant and extremely effective scrutiny” over the quality of products.72 Consumers were supposed to associate the names of these East German coffee brands with a particular set of sensory experiences (taste, smell, etc.) that, moreover, were supposed to remain consistent. State advertisers thus presented

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a public image of East German coffee that was at odds with the coffee industry’s prioritization of production volume, encouraging Germans to grow accustomed to the taste of these main brands. From the late 1950s onward, household recipe books, food and gastronomy trade journals, and other publications offered a plethora of recipes and directions on proper brewing methods, different styles of coffee drinks, and how to prepare coffee for guests. A guide to proper coffee brewing, printed in the trade magazine Konsumgenossenschafter in 1969, advised readers to avoid overcooking one’s coffee: “There is still one or another housewife who to save money boils the grounds or does not clean out the old residue in the pot when new coffee is prepared. This spoils the taste of the new drink, as the coffee grounds contain tannic acid.”73 Flavor came not only from proper brewing practices but also a willingness to expand one’s palette; many advice columns in household magazines invited Germans to try different recipes from around the world, providing further evidence of the attempts to insert East Germans’ coffee drinking habits within a global cultural tradition. One book told readers that “coffee can be modified and enriched in flavor using new ingredients. There are a multitude of recipes [for coffee variants]. So, let yourself be guided by the smell of coffee and try one of the following recipes. . . . For you also possess the secrets of other coffee brewers [Kaffeeköche].”74 Of course, one of the motives behind encouraging Germans to experiment with their coffee was as a response to the economic problem of supply shortages. By adding other flavors to their coffee, Germans might very well mask discrepancies in the taste stemming from the frequent changes to the recipes of roasted brands. One might expect that in a social and economic system so heavily focused on industrial productivity, state messages regarding coffee would emphasize caffeine’s stimulating effects and the ways in which coffee contributed to the alertness and energy of the East German workforce. Indeed, work sat at the core of the socialist way of life, a way of life that sought above all to situate one’s labor “at the center of a socialist morality.” This process would in turn fundamentally alter an individual’s relationship to and place within the community, subordinating individual desire and indulgence to the needs of the social group.75 By contrast, public discourse about coffee drinking in fact concentrated on leisure and relaxation, both of which were compatible with socialist concepts of labor and daily life. As mentioned earlier, “virtuous socialist leisure” was defined as activity that was meant “to contribute to the integration of the individual, to allow her full self-possession and realization of her human essence as well as restoring her for the next day’s labor.”76 Leisure contributed to the renewal of one’s energy and, therefore, productive capacity, so it was a healthy and vital component of socialist morality. Within the sphere of work, coffee has long been associated with breaks, dating back to its appearance in factory cafeterias in the late nineteenth century.77 As sources of renewal, coffee breaks could easily be described as contributing to socialist virtue, but the social virtue of breaks relied just as much on interpersonal

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connections, facilitated above all by a warm cup of coffee. “The coffee break was holy,” recalled Jutta Voigt in her memoirs about daily life in the GDR. Whether in a factory, an office, or the home, “a cup of coffee formed the fundamentals of communication, whether with colleagues, comrades, friends, the mechanic from the auto shop, or the tradesman who just installed a new Western faucet above the bathtub.”78 Voigt’s emphasis on coffee as a social lubricant was a common thread in both official and popular conceptions of coffee and breaks. Paul Gratzik described coffee as a social need in his 1977 crime novel, Transportpaule: “The rhythm of people’s life between their old and new walls depends on their coffee breaks. You drink it sweet, hot and in quite a quantity. If you were an anarchist, you could demoralize all the people, were you to block the supply of the beloved coffee. Our workforce can only afford mistakes if you never forget the procuring of coffee, even for a moment.”79 The coffee break was so sacred, in fact, that its power could convey important messages of socialist virtue for East Germans, even children. Hannes Hüttner’s 1969 children’s book, Bei der Feuerwehr wird der Kaffee kalt [At the Firehouse, the Coffee Goes Cold], told the story of a group of firefighters who have just sat for their morning coffee break. Just as the captain is about to pour the pot, the phone rings, and the team must hasten to the scene in their truck, abandoning their coffee for the moment. Upon their return, the phone rings again and they must depart once more. This process repeats itself again and again, such that by the end of their day, the coffee has gone completely cold and is no longer worth drinking.80 The tale itself is useful as an indication of how ubiquitous the coffee break had become in everyday life; children’s books tend to avoid complicated tales with subtle symbolism, preferring clear language and direct messages to convey particular lessons or meanings. Children would recognize coffee as something their parents valued, so the coffee break provided an accessible theme through which to facilitate the story. Beyond narrative considerations, Bei der Feuerwehr also conveyed an important political message: readers were meant to empathize with the firefighters for sacrificing their coffee. Editors at the State Children’s Publishing Firm, responsible for determining the pedagogical and political value of all children’s material, praised Bei der Feuerwehr for providing children with a glimpse into the lives of firefighters and lauded its political message. “The cheery and humorous manner in which the story is told,” wrote the reviewer, “in no way detracts from the image of these firefighters as heroes of socialism, always ready and willing to sacrifice for the greater good.”81 Forgoing a coffee break was not simply an unfortunate turn of events; to state publishers, Bei der Feuerwehr was worthy of printing because it could impart to children important lessons about sacrifice and duty as inherently socialist virtues. The book was approved, printed, and became a popular story, subsequently appearing as an animated film, radio show, and a theatrical production in the 1970s and 1980s.82

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Coffee breaks continued to appear in state-run periodicals throughout the 1960s and 1970s, especially in the form of articles about particular factories and firms. Typically, these stories would include a picture of the featured worker or brigade group during their coffee break. Often, the physical space itself was important, as an appropriately decorated break space was believed to improve relaxation and worker rejuvenation. For example, a 1969 piece in Für Dich on factories portrayed the recently converted “breakfast corner,” a small table partially enclosed by two half walls, where a group of workers sat drinking coffee. The image’s caption explained that while the finances for this project were provided by the factory, the workers themselves purchased the flowers and decorations to “beautify” their space.83 While the space was part of the larger cafeteria, its naming as a “breakfast corner” was an important distinction that gave the impression of comfort and personalization. Beautifying break rooms was a popular activity, encouraged by the regime, often initiated by factory management.84 A 1972 article in Kultur im Heim explored break rooms across different industries, asking readers, “Where do you take your meal during work? Where can you relax and collect new energy?” Whether one took a short coffee or long lunch break, “the break is certainly not a side issue and nowhere should be treated as such.” Under the right circumstances, a proper atmosphere in the break room could “positively affect worker happiness and workplace enjoyment.”85 As Katherine Pence has pointed out, the portrayal of workers enjoying coffee together in restful scenarios conveys a significant idea: coffee could foster solidarity between citizens through idle relaxation in the break room, not necessarily through work.86 In a sense, then, workers’ opportunities to form meaningful social bonds away from, yet within the context of, their labor could be interpreted as a form of self-awareness, a kind of “eigensinnig” behavior.87 Yet given the importance of workplace breaks in the state’s promotion of a better life, another idea was likely at play, one that relied on the past in a subtle way to encourage a belief in the social harmony brought about by socialism. In his original concept of Eigensinn, Alf Lüdtke argued that in the factories of the nineteenth century, breaks formed part of an experience of personal workplace protest, or self-awareness; not necessarily as a means of direct resistance to a capitalist system but rather as a way of capturing a little dignity for oneself in an otherwise restrictive set of structures and relationships of everyday factory life.88 One could examine the GDR’s official discourse of work and breaks through a similar lens, in which case, it is precisely the state’s explicit discussion—disseminated through trade journals and household magazines—of the break as a time and space away from work that exemplifies the manner in which the regime viewed its relationship with workers and the general population. Enjoying the company of fellow workers in restful, peaceful circumstances was a way to encourage a belief that in socialism, the past conflict between worker and employer had been overcome. Now the “company,” synonymous with the state, encouraged the breaks and facilitated the improve-

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ments to the breakroom in a show of solidarity with workers. No longer at odds with one another, so the logic went, worker and manager sat on equal footing during breaks and in break rooms, which had become democratized spaces. In fact, it was precisely because modern life introduced so many new demands on the socialist body that relaxing with coffee could be praised as the answer to an increasingly hectic experience. East German media praised coffee for its “reproductive powers” on account of its stimulating effects, particularly in discussions about adapting to the broad social and cultural changes brought about by modern life. Urban dwellers in particular were said to be living under “increasingly hectic conditions,” such as greater participation in the workforce and a loss of free time. Neither these tensions between a hectic lifestyle and relaxation nor the solutions to these problems were new; nor were they unique to East Germany. These kinds of issues constituted part of a “modern dilemma” experienced throughout Europe. East Germany’s answers to these problems often reflected approaches in the West, suggesting that East and West Germans shared similar experiences as they each encountered important cultural shifts in the second half of the twentieth century. “Everyone knows that city dwellers (above all Berliners) lead quite a hectic life,” wrote Kultur im Heim in 1958, noting that commuters especially “feel constantly driven by the second hands of their watches so as not to miss their streetcar or subway.” The pressures of work and family placed heavy demands on East Germans, leaving little time, the article implied, for indulgences. Yet indulging was precisely what Kultur im Heim recommended, insisting, “This haste is not conducive to health, and you should therefore allow at least as much time as you can in the morning to drink a cup of coffee in peace.”89 A healthy lifestyle depended on finding “balance between hard work and relaxation.”90 Stress and illness were made worse by “the inability or failure to ‘disconnect’ in the evenings and weekends and to consciously distance oneself from the workplace.” It was quite easy, suggested the author of one household encyclopedia, to neglect the warning signs: “Work continues late into the evening. Several cups of strong bean coffee must keep us awake. After that we can’t fall asleep—so a sleeping pill must help. In the morning we’re tired—so more coffee and cigarettes! But this is exhaustive overextension of our health. It must not be like this. Rest and leisure are important basic components of our daily life.”91 For those with little time to prepare coffee and relax in these ways, Kultur im Heim also had an answer: a new range of steel, electric appliances, including coffee grinders and brewing machines. A series of images displayed the various coffee machines, each with a caption explaining its capabilities—highlighting in particular the number of cups per second each was capable of brewing. Rapid brewing time continued to be one of the most frequently highlighted features of coffee machines—consider again the Moketta II coffee maker discussed earlier that premiered in 1965. Even the coffee itself could also contribute to saving time, depending on its form. As technology improved by the late 1960s and early

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1970s, firms were capable of extracting caffeine powder from raw beans more efficiently, allowing for the development of instant coffee. When the instant coffee Im Nu entered circulation in 1971, Der Fachberater hailed it as “a modern instant coffee product!”—a “better tasting coffee” that could be prepared “by hand, in hot or cold water [without any machines]” because “most of the preparation work has been done at the plant.”92 Nonetheless, instant coffee failed to achieve the levels of consumption of roasted and ersatz blends. A report in 1969 revealed that although most Germans were aware of the time-saving benefits of instant coffee (61 percent of instant coffee drinkers cited time saving as their primary purchasing motive), the IfM lamented that “only 6.9 percent” of households drank instant coffee.93 In the above cases, it is noteworthy that neither publication recommended simply drinking coffee as a means of stress management. Indeed, relying on coffee to “fuel” an already unhealthy work schedule was precisely what these authors discouraged. Instead, the appropriate response to a hectic lifestyle and demanding work necessitated relaxation and drinking one’s coffee “in peace.” Here, then, coffee acted primarily not as a stimulant capable of fueling East Germans’ capacity to work longer or harder; rather, the act of pausing for coffee was an antidote to that hectic lifestyle.

Figure 2.2. The modern socialist woman: Electric coffee grinders, 1957. Kultur im Heim 4 (1957): 38.

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Limited free time—or, more importantly, an increased proportion of one’s waking hours dedicated to work—was not a problem unique to East Germany society. In fact, messages about the need to make time for leisure and relaxation in the GDR fit remarkably well with contemporary ideas of work-life balance in the West. By the 1960s in West Germany, for example, more and more women were entering the workforce, leading to the decline of certain household traditions such as the midday family meal at home. Working days grew in length, shortening lunch breaks and limiting free (and family) time to weekends. These trends led to changes in West German diets—in particular, a turn toward foods that were less healthy and required less preparation time.94 Health officials in the Federal Republic also noted an increase in recreational drug use (including alcohol and tobacco) during the 1960s, findings that motivated advertising campaigns to defend “public health.”95 As mentioned earlier, state planners and designers in the East tried to rationalize consumption by reeducating the public to make “moral” consumer decisions that rejected “tasteless kitsch.”96 Form and taste went hand in hand for functionalist designers. As one particularly influential designer, Horst Michel, told advertising tradesmen in 1955, “An object must be assessed on its usefulness, simplicity and clarity of its shape and not on its outward appearance and the low price.” To Michel and designers like him, “useless decorations” and “poorly designed” products “do not provide coziness, but rather discomfort.” Designers, producers, and retailers had a responsibility “to enlighten customers about quality and use value,” as well as to teach restraint so customers recognized and avoided “petit-bourgeois Kitsch.”97 Home encyclopedias warned Germans of the dangers of ornament and “kitsch,” elements that under capitalism “gave rise to extravagant modernism” and were a “cheap imitation” of previously handmade (and presumably more “authentic”) products.98 Making responsible, moral consumer decisions was a key element of state and party officials’ attempts to construct a “socialist living culture,” a culture to which coffee drinking belonged.99 Design journals sought to visualize the modern socialist apartment, publishing photos of furniture and decor that featured the simple lines and clean, clutter-free spaces that in part characterized midcentury modernism. Coffee was present in these utopian visions, typically in the form of a coffee set made of gleaming white porcelain sitting atop a table in either a kitchen or living room.100 Coffee’s appearance in these articles and images at first appears peculiar. Design journals were interested in displaying the overall aesthetic of a room; human models typically did not appear in the photos, and it is highly unlikely that the photographers would have bothered to pour anything into the coffee sets in these staged images. Yet these images do not present us with a “Schrödinger’s coffee” dilemma: it was not the coffee itself but the idea of drinking coffee, either alone or with guests, that these images encouraged. In this way, coffee’s nearly ubiquitous presence

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in these design journals acted more as a legitimation of the designs themselves. Coffee was tradition being brought into the modern aesthetic. Made of East German porcelain, these coffee sets were important as much for the idea they conveyed as for the material from which they were sculpted.101 Choosing the correct dishes and serveware was integral to “decorating the modern table,” as state architect Hans Lewizky told readers in a 1964 essay.102 Properly adhering to socialist principles of design could also enhance one’s dining experience, as “The enjoyment of a meal is increased if the food and drinks are served on tasteful dishes in elegant glasses.”103 Paul Krauß, the lead designer at VEB Porcelain Combine Colditz, argued that cultivating a genuine socialist living culture could only happen “if we are mindful of our attitude to things, and realize that beauty does not come to us through poorly copied, minutiae of yesterday. Our society has the moral and material foundations to create the best cultural traditions that also include the everyday.”104 Household porcelain brought these cultural traditions into East German homes because it was, according to one magazine, “An ornament of the cultivated coffee table. A perfectly shaped design of our time. Inexpensive and affordable for everyone. Household porcelain: always a welcome gift of lasting value.” “Ornament” was in this case not a problem because the other qualities of porcelain—being affordable for all and conforming to accepted designs—recast “ornament” within the accepted parameters of a “socialist living culture.”105 Porcelain coffee pots and cups served two important interests for the regime. First, because porcelain was a material produced within the GDR, it relied on very few imports, thus avoiding foreign currency expenses. Second, and perhaps more important, because it had been manufactured for centuries in the territories now encompassing the GDR, the gleaming, pure white porcelain coffee set could also serve as another form of a “usable past”—but one that was now “democratized” and accessible to all. One advertisement for decorative porcelain coffee services in December 1963 highlighted this very distinction, saying, “[what was] once so prohibitively expensive [is] a commodity today, thanks to mechanized production. In households of our time, porcelain, and china in particular, belong with the indispensable possessions of every housewife.”106 A similar ad in the following issue pointed out that “only 150 years ago the prerogative of the wellto-do, [the featured coffee service,] is affordable as household porcelain for all today. Our lifestyle-adapted forms are products of a tradition-rich industry.”107 In making appropriate design choices in both furniture and household accessories, East Germans participated in this “socialist living culture.” Even here, however, one can sense tension within these messages between sociability and supposed relaxation. A 1957 article in Kultur im Heim featured a color photo of a woman sitting on a sofa bed listening to the radio and drinking coffee. In comparison to earlier examples, here we see a move toward a more private, cozy atmosphere, surrounded by elements of the new socialist design aesthetic: simple

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Figure 2.3. New apartments and the East German coffee service “Drei neue Küchenmodelle,” Kultur im Heim 1 (1957): 3.

decorations, functional shelving, and the radio, the woman appears relaxed and comfortable, her feet up. That was precisely the point: she was taking a moment to enjoy a cup of coffee and listen to the radio—she was not doing housework. Nevertheless, for all the implication of leisure, the woman appears in an evening dress, made up, and adorned with jewelry; all rather formal attire for the simple indulgence suggested by the rest of the image. These final elements betray the staged nature of the photograph but also demonstrate the uneasy fit between lingering dreams of female sociability and the design elements of a “modern” functional socialist way of life.

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Figure 2.4. “Virtuous leisure,” Kultur im Heim 1 (1957): 4.

Sociability, Solidarity, and Suspicion—Coffee and Social Tensions The home was where one entertained guests, and coffee played an important role in upholding certain social customs and expectations of proper hospitality, customs that remained in place under state socialism, albeit with official attempts to reframe some of them. Supplying one’s guests with coffee as they arrived and after dinner was typical when hosting—a practice neither unique to East Germany nor

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out of fashion today. What to serve one’s guests was “not just a question of the purse;” argued Unser Haushalt: “It serves no purpose and gives a bad impression if one seeks to outdo others. [It is] not what we set before our guests that is important, but how we maintain sociability.”108 The purpose of entertaining guests, the article implied, was to foster community, solidarity, and meaningful exchanges between citizens rather than to use such events as opportunities to showcase one’s material prosperity. Whether Unser Haushalt’s readers adopted such a message is unclear, though the presence of such a “guideline” implies a perceived need to direct East Germans in this way. This suggests that, at least to the book’s author, there were concerns that East Germans held inappropriate views about their roles as hosts. As a lubricant for social gatherings, coffee facilitated those exchanges, particularly after dinner, because according to Unser Haushalt, “any successful evening” would “conclude with a cup of coffee.” Sharing coffee with guests formed a part of “relaxation,” an indulgence enjoyed for its taste and power to bring people together, not always for its stimulating effects.109 Consider, for example, the advice given by Festlich Gedeckte Tisch [Festively Decorated Table] that an engagement party “is best celebrated with coffee . . . nowhere else can two unfamiliar families get together more easily than with the fragrance of a delicious coffee! How cheerily the conversation gets going!”110 Hosting and entertaining was supposed to be conducted in such a way as to reinforce new virtues of the socialist personality by strengthening bonds with coworkers, neighbors, and friends. Above all, it was meant to break down the class barriers that would have previously made such gatherings unheard of. As one magazine put it, “the word luxury has an aftertaste. It is an almost indecent word that delivers remorse immediately following pleasure.” A remedy to this conundrum, the book’s authors averred, was in the social activity of enjoying coffee with others as “at the same time, coffee also fosters thought, begins conversations, inspires ideas . . . and thereby the word sounds new to us again. . . . We enjoy life, and are happy with such luxury.”111 Indulgence was not a problem when the purpose focused on fostering solidarity among Germans. Reality could clash with this ideal in some circumstances where, instead of fostering solidarity, unequal access to coffee could reveal and exacerbate social tensions. While it may have been customary to offer guests a cup of coffee, which coffee one placed on the table could quickly identify a host’s privileged status in East German social hierarchies. Most East Germans purchased the principal brands available in general retail, Kosta and Rondo, as these were the most affordable and available brands (Kosta accounted for 80 percent of production). At 10 DM per 125 g package, Mona cost one-third more than a package of Kosta; even as incomes generally increased in the 1960s, Mona represented a significant additional expense that, as the IfM report demonstrated, placed it out of reach for most households. Coffee remained a staple inclusion in Western gift packages throughout the 1950s, even after the government instituted maximum

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volumes.112 After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, West Germans continued to send gifts but did so now through the GDR’s mail order service, GENEX (Geschenkdienst und Kleinexport GmbH). GENEX was one of several hard currency stores founded in the 1950s as places where Westerners could purchase Western (or Western-quality) goods in East Germany in exchange for hard currency.113 The Intershop, another hard currency retailer, catered specifically to Western visitors in East Germany beginning in 1955 and gradually expanding over the course of the 1960s and 1970s.114 East Germans were initially prohibited from shopping at hard currency stores or possessing hard currency (though there was a flourishing black market trade), so having Western relatives who could secure items from these retailers provided a distinct advantage for a fortunate few. Under Erich Honecker’s government, the Intershops would undergo a sweeping set of changes once the government recognized their potential to generate hard currency revenue for the state.115 In 1974, the state decriminalized the possession of foreign currency, allowing East Germans to acquire, save, and spend hard currency legally for the first time. The change aimed at curbing black market trade and redirecting that purchasing activity into the hard currency stores. The plan worked, at least in terms of securing hard currency from the population: by 1975, the Department of Commercial Coordination (Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung—KoKo) calculated that 85 percent of Intershop revenue across the country came from East Germans, with sales rising from 286 million West German marks in 1974 to 896 million by 1978.116 The Intershops worsened social tensions between citizens, contributing to the very social stratification that socialism was supposed to eliminate. Foreign money became the ticket to a material life that was no longer only perceivably more enjoyable but was demonstrably better. Few East Germans had the means to acquire the Western money needed to gain entry; the most common source of Western money was Beziehungen (relationships—often called “Vitamin-B”): relations or friends in West Germany who would send money in care packages. East Germans in border regions could also earn tips from foreign travelers in service industry jobs or from jobs that allowed them to travel abroad. For the majority of East Germans who lacked such connections or opportunities, the hard currency stores—and the East Germans fortunate enough to patronize them—quickly became a highly visible, open symbol of privilege in a social and economic system that was supposed to have eliminated precisely this kind of exclusivity and material disparity. Another retailer, Delikat, opened in 1966 and offered a variety of foreign and higher-quality domestic foodstuffs. Unlike Intershop or GENEX, East Germans were allowed to shop at Delikat from the beginning, and the store accepted East German marks.117 To offset the hard currency expenditures required to make goods like Jacobs Krönung—a favored West German coffee brand—available in Delikat, the state arbitrarily set consumer prices far above those of similar domes-

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tic goods in “normal” retail. Many of these goods were also subject to a significant surtax intended to “soak up” East Germans’ growing excess income, so the prices in Delikat still placed these specialty goods—such as foreign or better-quality coffee brands—well out of reach for many East Germans.118 Access to these stores—and the Western coffee brands within—contributed to the stratification of East German society by creating different categories and classes of goods for some groups, belying the regime’s claims of having established an egalitarian society devoid of class structures. Offering a guest a cup of “rare” coffee like Jacobs Krönung might satisfy the requirements of being a good host, but placing that brand in front of someone who lacked the means to acquire it also signaled one’s privileged access to “better” goods.119

Conclusion Genussmittel like coffee were entirely compatible with state socialism so long as the purpose and intent behind their consumption lay in fostering meaningful bonds with one’s community. The regime’s own rhetoric not only praised coffee for its physiological effects as a stimulant but also encouraged Germans to enjoy their coffee as a social activity that fostered rest and relaxation, and one through which they partook in an older German and, indeed, European cultural tradition. In this way, the regime framed coffee and its consumption as a socialist product and practice. Yet weaving these ideas together encouraged Germans to value their coffee for its stimulant effects and for the sensory experience it offered through taste and aroma. Preferences of quality, taste, and pleasure persisted in East Germans’ consumer choices, and they continued to believe that a product’s economic value (its price) ought to reflect their own subjective taste preferences. In placing coffee so centrally into its own rhetoric of participation in the socialist state, the SED also tied its own legitimacy to its ability to facilitate that participation by maintaining the supply of good coffee. As the SED would discover when world prices suddenly skyrocketed from 1975 to 1977, East Germans were more than willing to defend their expectations of access to quality coffee when the substance was adulterated, undermining the pleasure they derived from the act of coffee drinking.

Notes 1. Jupp, “Espresso Hungaria,” BZ, 4 November 1961, 3. 2. Ibid. Other possible definitions for Gemütlichkeit include “comfort” or “coziness.”

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3. Ibid. 4. Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 42. 5. At the same time, Jupp’s framing of coffee drinking as a relaxed, social activity in Espresso Hungaria, a café located on Stalinallee, also (perhaps inadvertently) hinted at certain inequities within East German society. Built in the early 1950s as part of the regime’s attempt to address the housing problem, the massive apartment complexes lining Stalinallee provided a showpiece of socialist engineering and prosperity and were reserved for highly productive “activists,” “innovators” of industry, and other “heroes of labor” (Helden der Arbeit). The café’s location simultaneously associated it with this urban modernization while extending an air of exclusivity to it—a peculiar tone to take within the context of an alleged leveling and equalizing of society under socialism. See Doris Müller, “Die Stalinallee in der politischen Propaganda im ersten Jahr des ‘Nationalen Aufbauprogramms Berlin 1952,” in Parteiauftrag. Ein neues Deutschland. Bilder, Rituale und Symbole der frühen DDR, ed. Dieter Wiegelmann, 373–84 (Berlin: Koehler und Amelang, 1997); Greg Castillo, “Domesticating the Cold War: Household Consumption as Propaganda in Marshall Plan Germany,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (April 2005): 261–88. On the state’s approach to architecture and housing generally, see Joachim Palutzki, Architektur in der DDR (Berlin: Riemer, 2000). 6. Ina Merkel argues that consumption played a vital role in shaping expectations about improving living standards, a goal to which the SED committed itself, thus tying the party’s political legitimacy directly to its ability to improve those living conditions. See Merkel, Utopie und Bedürfnis. Die Geschichte der Konsumkultur in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 410–15. Mark Landsman holds that while consumerism proved a constant thorn in the regime’s side, “the maintenance of power required periodic concessions to consumerism.” See Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: East Germany Between Productivism and Consumerism, 1948–1961 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 222; Monika Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum: Kaffeekonsum in beiden deutschen Staaten (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), 117. 7. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), 6. 8. As noted in the introduction, Eli Rubin and Sandrine Kott, in particular, have argued that studying East Germans’ daily lives is important for understanding the “Gramscian ways” in which East Germans internalized the rules of socialism, the meanings behind ideology, politics, economics, culture, and their own identities as part of the system of socialism. See Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics & Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 8; Sandrine Kott, Communism Day-to-Day: State Enterprises in East German Society, trans. Lisa Godin-Roger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 8. Michel de Certeau made a similar argument in a broader (and discipline-defying) sense when he challenged the idea that people were passive creatures, “guided by established rules.” Rather, he maintained that everyday life constitutes a practice as through the everyday “art of doing” human beings create, produce, and invent their own lives. See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). 9. Household advice books are a rich source of material on everyday life in the GDR. For examples of their use, see Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 136–41; Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially her discussion of these books as a means to reinforce bourgeois gender roles within East German households on 191–93. Historians have also examined these kinds of texts in other socialist contexts, such as Susan Reid’s discussion of gender in advice books in the Soviet Union during the Khrushchev era. See Susan Reid, “Cold War in

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10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 211–52. Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 2010), 95–103; Rubin, Synthetic Socialism, 47, 58; Betts, Within Walls, 126–35. Ina Merkel, “Luxus im Sozialismus: Eine Widersinnige Fragestellung?,” in “Luxus und Konsum”: Eine historische Annäherung, ed. Reinhold Reith and Torsten Meyer, 221–36 (Münster: Waxmann, 2003). Susan Reid and David Crowley, eds., Pleasures in Socialism: Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 22. Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 6. The 1961 Third Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, from which the GDR took its cue, had proclaimed that “virtuous socialist leisure was understood [as] reproductive activity” that was meant “to restore [workers] for the next day’s labor.” Reid and Crowley, Pleasures in Socialism, 30. See also Kleine Enzyklopädie: Die Frau (Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie, 1963), 588; Das kleine Haushaltbuch (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1969), 133; Das kleine Haushaltbuch (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1976), 121; Fritz Lickint, Wem schaden Alkohol, Tabak und Kaffee? (Berlin: VEB Verlag Volk und Gesundheit, 1954), 7–8. One consumer guide on coffee firmly rejected popular opinions of roasted coffee being a daily “food,” insisting on its label as a stimulant owing to its deleterious health effects: “Stimulants have no, or entirely insignificant, dietary value. Their value is based solely on their stimulating effects on the nervous system.” Adolf Krell, Bodo Körner, Carl Rabbel, and Joachim Stock, Warenkunde Lebensmittel, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: VEB Fachbuchverlag, 1961), 407. Themes such as relaxation, stimulation, and pleasure were present in ads outside the GDR as well. In West Germany, for instance, as early as the 1950s, ads “focused on celebration, fellowship, family life, luxury and pleasure, which had become part of the every day.” Similarities such as this further reinforce the need to discuss the ways in which East German cultural experiences often reflected, not contrasted, those of Western Europe. See Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 147. There is a growing body of literature on the notion of a “useable past” in both postwar Germanys. Briefly, a small sampling includes Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, eds., The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Philipp Gassert and Alan Steinweis, eds., Coping with the Nazi Past: West German Debates on Nazism and Generational Conflict, 1955–1975 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006); Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). BArchB DC 20-I/4/344, Ministerrat der DDR, Sitzung des Präsidiums des MR vom 24. Sept. 1959, Punkt 2. The brands were later announced in the state’s legal gazette (which typically announced new laws in the GDR). See BArchB DE 1/25084, Gesetzblatt der DDR, Berlin, 24. September 1959, Sonderdruck Nr. 1151. Preisanordnung Nr. 1556: Anordnung über Preise für Roh- und Röstkaffee vom 24. September 1959, 1. BArchB DE 1/25084, Merkblatt über Maßnahmen anläßlich der Preissenkung für Traubenwein und Röstkaffee, Berlin, den 25. Sept 1959, 1. Also cited in Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 101. Richard Wilk, “A Taste of Home: The Cultural and Economic Significance of European Food Exports to the Colonies,” in Food and Globalization: Consumption, Markets and Politics in the Modern World, ed. Alexander Nützenadel and Frank Trentmann, 93–108 (New York: Berg, 2008), 98.

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20. BArchB DE 1/25084, Merkblatt über Maßnahmen anläßlich der Preissenkung für Traubenwein und Röstkaffee, Berlin, den 25. Sept 1959, 1. 21. Pleasure also featured heavily in the themes of several other articles, for example, “Rezepte, die man sucht” in April; “Mixereien mit Kaffee; Spritzige und gemixte Getränke mit Kaffee” and “Die Campingzeit beginnt” in June; “Rezepte und Zubereitungstips” and “Die Bedeutung des Kaffees bei uns in der DDR’ in August; and “Eine gemütliche Kaffeestunde daheim: Wie decke ich einen Kaffeetisch” in September. BArchB, DE1/25085, Ulbrich (Federführendes Mitglied des Werbekollektivs der Röstindustrie und des Redaktionskollegiums), Themenplan für “Interessantes für Kaffeeverkäufer,” 15. Dez. 1960. 22. BArchB, DE 1/25084, Werbedienst der Lebensmittelindustrie, Kurzprotokoll über die Besprechungen der Werbekommission Kaffeewerbung am 25. Mai 1960 in Halle, Berlin, den 27.5.1960, 3. 23. Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 44; Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 74, 207–209; Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, 170. 24. Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 48. 25. BArch DN 1/10943, Verfügungen und Mitteilungen des Ministeriums für Handel und Versorgung, Anweisung Nr. 14/59—Handel mit Kaffee, vom 6.3.1959, cited in Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 100. 26. BArchB DY42/1401, Beschluss der Zentralen Konferenz der Süss-, Dauerbackwaren-, Kaffeeund Teeindustrie vom 29.4.1959 zur Lösung der nächsten Aufgaben bei der Entwicklung der Süss-und Dauerbackwaren- sowie der Kaffee- und Teeindustrie, 12. 27. “Bärchen ärgert sich: Qualitätsstandpunkte,” BZ 16 (19 Mar. 1960), 8. 28. BArchB DE 1/25085, Brief von Paschke (Staatliches Kontor für pflanzliche Erzeugnisse der Lebensmittelindustrie) an SPK lebensmittelindsutrie gruppe pflanzlich Erzeugnisse, den 16. Juni 1960; Brief von Klevesath an Rat des Bezirkes Wirtschaftsrat UA Lebensmittelindustrie, 21. April 1960; BArchB, DE 1/25084, Staatliches Kontor für pflanzliche Erzeugnisse der Lebensmittelindustrie an der SPK, 24. November 1960. In July, industry officials called for the removal of Robusta beans from Kosta after 1 August as a temporary measure in anticipation of “certain difficulties” in obtaining Robusta beans that summer. BArchB, DE 1/25084, Brief von Schöbe an SPK, 12. Juli 1960. 29. When a December 1960 delivery of raw Brazilian Minas coffee contained an abnormally high portion of “inferior quality” beans, planners recommended an immediate 10 percent reduction in the ratio of Minas coffee in Kosta. BArchB DE 1/25084, Schäbe an Niedergesäß (Staatliches Kontor für pflanzliche Erzeugnisse der Lebensmittelindustrie), 10.12.1960. 30. Ibid. 31. André Steiner, The Plans That Failed: An Economic History of East Germany, 1945–1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 104. 32. These discussions within the coffee industry also reflect broader changes and shifts within the political sphere of East German economic policy. The SED introduced the NÖS in 1963, which decentralized most of the state’s planning authority and allowed individual Volkseigener Betriebs (VEBs—People’s Own Enterprises) to determine their own production quotas. The NÖS was intended to streamline production in the hopes of achieving a more efficient economy by introducing profit incentives for firms, but because the SED refused to relinquish ultimate authority over the flow of money, and because firms were still beholden to the demands of yearly plan fulfillment, the system failed to achieve the flexibility originally intended. See Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 49–54; Rubin, Synthetic Socialism, 174–75; on the failures of the NÖS, see Steiner, Plans That Failed, 110–15. 33. BArchB DE 1/25085, Brief von Wiesner an Niedergesäß, 25. Juni 1960, 3–4.

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34. BArchB, DE 1/25085, Brief von Hans Gömann an Staatliche Plankommission, no date. 35. BArchB, DE4/12094, Protokoll über die Sondersitzung der Arbeitsgruppe Kaffee/Tee am 14.6.1963 zur kompl. Beurteilung aller bisher vorliegenden Verbesserungsvorschläge des Koll. Gömann, 3.7.1963, 19. 36. Results from these surveys were not published but functioned instead as internal reports designed to provide a basis for future coffee production. Using the data from the 1960s, researchers hoped to develop a prognosis for maintaining coffee consumption until 1980. In their preamble, they indicated their aim to “determine the impact” of changing conditions “on objective and subjective consumer-shaped factors” over the coming decades. Thus, while the reports require the same careful scrutiny one would generally apply to most statistical data (especially that produced by a dictatorship), they nonetheless provide interesting insights into the intended outcomes of the IfM and coffee planners. BArch: DL 102/394, Lutz Roland, Petra Leopold, and Ursula Krause, eds., Prognose zur Entwicklung des Verbrauchs von Röstkaffee bis 1980, Teil 1 (Leipzig: Institüt für Marktforschung, 1969), preamble (no page number). 37. Ibid., 10. 38. Ibid., 11. 39. The IfM’s study was based on responses to surveys filled out by 1,341 households throughout the GDR in July 1968. Originally, 2,480 households were approached. BArchB: DL 102/403, Lutz Roland, Petra Leopold, and Ursula Krause, eds., Prognose zur Entwicklung des Verbrauchs von Röstkaffee bis 1980, Teil 2: Verbrauchsgewohnheiten bei Röstkaffee—Befragungsergebnis (Leipzig: Institüt für Marktforschung, 1969), 3–4; ibid., Tabelle 109: Die Häufigkeit des Verbrauchs von Bohnenkaffee in befragten Haushaltgrößengruppen; Tabelle 116: Die Häufigkeit des Verbrauchs von Kaffee-Ersatz in befragten Haushaltgrößengruppen. 40. BArchB: DL 102/403, Roland, Leopold, and Krause, Prognose, Teil 2, Tabelle 118: Die Häufigkeit des Verbrauchs von Kaffee-Ersatz in befragten Haushalten untergliedert nach Einkommensgruppen. 41. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 273–74. 42. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 121. West German sources indicate that market supply for roasted coffee jumped from 95.2 kilotons (kt) in 1955 to 169.5 kt in 1961 as household expenditures for coffee remained fairly consistent, representing between 17 and 19 percent of monthly beverage expenses over the same period. See Gesellschaft für Konsumforschung, S 1962 046, Der westdeutsche Getränkemarkt, Tabelle 16: Marktversorgung mit Kaffee und Tee, 64. The author thanks Robert Terrell at Syracuse University for providing this document from his own archival research. It should also be noted that during the 1930s, Germans reportedly drank an average of 5 kg of coffee and coffee substitutes per annum, according to Adam Tooze. See Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Penguin Books, 2007), 142. 43. East German coffee consumption increased from 0.6 kg to 1.5 kg per capita between 1958 and 1961, stabilizing until 1970, when it increased again from 1.5 kg to 2.17 kg. BArchB: DL 102/403, Roland, Leopold, and Krause, Prognose, Teil 2, Tabelle 118. 44. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 163, 188–91. An issue with Sigmund’s own estimates, however, lies in an absence of hard data on the volume of coffee in gift packages. She cites the IfM’s study from 1978 that lists estimates for the average volume of coffee in a gift package (about 363 g), as well as the estimated total volume of Western coffee imported through gift packages in 1977 (4,257 t). These figures do not provide her with an average volume for 1960–1977, and even the IfM’s own estimates were based on its calculations of the average volume of a single package, based on the total number of packages. In fact, a section of the IfM report discussing gift packages specifically indicates that though the IfM carried out an investigation of the volume of coffee arriving through such packages, the results were “to remain secret” and

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45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

were withheld by the IfM (section 4.4). It is thus very difficult to accurately estimate the precise volume of Western coffee sent through gift packages for the period in question. Of an estimated 26 million marks spent on foodstuffs, East Germans had spent approximately 1.5 million marks on coffee in 1961. BArchB: DL 102/403, Roland, Leopold, and Krause, Prognose, Teil 1, 18. BArch: DL 102/394, Roland, Leopold, and Krause, Prognose, Teil 1, Anlage 1: Fragebogen, 5. Ibid., 42. BArch: DL 102/394, Roland, Leopold, and Krause, Prognose, Teil 1, Anlage 1: Fragebogen, 37. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 50. “Kaffee Kaffee dass muss ich haben,” Für Dich 5 (Jan. 1967): 24. This figure was also substantiated by the GDR’s own statistical data on beverage consumption, which placed bean coffee in fourth place behind nonalcoholic refreshments, alcoholic drinks, and milk, at 15.5 percent of total drink consumption. Kaffee-Ersatz followed, with 6.7 percent of total drink consumption. See Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 164. “Kaffee Kaffee dass muss ich haben,” 26; see also Rosemarie Sitte, ed., Kaffee oder Tee (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1970): 2; “Schwarz wie die Nacht, heiß wie die Hölle, süß wie die Liebe: Kaffee,” Guter Rat 3 (1969): 8. Quoted in Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 33. See also Hans-Joachim Schulze, with illus. Frank Wahle, Ey! Wie schmeckt der Coffee süße: Johann Sebastian Bachs Kaffee-Kantate in ihrer Zeit (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1987), 10. Gerhard Boerger, “Unser Sorgenkind—die Verpackung,” Neue Werbung: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Werbung 6 (Sep. 1954): 10. Jeffrey Herf argues that in East Germany, official memory of Nazism remained in effect until the collapse of the regime because of a failure to adequately engage with the past. See Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 162. More recently, Jon Berndt Olsen has challenged the idea of this stagnant memory culture to argue that both official and unofficial representations of the Nazi past were anything but static and evolved over time. See Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945–1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 9. West German coffee firms also played with the blending of tradition and modernity. A series of Jacobs-Kaffee ads in the 1950s tried to unite tradition and modernity “under one hat.” One Jacob’s ad from 1957 portrayed a “grandmother” with a wooden, manual coffee grinder, while another ad portrayed a fashionable young woman with short hair and both her electric kettle and grinder. The image of the grandmother still included elements of mid-century design, like modern kitchen cabinets and an artistic, stylized clock. The subtext read “freshly oven baked bread and homemade strawberry jam are gone, but the most important thing we still have: Jacob’s Coffee.” The second ad with the younger woman read: “She encounters the demands of the every day. She knows nothing of the school of mixing, of roasting experience that Jacobs has for a century, nothing of the best coffee plants of the world. She knows only that she can trust in her taste. And on the taste of her mother, her stepmother, grandmother, etc.” See Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 146. “Moketta II—Für Freunde guten Kaffees!” Für Dich 16 (Apr. 1965): 26. “Moketta II—Für Freunde guten Kaffees!” Für Dich 17 (Apr. 1965): 26. “Moketta II—Für Freunde guten Kaffees!” Für Dich 18 (May 1965): 39. Jon Berndt Olsen has explored the GDR’s attempts to control and shape East German memory culture, including an approach that venerated the history of the German working class in order to legitimate the SED’s rule in the present. See Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth, 72–75.

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62. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), 182. As David Ciarlo’s work on Wilhelmine Germany has shown, ads that drew upon the public’s “knowledge” of racial tropes were in fact themselves responsible for creating that “knowledge” in the first place. For instance, Ciarlo points out that toothpaste ads in 1911 used a gleaming white smile of the African figure “because Africans [were] ‘known’ to have particularly healthy, white teeth. This ‘information,’ however, was conveyed in Germany by two decades of toothpaste advertisements . . . in the first decade of the twentieth century.” See Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 312. 63. Tag Gronberg, “Coffeehouse Orientalism,” in The Viennese Café and Fin-de-Siècle Culture, ed. Charlotte Ashby, Tag Gronberg, and Simon Shaw-Miller, 59–77 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), here 60. S. Jonathan Wiesen has argued that during World War II, German ads occasionally deployed racist images of “hook-nosed Jews” and “African savages cleansing themselves of their blackness in Henkel soaps”—not necessarily as a conscious attempt to promote National Socialist ideology but as a means of “tapping into” the fears and desires of the population, “expressing prejudices consumers shared.” Wiesen, Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 92. 64. Karl Hartl, Wie? Wann? Wo?—Wie das Alltägliche zum Alltäglichen wurde (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1949), 57. Verlag Neues Leben was a firm that typically printed material aimed at youth and young married couples. 65. Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 215. 66. Pamela E. Swett, Selling under the Swastika: Advertising and Commercial Culture in Nazi Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 202–6. 67. Boerger, “Unser Sorgenkind—die Verpackung,” 10. 68. H. Richter, “Mona, Rondo, Kosta: Die psychologische Funktion des Namens in der Werbung,” Neue Werbung: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Werbung 7 (June 1960): 3–30, 4. 69. Ibid., 5. See also Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 102–105. 70. H. Richter, “Mona, Rondo, Kosta,” 6. 71. A growing body of scholarship discusses advertisements as historical sources, arguing that they are not merely passive windows that reflect a certain time and place but rather acted as interactive media that both conveyed and assumed meanings through both their production and consumption. A very brief set of examples includes Siegfried J. Schmidt and Brigitte Spieß, Die Kommerzialisierung der Kommunikation: Fernsehwerbung und sozialer Wandel 1956–1989 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997); Rainer Gries, Produkte als Medien: Kulturgeschichte der Produktekommunikation in der Bundesrepublik und der DDR (Leipzig: Leipziger Universität GmbH, 2003); Swett, Selling under the Swastika. 72. Herbert Erasmus, “Warenzeichen sind Qualitätszeichen,” Neue Werbung: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Werbung 1, no. 3 (August 1954): 1. 73. “Kaffee-ABC,” Konsum Genossenschafter, 19 July 1969, 8. 74. Vom Nachmittagskaffee zum Fünf-Uhr Tee, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1988), 4. See also Sitte, Kaffee oder Tee; Herbert Pilz, Getränke ABC: 2000 Stichwörter über alkoholfreie und alkoholische Getränke (Leipzig: VEB Fachbuchverlag, 1982), 118–19; Wir kochen gut (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1968), 176–77. 75. Kott, Communism Day-to-Day, 100. 76. Reid and Crowley, Pleasures in Socialism, 30. 77. Alf Lüdtke, “Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horseplay: Eigensinn und Politics among Factory Workers in Germany circa 1900,” in Confrontation, Class Consciousness, and the Labor Process: Studies in Proletarian Class Formation, ed. Michael Hanagan and Charles Stephenson, 65–95 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986).

Coffee and the “Modern Comforts” of Socialism | 75

78. Jutta Voigt, Der Geschmack des Ostens: Vom Essen, Trinken und Leben in der DDR (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, 2005), 160. 79. Paul Gratzik, Transportpaule (Rostock: VEB Hirnstorff Verlag Rostock, 1978), 51. Cited in Volker Wünderich, “Die ‘Kaffeekrise’ von 1977. Genußmittel und Verbraucherprotest in der DDR,” Historische Anthropologie 11 (2003): 240–61. 80. Hannes Hüttner, with illlus. Gerhard Lahr, Bei der Feuerwehr wird der Kaffee kalt (East Berlin: Kinderbuchverlag, 1969). 81. BArch DR 1/2259a, Druckgenehmigungsvorgänge. Hannes Hüttner: Bei der Feuerwehr wird der Kaffee kalt (9.2.1968), 3. 82. The animated film appeared in the TV listings of Neue Zeit and Berliner Zeitung for the dates 12 Jan. 1973, 4 Jan. 1974, 19 June 1975, 13 Jan. 1977, and 8 Sep. 1978. The book also remains in print to this day: Hüttner, with illus. Lahr, Bei der Feuerwehr wird der Kaffee kalt (Hemsbach: Beltz, der Kinderverlag, 2019), see https://www.beltz.de/kinder_jugendbuch/produkte/ details/43067-bei-der-feuerwehr-wird-der-kaffee-kalt.html, accessed 13 December 2021. 83. “Schöner Leben mit Automaten,” Für Dich 41 (1969): 22–23, 23. 84. In 1972, for instance, the management at the state baking firm (Bako) “ordered more comfortable chairs and paintings for the breakfast room. Beverage dispensers were set up and food vending was made available throughout the day, especially during breaks. Over time food provisioning became less of a vital necessity and the quality continued to improve. Above all, food was accompanied by and became the center of workers’ leisure time and relaxation. It became unthinkable to hold a party without coffee and cakes for women, and beer and sausages for men.” Kott, Communism Day-to-Day, 59. 85. Dagmar Lais and Bernd Wurlitzer, “Die große und die kleine Pause,” Kultur im Heim 3 (1972): 1–4, here 4. 86. Katherine Pence, “Grounds for Discontent? Coffee from the Black Market to the Kaffeeklatsch in the GDR,” in Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, ed. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, 197–225 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 211. 87. The concept of Eigensinn, or self-awareness, is one originally developed by Alf Lüdtke in reference to factory workers in nineteenth-century Germany (as mentioned here). See Lüdtke, “Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horseplay,” 65–95. Borrowing from his theory, GDR historians have come to apply the term quite broadly to many aspects of the social and cultural history of East Germany, from discussions of possible avenues for resistance versus resistenz to ways of understanding East Germans’ internalization of socialist values. See also Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Berlin: Böhlau Verlag GmbH, 1999). Andrew Port has suggested the term’s utility is waning from overuse—and frequent misuse—leading him to call its over-application one of the “banalities of East German historiography.” The debates and discussions over the term’s utility in the GDR are established and would take up too much space to discuss in detail here, but a sampling of relevant literature includes Port’s introduction to Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler, ed. Mary Fulbrook and Andrew I. Port, 1–32 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Port, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic; Rubin, Synthetic Socialism. 88. Lüdtke, “Cash, Coffee-Breaks, Horseplay,” 79. 89. “Technik im Haushalt,” Kultur im Heim 2 (1958): 27. 90. Wolfgang Polte, Unser Haushalt (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, 1966), 202. 91. Ibid. 92. Harry Nowack, “Im Nu: ein modernes INSTANT-Kaffeemittel,” Der Fachberater 1 (1972): 7. Similarly, taking virtually no time to prepare at all, Bero Instant was “A modern coffee in our

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93. 94.

95.

96.

97.

98. 99.

100.

101.

102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

modern times. You can prepare this excellently flavored and tasty coffee in seconds—without a grinder. Without the old trappings! On the way to gastronomic progress!” Advertisement for Bero-Instant coffee. http://ddr-design.com/index.php/werbung-plakate-schilder/werbungund-plakate/instant-297, accessed 13 December 2021. Roland, Leopold, and Krause, Prognose, Teil 1, 40. Arnold Sywottek, “From Starvation to Excess? Trends in the Consumer Society from the 1940s to the 1970s,” in The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968, ed. Hanna Schissler, 341–58 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 350. Robert P. Stephens, “‘Wowman! The World’s Most Famous Drug-Dog’: Advertising, the State, and the Paradox of Consumerism in the Federal Republic,” in Selling Modernity: Advertising in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan Wiesen, and Jonathan R. Zatlin, 230–61 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 239. Rubin, Synthetic Socialism, 69. A professor at the Hochschule für industrielle Formgestaltung Halle told Für Dich readers that “we want our environment—that is, the objects and the space of our surroundings—to be formed according to the laws of beauty and the demands of socialist development, and thereby influence the people of the socialist era.” See Burg Giebichenstein, “Lehrstuhl für Schönheit,” Für Dich 11 (Mar. 1964): 4–5. Horst Michel, “Form und Zweck: Wenn nur Gutes produziert wird, kann nichts Schlechtes mehr verkauft werden,” Neue Werbung: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Werbung 2 (Apr. 1955): 11. Kleine Enzyklopädie: Die Frau (Leipzig: VEB Verlag Enzyklopädie, 1963), 461. For example, there was a “concerted campaign” in the 1950s and 1960s to “‘sell’ modern, functionalist buildings and apartments as part of a completely new, perfected modern lifestyle.” Rubin, Synthetic Socialism, 89. See, for example, “Drei neue Küchenmodelle,” Kultur im Heim 2 (1957): 32; “Die Küche der Zukunft,” Für Dich 51 (Dec. 1963): 40–41; “Ein Essplatz ist notwendig,” Guter Rat 3 (1967): 16–18. A March 1963 article in Für Dich praised an undecorated, simple design for a new set of porcelain coffee services: “whoever has searched so far in vain for practical, simple kitchen dishes, a dining and coffee service without flowers, and beautifully shape[d] . . . can now rest assured to find satisfaction in our new line.” “Test mit dem ‘Testladen,’” Für Dich 10 (Mar. 1963): 32. Hans Lewitzky, “Der gedeckte Tisch im modernen Wohnraum,” Für Dich 10 (Mar. 1964): 40–41. Ibid. Ria Liermann, “Paul Krauß: Anspruche an einen Formgestalter,” Kultur im Heim 6 (1978): 30–33. These ads also directly targeted women, with bold typeface proclaiming, “Beautiful coffee dishes: the pride of every woman.” See “Schönes Kaffeegeschirr der Stolz jeder Frau,” Für Dich 23 (June 1964): 38. Similar ads for the same product ran through the summer months of 1964, each of which repeated the message that “women love porcelain . . . especially when it matches the style of our time.” See “Schönes Kaffeegeschirr der Stolz jeder Frau,” Für Dich 27 (July 1964): 30. Für Dich 50 (Dec. 1963): 32. Ibid. Polte, Unser Haushalt, 532, emphasis added. Ibid., 541. Festlich Gedeckte Tische für viele Gelegenheiten, Bestellungnummer 607 (Leipzig: Verlag für die Frau, no date). Sitte, Kaffee oder Tee, 3. Voigt, Der Geschmack des Ostens, 159.

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113. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 272. 114. The first hard currency store opened in the harbor city of Rostock in 1955 and catered specifically to Western sailors making port. Ibid., 245. 115. Matthias Judt, Der Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung: Das DDR-Wirtschaftsimperium des Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski—Mythos und Realität (Berlin: Chistoph Links Verlag, 2013), 78. 116. Ibid., 81. While the Intershops helped bring more foreign money into the hands of the state, these changes proved entirely counterproductive to the state’s efforts to save its domestic economy because they diluted and deflated the value of the East German Ostmark and, therefore, the entire economic system. Through these changes, the state tacitly accepted—openly and publicly—that Western currency was more valuable than the Ostmark, and, consequently, more desirable, thus worsening the already declining faith East Germans had in their own economy. Through these policies and practices, in other words, “the West German mark was imbued with the nimbus of an alternative value system in direct competition, ideologically and monetarily, with the GDR.” Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 245. 117. Delikat was intended to compliment another retailer, Exquisit, that also accepted East German currency but dealt in finished goods, such as textiles and higher-end fashion. See Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism, 136; as well as Peter Hübner, “Reformen in der DDR der Sechziger Jahre. Konsum- und Sozialpolitik,” in Sozialistische Wirtschaftsreformen. Tschechoslowakei und DDR im Vergleich, ed. Christoph Boyer, 501–39. Studien zur europäischen Rechtsgeschichte, no. 210 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006). 118. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 268. 119. For more on social differentiation in East Germany, see Ina Merkel, “Working People and Consumption under Really-Existing Socialism: Perspectives from the German Democratic Republic,” International Labor and Working-Class History 55, Class and Consumption (Spring 1999): 92–111, here 92. As Daphne Berdahl explained, concepts of “social differentiation” in East Germany often considered divides between political elites and citizens, but in fact this differentiation often manifested in resentment between citizens based on issues related to wealth, access to specialized goods, or other privileges associated with their status vis-à-vis political elites. See Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 112–13.

Chapter 3

BITTER GROUNDS East Germany’s “Coffee Crisis”

S In a front-page article in 1961, the East German daily Berliner Zeitung asked readers, “Do you like to drink a cup of coffee? Surely. But have you put any thought into where the coffee comes from?” The article implicitly discouraged East Germans from taking their cup of coffee for granted, explaining the delicate balance between imports and exports on which the GDR relied for such goods.1 Drinking coffee—a seemingly simple act on its own—tied East Germans and the socialist project to an unpredictable system of goods exchange, the delicate balance of Cold War politics, and the underlying currents of an even broader, less perceptible cultural shift: the gradual and unavoidable process of globalization during the twentieth century. This balance collapsed into a crisis in the spring and summer of 1977, when the GDR found itself caught between a fourfold increase in coffee prices it could not afford and its commitment to providing the populace with coffee. The coffee crisis challenged both the supposed superiority of the planned economy and the regime’s claims to legitimacy when it struggled to keep coffee flowing into the cups of expectant East Germans. Yet, as public reaction to Kaffee-Mix demonstrated, merely maintaining supply proved an insufficient solution to the coffee crisis because it failed to adequately account for taste and flavor. After nearly twenty years of drinking roasted brands like Kosta, Mona, and Rondo, East Germans had grown accustomed not only to having access to coffee but, through social practice, had gradually come to assign a perceived value to “their brand.” As Sidney Mintz argued, if meaning comes from use, then there was nothing “natural” about this process: “What constitutes ‘good food,’ like what constitutes good weather, . . . is a social, not a biological, matter. Good food . . . must be good to think about before it becomes good to eat.”2 The smell, taste, and consistency of these brands mattered because Notes from this chapter begin on page 108.

Bitter Grounds | 79

they were closely associated with each brand’s name and its perceived value. Kaffee-Mix may have guaranteed continued access to coffee, but it also represented a fundamental degradation in quality. Citizens’ adamant defense of a “quality cup of coffee” illustrates a paradox of the East German brand of consumer socialism: despite the regime’s efforts to eliminate “false desires” by ensuring equal access to “genuine needs,” East Germans nonetheless continued to distinguish between different products based on their perceived “value.” As chapter two demonstrated, the regime encouraged coffee drinking as a key part of the particular form of socialist modernity it sought to foster. By encouraging such an association, the regime inadvertently perpetuated some of the very cultural mindsets it sought to eliminate. A cheap and tasteless substitute, Kaffee-Mix was bereft of cultural value, and to East Germans it constituted the abandonment of the party’s commitments under real existing socialism.

The Brazilian Frost of 1975 As they brewed their morning cups on 21 July 1975, coffee lovers around the world learned of a large cold front that had swept South America the previous weekend, assaulting Brazil’s coffee-producing regions of Minas Gerais, São Paulo, and Parana from 17 to 20 July.3 Light frosts are not uncommon in the region and typically only kill the leaves and flowers of coffee trees. Referred to as “white frosts,” these episodes leave the rest of the plant unharmed and only have a limited effect on annual coffee yields.4 Brazil’s coffee industry generally recovers from such “white frosts” fairly quickly. Unlike “white frosts,” the “black frost” of 1975 froze the leaves, bark, and sap within the tree itself, turning it black and killing the entire plant.5 The state coffee firm, the Instituto Brasileiro do Café (IBC), suspended all coffee exports on 19 July as a protective measure. A week later, on 23 July, the IBC announced that over half of the 1976–77 crop had been destroyed, estimating that coffee production would be “substantially reduced” for at least two years.6 Owing to the fact that the 1975–76 harvest had begun in April and was nearly complete, the frost did not affect that year’s crop; however, the dead trees would need to be replaced, and the new saplings would take at least four years to bear sufficient fruit.7 As Brazil supplied roughly one-third of the world’s coffee at the time, such a devastating natural disaster had serious implications for the international coffee market. News of the event caused such immediate panic that by 22 July, the New York Coffee and Sugar Exchange (NYCSE) had doubled the limits for coffee futures, raising them to four cents per pound.8 Other coffee-producing countries also increased their export prices in response to news of the frost, including Colombia and El Salvador.9 By the end of the month, wholesalers had begun to follow suit.10 The frost caused additional confusion as it hit at a time when many of

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the world’s other coffee-producing countries were experiencing upheaval. For instance, Ethiopia, which produced Arabica beans similar in quality to those of Brazil, as well as Angola, at that time the world’s second largest producer of Robusta beans, were embroiled in civil wars.11 Exacerbating matters was the uncertain situation within the International Coffee Organization (ICO), the body that regulated prices and quotas for coffee imports and exports.12 In light of the falling US dollar in 1971 and the oil crisis of 1972–73, coffee-producing countries tried to negotiate higher export prices, but consuming countries refused. In response to this breakdown in negotiations, the ICO Council suspended export quotas (as well as all economic provisions) in December 1973, allowing free competition throughout the market at the time of the 1975 frost.13 East German trade officials monitored these developments; Table 3.1 outlines the trajectory of the average coffee price per pound. The real coffee price doubled between 1975 and 1976, nearly quadrupling by 1977.14 By 1978, the price had sunk again by 47 percent of its 1977 rate, but this decreased price was still more than twice that of prefrost levels. Such a dramatic rise placed the currency-poor GDR in a financial quandary.15

A Crisis Brewing: March–July 1977 If news of Brazil’s frost sparked quick reactions in Western commodity markets, the mood in East Germany remained calm through the autumn of 1975. None of the three major East German state-controlled newspapers (Neues Deutschland, Neue Zeit, Berliner Zeitung) published anything about the frost until March 1977, when Berliner Zeitung reported on Brazil raising coffee prices by 33 percent. Despite referencing the frost, the article provided no specifics regarding the extent of damage or the time required to cultivate new trees, nor did it explain exactly what the price increases were. Instead, Berliner Zeitung presented an unclear picture of the world coffee supply and hinted that blame for the price increase in fact lay with Western manipulation: “As a rule Brazil receives a quarter of world revenue [for coffee]. However, in 1975 their crops were affected by dire frosts. The crop failure has not yet been fully felt in international supply. Trade could rely on surpluses from previous years. Nevertheless, the world supply on the market has meanwhile become ever scarcer. It is difficult to evaluate to what Table 3.1. Coffee price per lb. in US cents, 1975–1978.

Coffee price per lb. (US cents)

1975

1976

1977

1978

Change from May 1977 to June 1978 in percent

71.72

142.45

256.39

158.40

– 46.5%

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extent capitalist speculation had a hand in this.”16 State media did not publish much additional information about the global coffee situation, leaving citizens to learn of changes through alternative sources, including Western media.17 By March 1977, GDR planners found themselves caught off guard by the dramatic increase in world coffee prices. Responsibility for monitoring the coffee situation fell in large part to Hans-Joachim Rüscher, head of the Central Committee’s Department for Light, Food-, and District-Led Industry (Abteilung für Leicht-, Lebensmittel-und Bezirksgeleitete Industrie des Zentralkomitee der SED—ABI). In his initial assessment on 17 March, Rüscher noted a 12.7 percent increase in per capita coffee drinking between 1970 and 1976.18 Import plans for 1977 called for 51,900 t of raw coffee, an increase of 1,900 t over the previous year’s coffee imports.19 Based on population figures of the time, these plans suggest a per capita import figure of approximately 3.52 kg.20 The regime estimated a required budget of 231.8 million Valutamarks (VM) for this plan, or 4,467 VM per tonne. 21 Like the Russian transferable Ruble, the Valutamark was an artificial currency that functioned as an accounting unit for the purposes of calculating the economic costs (the required volume of exports) of importing a given volume of goods. Officially, state economists took the Valutamark as the “notational equivalent of one West German mark.”22 Lacking any real value, then, the Valutamark can only serve as an indicator of aggregate trade figures (see Table 3.2). Estimates for the 1977 coffee supply placed the price at 17–20 thousand VM per tonne of raw coffee, more than a fourfold increase over the 1975 price.23 Rüscher claimed these prices would cost the GDR 350.2 million VM more than was allotted in the plan.24 The panicked tone of planners’ correspondence for Table 3.2. GDR import and export totals (in millions of Valutamarks), 1970s.     

 
 



 







    





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the remainder of the year demonstrates that industry and government officials viewed this problem as a genuine “coffee crisis [Kaffeekrise].”25 GDR officials were caught off guard by the coffee shortage in part because they had previously assumed the frost in Brazil would not cause more than a short price spike. In terms of supply, Brazilian coffee plantations had already completed the 1975–76 harvest before the frost, and the ICO and ICB were reporting sufficient world coffee stockpiles for two years. Thus, East German planners may have simply assumed supply would not be a real issue until those stocks were depleted. Both the pricing patterns of the previous years and the breakdown of the ICO’s negotiations in Paris over a new International Coffee Agreement (ICA) just a week prior to the frost likely contributed to planners’ perceptions. GDR coffee imports from 1970 to 1977 had increased by 5,000 t, while prices had decreased over the same period of time—until the frost.26 Even the immediacy of price increases in 1975 seemed manageable at the time. The suspension of quotas in the existing ICA meant the coffee trade was deregulated at the time of the frost, and East German planners may have seen an opportunity to obtain coffee from producing countries on a case-bycase basis.27 Combined, existing contracts and structural buffers allowed East German planners to delay action in the short term and instead observe the situation as it developed.28 Fears regarding a coffee shortage must therefore be understood in the context of the much broader economic difficulties gripping the government at the same time. Although East Germany benefited from several safeguards when it came to coffee, these could only bear so much strain, and when coffee prices soared in 1977, they did so just as much of this protection disappeared. Foremost of these economic strains was the growing debt crisis, the result of the government’s borrowing West German money to pay for immediate, tangible improvements in daily living standards under the “Unity of Economic and Social Policy” introduced in 1971.29 As Jeffrey Kopstein has argued, the SED’s turn to social policy linked the party’s legitimacy to the state’s ability to deliver on its promises, and social policy became “sacrosanct” over the course of the next decade, prohibiting any critical engagement with the policy or its implementation.30 Financing the Main Economic Task proved beyond the GDR’s capabilities, and the government relied increasingly on large loans from West Germany to manage the country’s cash flow. In addition to loans for consumer goods, the GDR also increased its oil imports starting in 1971, “practically doubling” them by 1980.31 During the first world oil crisis of 1972–1973, the GDR ran a shrewd policy of importing as much Soviet oil as possible, which it obtained at prices below the world average, and reselling that oil to capitalist countries at current (and therefore profitable) market prices.32 Under the terms of the Council for Mutual Economic Aid (CMEA, or COMECON), the price of Soviet oil for COMECON countries was based on its average rate on the capitalist market over the previous five years, and it then remained fixed for the following five years.

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Thus, the GDR did not immediately feel the effects of the first oil crisis and, in fact, was able to profit from its resale of Soviet oil, a practice accounting for nearly 90 percent of the GDR’s crude supplies from 1974 to 1979.33 At first, the Western currency earned through this system “held the debt at bay,” as well as helped Mittag and Honecker keep the debt issue out of Politburo discussions.34 Relying on this plan proved disastrous when in 1975, COMECON changed its policy so that the price of oil was calculated annually, based on a rolling five-year average.35 The following year, in response to poor agricultural harvests in the Soviet Union, Moscow increased the price of oil from 14 rubles per ton to 35, reflecting the rolling average through COMECON. These changes caused immediate shifts in Eastern European trade balances. From 1975 onward, each of the Eastern European members of CMEA shifted from “a pattern of balanced accounts and trade surpluses” to running trade deficits with the Soviet Union by the end of Table 3.3. Soviet and East European hard the decade.36 This increase cost the currency debt (US$ millions). GDR an extra 388 million West Ger- Country 1971 1975 1980 man marks (DM) in 1976 alone.37 Bulgaria The GDR’s foreign debt had Gross 743 2,640 3,065 already climbed to nearly 11 billion Net 723 2,257 2,730 DM in 1975 and would reach just Czechoslovakia over 25 billion by 1979.38 Having Gross 485 1,132 4,890 depended on the profits of resell- Net 160 827 3,640 ing cheap Soviet oil, the tables were GDR now reversed; by the late 1970s, the Gross 1,408 5,188 14,410 GDR “had to export 20 percent Net 1,205 3,548 11,750 more goods to the West just to keep Hungary even.”39 Between 1975 and 1985, Gross 1,510 3,929 9,090 the GDR nearly doubled its exports Net 687 2,034 6,694 to the USSR for a mere 7 percent Poland increase in oil imports.40 Perhaps Gross 987 8,388 24,128 662 7,725 22,774 because the debt situation could Net potentially ignite political and social Romania fires, the GDR stopped publishing Gross 1,227 2,924 9,557 Net 1,227 2,449 9,180 separate import and export totals after 1976, henceforth issuing “only Total EE-Six 6,360 24,201 65,140 aggregate trade figures.”41 East Ger- Gross 4,658 18,840 56,768 many was not alone in this regard; Net the entire Eastern European bloc was Soviet Union 1,800 10,577 17,565 suffering from a sharp spike in hard Gross 580 7,450 9,500 currency indebtedness in the late Net 1970s, more than doubling in almost Total-CMEA 8,160 34,778 82,705 every case between 1975 and 1980 Gross Net 5,238 26,290 66,268 (see Table 3.3).

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Crippling foreign debts, therefore, presented planners with seemingly insurmountable challenges when they faced the suddenly high costs of coffee imports in 1977. Even the GDR’s most reliable source of hard currency in the early to mid-1970s had only been sufficient to slow these effects for a short period; with that source now removed, there was simply no way to finance any increase in the importing of consumer goods, especially one whose price had now quadrupled. Yet without coffee, the SED understood its claims of “real existing socialism” would lose public credibility. Indeed, the SED’s decision to try and continue coffee provisioning despite the oppressive foreign debt situation merely highlights just how politically volatile the issue had become. On 14 March 1977, State Planning Commissioner Gerhard Schürer, together with Economics Minister Günter Mittag, wrote to Honecker, blaming the scarcity of hard currency on “years of excessive imports of commodities that . . . do not contribute directly to increasing productivity and thereby to the sources of their repayment.”42 Honecker did not receive the criticism well, retorting: “We cannot simply change all of our policies overnight . . . what has been suggested means deep cuts [in the standard of living]. We would have to go before the Central Committee and say: We did not foresee this or we lied to you.”43 Schürer recommended reducing the amount of coffee available to the public by 80 percent, claiming that “the State Planning Commission has not been drinking coffee for a long time, and it is all right, we are still alive.”44 To Schürer, eliminating coffee imports was the logical solution to the coffee problem; under the circumstances, spending hard currency on a luxury good made little economic sense. Honecker’s problem with Schürer’s proposal was that it neglected the political ramifications of sudden and dramatic changes in policy. Economic expediency was not a politically sound strategy if it resulted in a reduction in living standards that the regime had publicly committed to improving. Indeed, it was all very well for the Planning Commission to have gone without coffee “for some time,” but it was both a sign of hubris and naivety to suggest that the rest of the population would be willing to make such a sacrifice for the sake of balancing the budget.45 As debates continued about how to solve this problem, the increasing political sensitivity of the issue prompted planners to express their growing anxieties, and their internal correspondence took on a distinctly panicked tone. In late April, Rüscher forwarded Mittag news stories in Western media about Jacobs Krönung coffee brand “buying up” a French coffee firm, saying that Western media was concentrating on “preparing consumers for higher prices.”46 Of immediate concern was the holiday provision of coffee, particularly with Easter and the secular “coming of age” ceremony [Jugendweihe] approaching.47 The Easter holiday had survived the regime’s attempts to secularize religious practices and remained an important annual family gathering for a majority of East Germans.48 Easter tradition included the serving of coffee and cakes as a matter of course, and the threat

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of potential shortages so close to the holiday highlighted the risks to public opinion for planners. The Ministry of District-Led Industry and Foodstuffs Industry (Ministerium der Bezirksgeleitete Industrie und Lebensmittelindustrie—MBL) assured Mittag that for the time being, at least, the Easter supply of coffee was secure. Even this reassurance carried a warning that for the previous two months, the country had only managed to import the quality of coffee normally used in the most expensive brands, beans that had to then be mixed with the cheaper brands.49 Planners were keenly aware that ensuring East Germans would be able to enjoy coffee with their Easter cakes had been an expensive task that already forced the adulteration of existing blends. Proposals for solving the coffee crisis fell into two main camps. On the one hand were the planners who recommended a flat reduction of the public coffee supply. Mittag discussed three possible ways to limit imports: importing “affordable” (preisgünstiger) coffee, introducing a new mixture, and reducing the number of coffee consumers (gesellschaftlicher Bedarfsträger reduzieren).50 On the other hand were those like Rüscher who sought ways to stretch remaining supplies of raw coffee so as to maintain supply for the public. Both approaches relied on various forms of product adulteration. As we have already seen, altering the recipe of coffee brands had been a common response in previous decades to import shortfalls or shipments of inferior quality goods. Unlike these earlier approaches to rationing, in which recipe changes typically involved a few hundred tons at a time, planners now faced the likelihood of adulteration on an unprecedented scale. The earliest proposal included a restructuring of the entire retail coffee supply.51 In 1977, East German retailers offered four varieties of roasted coffee: Kosta, Kosta-Melange (which was based on Kosta), Rondo, and Mona. Alongside the roasted coffees were a caffeine-free product (simply named “caffeine-free coffee”) and a single instant coffee, Im Nu. A special roasted coffee, “First Class,” existed as well, but this product was extremely scarce and available only in Intershops.52 The State Planning Commission (SPK) set prices for each brand that reflected existing fixed-price categories for foodstuffs (see Table 3.4). Table 3.4. Prices for roasted coffee brands in the GDR, March 1977 (in East German marks). Coffee Brand

Portion of GDR market (percent)

Consumer Price (marks/kg)

Consumer Price (marks/125g pkg)

Kosta (incl. Kosta-Melange)

70

60

7.5

Rondo

22

70

8.75

Mona

8

80

10

Koffeinfreier Kaffee

(limited distribution)

80

10

First Class

(only in Intershop)

117.5

14.70

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At 60 marks per kilogram, Kosta presented the most affordable choice for East German consumers and dominated the retail market. Rondo still commanded a respectable percentage of consumption, typically among members of the East German middle class whose incomes allowed them this option.53 Rüscher’s office recommended replacing each of the existing roasted brands with three entirely new mixed blends and introducing a new mixture comprised “of at least 20 percent ersatz product.”54 Combined, Rüscher estimated his recommendations could save the state approximately 30 million VM in the second half of 1977.55 The second major approach to the crisis involved more radical changes in overall provisioning to reduce public consumption of coffee. In mid-April, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, head of the Department of Commercial Coordination (Kommerzielle Koordinierung—KoKo), submitted a lengthy proposal that sought to reduce the consumption of coffee more broadly and would halt production of “all existing GDR brands” after 1 June.56 Similar to his previous proposals, Schalck-Golodkowski recommended replacing existing coffee with a single new brand but now indicated that this brand would comprise 50 percent roasted coffee and 50 percent surrogate. Retail consumption of coffee, he argued, would decline by 25–30 percent, which would “undoubtedly lead” East Germans to turn to Western connections, or to purchase coffee in Intershops, which had “hitherto played a marginal role” in this market.57 In each approach, adulteration served a different purpose that reflected competing priorities between these departments. Rüscher’s proposal called for dramatic changes to the brands on offer, but in recommending the introduction of new mixtures, he seems to have recognized the importance of consumer choice. He calculated that the industry had already used over half of the year’s supply of raw coffee, and since there would be no further imports for 1977, existing reserves needed to be held back for the second half of the year.58 Adulteration was therefore the best chance for facing the shortfall, maximizing the regime’s ability to fulfill consumer expectations under real existing socialism. By contrast, for Schalck-Golodkowski, whose responsibilities as head of KoKo included procuring and retaining hard currency, the mounting payment imbalance necessitated more drastic measures to obtain and secure hard currency, so adulteration served as a lever to control and lower public consumption. Schalck-Golodkowski would see roasted blends reduced to a single product at a price of 120 marks/kg, which was 40 marks/kg, or 50 percent, higher than the existing mid-priced Rondo.59 He also called “[a]ll public relations (press, television, radio, film, advertising) to immediately refrain from promoting the consumption of these goods.”60 SchalckGolodkowski’s measures sought to marginalize coffee drinking and force East Germans to acquire their coffee through alternate means if they had access to any. These forms of “provisioning” likely appealed to Schalck-Golodkowski because, first, alongside coffee, increased deliveries of Westpakete would bring a host of

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other consumer goods into the GDR. Second, Intershops were tourist shops that only accepted West German marks in exchange for their wares; SchalckGolodkowski hoped to force East Germans to purchase coffee in a way that directed Western marks into the regime’s coffers.61 After two months of stressing the severity of the coffee situation, Rüscher expressed a palpable frustration at the lack of any concrete action on the matter. He warned that “if this development keeps up, it’ll drain the stockpile reserves by the beginning of September.”62 Mere weeks later, he reiterated his frustration in another letter, saying, “from a political and economic perspective, decisions on these issues are essential.”63 His concerns eventually reached the highest levels of the party apparatus. On 2 June, Erich Honecker met with other senior party officials, including Werner Krolikowski and Gerhard Grüneberg, to discuss the coffee problem. After summarizing the essentials of the pricing situation, Honecker made the following remark to the others: We had thought to find a solution to this with mixed coffees and offering different brands with different prices. For this you need special machinery that we can’t get, at least not this fast. We have to have a way to tide us over in the meantime. One can’t have a price increase of 100 percent. The thing is that at the moment we offer different types of coffee; can’t we tweak the ratio between the different types of coffee on offer? My opinion is that we can’t manufacture more disproportion in the national economy because of this coffee thing. You can simply only import as much coffee as we have money allocated for it.64

In Honecker’s assessment, drastic price increases were clearly a nonstarter, but a mixed coffee would take time to produce—thus, the logical temporary solution was to change the make-up of the varieties available to the public. Grüneberg suggested that price increases might not be all that risky and asked whether they could “in this exceptional case talk openly with the people and change the prices in such a way that the problem is brought to a solution?” Krolikowski offered rationing as a solution. Honecker dismissed both ideas and claimed, “The people will still buy coffee and then you still have the discussion about the price increase. . . . We would get public unrest.”65 Even at the highest levels of the party apparatus, then, the nomenklatura were acutely aware of the likelihood of public backlash should the issue be mishandled. The growing sense of “crisis” surrounding coffee in the spring of 1977 generated an urgent need to find alternate sources of raw coffee that would not increase the country’s hard currency expenses. Werner Lamberz, a special envoy from KoKo, conducted a “coffee trip” through a number of African countries on 11–23 June 1977, including South Yemen, Ethiopia, Angola, Zambia, Mozambique, Nigeria, and the Congo.66 Lamberz sought to secure coffee from Angola and Ethiopia on a barter system, a goal that was partially achieved. Political

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unrest in both countries made them amenable to the GDR’s proposals—in particular, Ethiopia, which sought additional military supplies and equipment for its civil war. Ethiopia agreed to deliver five thousand tons of coffee annually from 1977 to 1982 at a cost “equal to the international price of coffee” as of the time of the contract’s signing.67 Payment for the first two years of this contract could be made through East German finished goods, also priced according to current world market value. Primarily, these finished goods were to take the form of “equipment of special foreign trade” (East German shorthand for military equipment). An immediate shipment of 550 East German “W 50” heavy-duty trucks and other supplies would pay for the first delivery of 4,000 t of coffee.68 Angola also agreed to send 5,000 t of coffee per year under a five-year contract (1977–1982) in exchange for East German technical and logistical support, including the deployment of two hundred specialists and tradesmen in Angola. However, the Angolan negotiations also included a fascinating provision: a second “internal” agreement would be signed between Angola and GDR for 1977–1978 for coffee deliveries payable with East German finished goods. Angola agreed to send the first 2,000 t within “six to eight weeks” of the contract’s signing, and the calculations for payment would be made through a special account. In such a form, this accounting constituted “a bilateral line of credit” between the two countries that would require “no payment in hard currency” for the first two years. Not only was this special agreement to be signed separately, but Angola stipulated that the contract was “to remain absolutely confidential, because Angola has rejected similar proposals from other socialist countries (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia [SFRJ], Czechoslovakia [ČSSR], Cuba).”69 The “coffee trip” was a whirlwind affair that both exemplified East Germany’s sense of urgency and provided a politically viable solution to the shortage, albeit a partial one. Lamberz visited six countries in twelve days, and both resulting contracts emphasized a need for haste. Each contract took effect immediately upon signing (rather than negotiating contracts starting in the new year). Together, they provided East Germany with an immediate infusion of 12,000 t of coffee by the end of 1977—certainly a welcome relief to planners trying to stretch a remaining 18,000 t over the second half of the year. In each case, the conditions of the trade clearly identified these contracts as exceptions to the “normal” forms of trade to which Angola and Ethiopia were accustomed—particularly in the case of the “special agreement” with Angola. While the coffee situation provided the impetus for exchange, sending Lamberz to investigate alternate sources of raw coffee also formed an important part of East Germany’s strategy for handling the crisis. Coffee possessed a political power, one the regime’s planners and trade officials understood as emanating from the party’s own promises of rising living standards. Finding new sources, then, was about far more than merely satisfying a growing demand for coffee under extraordinary pricing situations. Successfully negotiating contracts with Angola and Ethiopia ensured an influx of

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coffee that could help stretch supply for the time being without requiring more hard currency from an already beleaguered East German economy. From 14 to 16 June, Werner Krolokowski, a member of both the Politburo and the economic commission, met with Werner Buschmann, deputy minister for the MBL, to discuss the coffee problem. The pair wrote up a draft proposal for the Council of Ministers that adopted the more radical solutions offered by Schalck-Golodkowski in April, including widespread removal of certain brands and the introduction of a mixed brand. Under this proposal, only Mona would remain in retail stores, as well as caffeine-free coffee, at existing prices of 80 marks per kilogram. The production of the roasted coffee blends Kosta and Rondo, as well as the Brazilian instant, would cease.70 The draft also called for the production of a mixed coffee called “Kaffee-Mix”—the first time the proposed mixture had a specific name associated with it—and listed a ratio of 51 percent roasted coffee and 49 percent surrogate products, including chicory, rye, and barley.71 Production of this new mixture would require an industry overhaul, including the complete conversion of production lines at VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb—People’s Own Enterprise) Kaffee Halle, which was designated as the primary production facility for Kaffee-Mix.72 The draft planned for VEB Kaffee Halle to produce 3,500 t of Kaffee-Mix by the end of the year, which Buschmann said would require an additional thirty shift workers (Schichtarbeitskräften) in the district by 1 August.73 On balance, Buschmann and Krolokowksi’s draft more closely reflected Schalck-Golodkowski’s recommendations from April but differed in one important way: they proposed to extend Kaffee-Mix production into 1978, “with 80 percent mixed coffee . . . and 20 percent roasted coffee mixture ‘Mona.’”74 Buschmann also warned that it was impossible to predict sales of a mixed coffee, so he warned, “We must assume a higher demand for Mona that can only be covered for a short while.”75 Rüscher seemed to echo Buschmann’s worries and added, “under the present circumstances, [Mona] coffee will become an object of speculation since there is no product of comparable price to compensate.”76 As demand for increasingly less available coffee rose, no doubt Rüscher also feared the resulting inflation that would further degrade living standards and, in turn, put even more political pressure on the state apparatus. On 28 June, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the SED approved “in principle” the measures and Lamberz’s draft agreements with Angola and Ethiopia.77 Setting an implementation date of 1 September, the Politburo modified the provisions to stipulate that Rondo and Mona were both to remain in retail and would each undergo a recipe change to lower their roasted coffee content slightly. Kaffee-Mix’s composition would remain 51 percent roasted coffee and 49 percent surrogate but would be produced as quickly as possible and released at a price of 48 marks/kg. The new product’s price was four-fifths the cost of the brand it replaced (Kosta), but given Kaffee-Mix’s composition, its price repre-

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sented a premium to the state, as a price adjusted for inflation ought to have been half that of Kosta, or 30 marks/kg. Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski’s proposal to remove up to 80 percent of the coffee in circulation was deemed too politically unsuitable because the regime feared—quite rightly—that the population would interpret this as a purposeful decline in living standards. Planners instead decided that restaurants and retail distributors would only be supplied with Kaffee-Mix, and production of the surrogate Malzkaffee would increase. Despite the continuation of Rondo and Mona, Kaffee-Mix production would continue into 1978 to account for 80 percent of total coffee supply.78 Yet, to some on the Politburo, replacing the most affordable roasted coffee brand was as dangerous as allowing coffee to disappear altogether. Following the meeting, Politburo member Albert Norden wrote a private letter to Honecker stating that the measures went too far, and that the decision to continue with plans to effectively replace real bean coffee with Kaffee-Mix throughout the country was “simply unthinkable.” Norden believed the regime faced “not just any sort of supply situation, but rather that of a national luxury good in the best sense of the word.” While economically expedient, Norden found the measures to be reckless because they relied on a new, completely untested product with no way of predicting consumer behavior. Norden had lived through the shortages of the postwar period and reminded Honecker of the “introduction of the Handelsorganisation [HO]”: “From the earliest point citizens seized coffee, even though it was (and is) expensive.”79 For Norden, the coffee crisis was more than a mere matter of supply. In light of the GDR’s growing debt and the onset of the oil crisis, he recognized the need to save currency: “Without drastic hard currency savings it will not work. And that must no doubt include the consumption sector.” Some discretion, however, was required in making decisions about consumer goods with such symbolic importance as coffee: “which items are cut or reduced is in my opinion a political issue of the first order.”80 The regime recognized coffee as a politically sensitive issue only in terms of people’s continued access to coffee. In pointing to the question of coffee’s cultural significance, Norden recognized that citizens were not likely to be satisfied merely by an adequate supply of mixed blends. They expected a certain quality to their coffee.81 For now, Norden’s concerns fell on deaf ears, and the regime proceeded with measures to continue supplying coffee by reducing its quality. The compromise found common ground between maintaining supply and cost savings but still carried a significant risk. Planners could not predict how the public would react, and because demand was not tied to price in the way planners assumed, introducing Kaffee-Mix at this premium price risked increasing inflation if the product proved unpopular, which would only exacerbate the broader pressures faced by the beleaguered East German economy. Thus, when faced by this “coffee crisis,” planners had very limited options; every choice they faced involved perilous political risks.

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Bitter Grounds—Public Reaction to “Kaffee-Mix” No sooner had the Central Committee approved the measures than party and state officials encountered challenges in implementing them by the 1 September deadline. As part of the measures, the Council of Ministers formed a working group whose task was to monitor the implementation of the coffee measures. Among its initial observations, the working group explicitly warned that the activities related to Kaffee-Mix production must remain absolutely secret; the working group worried that if the changes were known publicly, they would cause “anxious purchasing” throughout the population.82 Controlling the flow of information was crucial to avoid panic as “already a large number of people are aware of the retail measures . . . all persons must be obliged to secrecy in writing.”83 Fears of speculation increased in early July as the government learned of actions taken in neighboring socialist countries. Hermann Axen, a member of the Politburo, wrote to Honecker in confidence on 1 July to warn him that Czechoslovakia’s Central Committee had just approved a measure to increase the retail prices for coffee by 50 percent by 20 July.84 Mittag and Lamberz also warned Honecker about pending price hikes for coffee in both Czechoslovakia and Poland.85 These changes would leave the GDR with the least expensive prices for coffee among the three countries, which would, they argued, increase speculative purchasing along border regions by non-Germans. To stymie hoarding along the borders, Mittag and Lamberz recommended that the wholesalers in those regions (Grossverbraucher) should be supplied with mixed coffee instead of roasted coffee. The pair further cautioned Honecker about the continued need for secrecy, writing in a postscript that “aside from us, nobody knows about this letter.”86 It now seemed as though East Germans would have to compete with tourists for access to the most affordable coffee. Mittag sent Honecker a revised schedule of measures for the coffee problem on 13 July with a request “for a decision on whether this proposal can be dealt with” at the next Politburo meeting on 26 July.87 The draft stepped up the implementation of these measures to August instead of September “in order to be able to carry on the policy of the Main Task.”88 Ministry officials did not wait for the Politburo to make a decision on changing the timeframe for the changes, instead moving forward on upgrading the roasting industry with the equipment necessary for Kaffee-Mix production. Despite the overhauls of the 1960s, by 1977 most existing equipment and machines were old and inadequate for handling the increased capacities demanded by the Central Committee.89 Installation of newly purchased machines occurred over the first three weeks of July. Although the upgrades involved significant conversion—switching Mocca-Fix lines to accommodate the new mixture—planners still sought to keep secret as much of the process as possible. Anticipating that

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workers might (correctly) interpret large-scale conversions as a dramatic change in overall coffee supply, planners framed the work as a special training exercise to mislead workers at the factory level. Managers were responsible for carrying out instruction in such a way “that it will be clear that this is to be considered a new product.”90 Worker brigades in converted roasting plants were to be instructed “on the production of the mixed coffee without addressing the other questions related to coffee production.”91 The initial test in VEB Kaffee Halle had positive results; long-term production of Kaffee-Mix was now “guaranteed” and could begin by 1 August.92 The Politburo gave final approval to the coffee measures on 26 July, although the ruling in fact functioned more as a post hoc affirmation of measures already underway.93

A Matter of Taste: Public Reception of Kaffee-Mix Kaffee-Mix entered the market in the first week of August 1977, arriving on store shelves and in most state-run settings, for example, hospital and factory break rooms, civil service offices, and trade union vacation homes.94 Bright gold and brown foil bags with “Kaffee-Mix” emblazoned across the front in gold lettering promised consumers a tantalizing experience. The packaging described the contents as “a blend of exquisite roasted coffee and fine-tuned coffee surrogate,” a statement whose language seemed to claim a particular degree of quality.95 As they arrived for their weekly shopping trips, East Germans, such as Rudolf in Rötha, thus faced the options for coffee found in Table 3.5. Public reaction to the changes in available coffee—and to Kaffee-Mix in particular—was overwhelmingly negative and centered around three paramount issues: the lack of information about the abrupt changes to supply, the price of the new product, and, above all, the poor quality of Kaffee-Mix. East German coffee drinkers wrote private petition letters (Eingaben), complained in stores, and even engaged in a few work stoppages. State planners monitored customers’ reactions from the first days of KaffeeMix’s delivery. The MBL ordered stores to position clerks in the aisles to engage customers in conversation about the new product.96 Trained to be knowledgeable advisors and “tutor[s] of consumTable 3.5. Pricing scheme for packaged coffee ers,” retail workers acted as “liaisons as of 1 August 1977 (in East German marks). between industry and the consumer Coffee Brand Volume EVP (in marks) to represent the consumers’ interests while also monitoring their Mona 125g 10.00 demands and guiding their taste.”97 Rondo 125g 8.75 These “sales discussions” had already Mocca-Fix 125g 8.75 been an established practice in East Kaffee-Mix 125g 6.00 German stores since the 1950s as

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trade officials sought to “canvas the opinions of consumers” as a way to develop “a more sophisticated ‘market observation’ [Marktbeobachtung].”98 Customers therefore understood these conversations as an important part of the “normal” or “established” system of reporting their concerns.99 However, since industry planners had taken such precautions to ensure that the new coffee was developed in the utmost secrecy, most retail workers found themselves offering a product about which they knew virtually nothing. According to one report, in many stores Kosta had still been available on 1 and 2 August, giving some customers the impression that their coffee brand had been replaced quite literally overnight.100 In a number of cases, retail stores only learned of the changes when Kaffee-Mix arrived at their loading bays early on Monday morning, far too late for them to effectively prepare; in extreme cases, even the local party offices only learned of the changes between 1 and 3 August.101 Without prior notification, then, shopkeepers had little to no information with which to engage customers who, like Rudolf M. of Rötha, found their regular coffee shopping patterns disrupted. Even if clerks were unable to clarify customers’ questions, these conversations nonetheless provided valuable insights into the reception of the new product. Some customers drew comparisons to the West, complaining that “real coffee” had disappeared in the GDR. Others spoke of coffee as a daily need, telling staff, “We’ve gotten used to enjoying bean coffee and it’s impossible, especially amidst the chaos in which we live, to abstain from it.”102 A survey report from seven Berlin stores on 3 August concluded that “it became obvious that the majority of customers are treating the new coffee brand with a wait-and-see attitude.”103 Rudolf M.’s frustration at shopkeepers’ lack of knowledge drove him to write an Eingabe to the nearest roasting plant—something many other East German coffee drinkers did as well. Over the next two weeks, East Germans wrote what Rüscher called a “higher volume of Eingaben than normal” to various coffee firms and state organs.104 Over the course of the entire coffee crisis, state officials received a total of approximately fourteen thousand Eingaben specifically related to the coffee measures, a figure representing approximately 23 percent of all oral and written petitions submitted to the Council of State that year.105 Writing these petitions formed an important part of citizens’ response to the coffee crisis, especially because the lack of civil liberties—including freedom of speech—in the GDR meant these petition letters served as one of the few ways East Germans could legally express dissatisfaction or even engage the regime directly. Over the past two decades, there has been considerable debate over the purpose and role of Eingaben in East Germany. In one line of thinking, Eingaben could be interpreted as one element of a broader system of control: a means of “filtering” opposing viewpoints by limiting both the opportunity to complain and the language in which complaints could be expressed.106 Eingaben could also help the state reinforce its control by fragmenting the complaints. Through Eingaben, people

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typically turned to the authorities as individuals, not as a group, greatly limiting the potential impact their letters might have had. Thus, some scholars argue that Eingaben never provided East Germans with a genuine means of challenging state authority because by “channeling citizens’ opinions,” the regime effectively sheltered itself from “a genuine broad-based engagement with public discontent.”107 In another vein, some scholars argue that it is important to take seriously East Germans’ desire to write letters to bring the regime’s attention to issues they faced in their everyday lives, and that they did so with the belief that the regime would act on these issues. East Germans understood the act of writing petitions as part of a system but felt a certain responsibility in submitting their concerns to the regime on behalf of fellow citizens.108 Others argue Eingaben provided an important mechanism for East Germans to express their own subjectivities and sociability—Eingaben reflect citizens’ understanding of their lives, state, and community.109 There were, of course, limits to what could be said in these letters: any open criticism of the political or economic system itself was prohibited, and if engaged in, it could place citizens under the suspicion of the state apparatus. Yet East Germans wrote these kinds of “complaint” letters constantly on a wide variety of topics; doing so safely meant adapting to the “rules” of state socialism and learning to carefully craft one’s letter. East Germans used particular language to frame their complaints in an acceptable manner, adopting the regime’s own rhetoric to suit and express their individual needs. Some pointed to the incongruity between government policies and the coffee measures, such as Frau L., who told an industry director: “my opinion is that this product cannot possibly be in the interest of the 9th Party congress of the SED, of raising the living standards of our citizens.”110 By taking on the official transcript of ruling elites, East Germans could frame their complaining as an attempt to hold ruling elites accountable for their own promises.111 This tactic, argue some historians, reflects East Germans’ internalization of the “rules” of everyday life under socialism: there were limits to a person’s agency, but by adapting to certain “rules” one could safely navigate and effect change within the limits of the system. This tactic formed one of the “weapons of the weak,” as James Scott put it, with which subordinates used the state’s own rhetorical tools to create their own voice, their own space for negotiation with the power structures in which they lived.112 Although most East Germans submitted petitions about coffee individually, they all expressed the same immediate anger over precisely the same issues. East Germans were offended by the regime’s silence, interpreting the lack of available information as an indication of the state’s lack of faith in the population’s ability to understand the current economic situation. For example, many shoppers did not understand why they learned of similar measures taking place in Czechoslovakia but were not “informed about measures in our own land in the same way.”113 The letters suggest that most East Germans understood the realities of

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the world pricing situation: “when the prices increase on the world market, in particular, for coffee, crude oil and fruits, every one of us knows that our GDR will also have to overcome these difficulties so as to guarantee a stable price.”114 Silence regarding this reality, however, “would surely incite panic throughout the population” that would in turn “disrupt the relationship of trust between government and people.”115 Instead, many letter writers argued that an open discussion about the necessity of the coffee measures “would serve the common cause of our state more than the current rumors and whispers” because it would treat East Germans as responsible citizens.116 When they turned their attention to Kaffee-Mix itself, citizens most frequently criticized the product’s aroma, flavor, and color. Citizens in the region of Erzgebirge suggested “the coffee we had in the war didn’t taste so miserable!”117 Customers called Kaffee-Mix “a waste of valuable roasted coffee,” and most, according to retailers, purchased the product “only hesitantly,” while some even went so far as to discourage other customers from buying the brand.118 More avid coffee drinkers “felt Kaffee-Mix was not strong enough, and rejected it on principle.”119 A Stasi report from Leipzig indicated that citizens felt the mixture “has no resemblance to coffee,” and that they would “prefer to be without coffee than drink this mixed stuff.”120 Many letter writers even mentioned specific health effects, such as Frau S. who claimed “after we drank a cup, we did not need to wait long for a stomachache and were forced to take stomach drops.”121 Some letters even noted that Kaffee-Mix did not fit through the filters of standard coffee machines found in public establishments or private homes.122 The grounds were apparently much too fine and produced sludge when customers tried to use it in their “Kaffeeboy” machines. Herr and Frau S. complained, “The water does not flow through the filter. . . . The whole thing is a disaster!”123 In their haste to ensure a stable supply of coffee, planners chose a production method that rendered the product entirely useless in the most common household appliances, jeopardizing the entire point of their efforts to maintain supply in the first place. Some Germans turned to humor to express their dissatisfaction. In Leipzig, the Stasi noted the circulation of a number of “derogatory names” for Kaffee-Mix, including “Erichs Krönung” (Erich’s crown/coronation), a play on the West German brand “Jacobs Krönung.” Other names included “Kaffee-HAG, Honeckers Arbeiter-Gesöff” (Honecker’s Workers’ Swill, although alternative translations for Gesöff include “gnat piss”); “Homo: Honecker-Mocca”; or even “Erichs letzte Mischung” (Erich’s final mixture), which invoked particularly aggressive overtones.124 In one of the most striking examples, a self-identified “coffee drinker collective” (Kaffeetrinker-Kollektiv) in Karl-Marx-Stadt sent what its members called the “test results” of a probe they conducted on Kaffee-Mix. Claiming “we imagine we can give you some valuable insights, so as to improve the quality of this product,” the group submitted their results for review, of which some highlights included the following:

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Benefits of Kaffee-Mix: 1) The drink should be consumed if possible before the start of the workday because the first spontaneous laughing fits also tend to sweep up those employees who always seem to appear in a foul mood. (Earlier start to work is guaranteed!) 2) Additional savings in work time and energy because the majority of passionate coffee drinkers will immediately abstain. Drawbacks to Kaffee-Mix: 1) Kaffee-Mix is suitable exclusively for taste- and smell-deprived people because they can consume this drink without a great deal of resistance. 2) The test roused in several participants the following symptoms: a) Colleague (woman): a few hours after Kaffee-Mix—still speechless! b) Colleague (woman): (Special case) is apparently already so internally dysfunctional from a disreputable lifestyle [liederlichen Lebenswandel] (coffee, black tea, cigarettes, and sometimes alcohol) that she exhibits absolutely no effects—outside of smell and taste nuisance. c) Colleague (woman): moans about stomach discomfort/troubles and exhibits euphoric impulses (a bit like after the enjoyment of a high concentration of alcohol). d) Colleague (male): after drinking Kaffee-Mix suffered from sexual depression (fortunately it was overcome after a short time) and complained of pain in the hair (fear of hair loss as a consequence). Conclusions for the use of Kaffee-Mix: 1) It was previously common in our group to sentence undisciplined colleagues to pay for a round of coffee (Kosta, because we are not strong earners!). From now on such employees will be threatened that, depending on the degree of the breach of their discipline, one or two cups of Kaffee-Mix will be administered orally (more would be irresponsible!). We suspect that through this [action] worker discipline will significantly improve. 2) You should at least point out on the packaging (if you don’t dare to show the individual surrogate components as a percentage) that the consumption is at your own risk. 3) We are convinced that only a few citizens of the GDR will put up with this attack on their taste and their wallets! 4) If there are difficulties in selling it (as we suspect there to be), then we recommend it for use as: a) Surrogate for Unkraut-Ex (a herbicide based on sodium chlorate) b) Surrogate for a chemical depilatory c) Surrogate for laxatives d) Surrogate for alcohol (over 60 percent) All kidding aside, we were honestly disappointed by the cost of your new product. Even if we expect and accept the economic need to save on coffee, Kaffee-Mix is in no way a replacement for Kosta. You should seriously examine/test this product once again!

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Please do not take our strongly exaggerated description as seriously as we do ourselves. Nevertheless, in our opinion it is not a matter of a proper coffee blend and brand, but rather a disgrace. Our alternatives (for recipients of our wage and salary levels) remain either giving up the enjoyment of coffee or spending 30 to 50 marks more per month.125

In an example of East Germans’ “internalizing the rules” of state socialism, the collective’s deployment of productivist rhetoric allowed them to frame their criticism as the legitimate concerns of conscientious members of the proletariat, for instance, in their quip that factory productivity would increase as workers skipped their coffee breaks to avoid Kaffee-Mix’s horrible taste. A lack of quality— specifically in terms of taste and enjoyment—characterized this group’s primary objection to Kaffee-Mix, a sentiment clearly visible in their suggestion that it was suitable as either a form of punishment bordering on torture or as an effective pesticide but certainly not as an enjoyable beverage for the break room. Yet the point was not to merely emphasize how horrible the coffee tasted but to identify the political ramifications of a decline in workers’ ability to enjoy their coffee. These workers feared that their living standards—and, specifically, their working conditions—would suffer as a result of Kaffee-Mix. Note that the collective framed the coffee break in rather absolute terms: it was hardly worth taking a break at all if the only coffee available was Kaffee-Mix. In a far more serious tone, the collective concluded that merely replacing quality coffee with a poor substitute was as ineffective as it was irresponsible, as a poor-quality coffee provided East Germans with but two options: paying more for their coffee by purchasing different brands or abstaining from coffee altogether. State and industry officials separated letters about price from those about quality, yet in many cases, complaints about price were in fact intimately connected to conversations about quality and politics. At 6 marks per package, Kaffee-Mix cost nearly as much as the brand it replaced, Kosta, but offered a taste that for most petitioners “in no way relates to quality.”126 Thus, these Eingaben reveal East Germans’ belief that the price did not reflect the product’s perceived value, such as a scathing critique from a group of people in Reichenbach who claimed “we know how bean coffee should taste. But your new bean coffee ‘Kaffee-Mix’ tastes like half and half. Namely, half winter barley and half spring barley. And all this for six marks.”127 Quality, not pricing, led Germans to reject Kaffee-Mix. In Löbau, workers at the local advertising firm decided to boycott Kaffee-Mix because “it possess[ed] neither the beloved smell nor taste of bean coffee.”128 These ad workers were not alone; rejecting Kaffee-Mix on account of its poor taste, many East Germans resolved to purchase Rondo and Mona instead, despite their higher cost.129 Although purchasing more expensive coffees was a conscious decision, many citizens spoke of their choice as their only genuine option: Kaffee-Mix was

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an intolerable drink, but sacrificing coffee altogether was entirely unacceptable. In her memoirs of life and food culture in the GDR, Jutta Voigt spoke of the coffee crisis as a rupture, explaining that despite citizens being accustomed to gaps in supply, their “patience came to an end over this issue. It raged like never before. To this point, and no further. Enough. The coffee became a bastion.”130 One family emphasized how central coffee was to their everyday life, writing “as a working-class family drinking coffee has for us become a personal bright spot. Under no circumstances can we go without this ‘small luxury.’”131 Despite being a “small luxury” in official parlance, to East Germans, coffee represented not an indulgence but a daily necessity.132 Anger over the poor taste of Kaffee-Mix also reinforced growing frustrations about perceived social inequalities. With Kosta removed and Kaffee-Mix an unacceptable alternative, the only remaining option for East Germans was to purchase Mona—at a price one-third higher than Kosta—or to seek out coffee in the specialty stores, Intershop and Delikat. The Intershops still only accepted hard currency, cutting off most East Germans from being able to shop there, a reality that by now had fueled discontent. The Delikat stores hardly offered a viable alternative as their prices were set far above those of similar goods in normal retail stores. For example, a packet of Jacobs Krönung at a Delikat cost 25 marks, compared to 7.5 marks for Kosta.133 In September 1977, consumer tensions—especially those about the coffee crisis—led the government to announce a rapid expansion of Delikat and Exquisit stores in the country. The expansion was ostensibly intended to offer East Germans without hard currency an alternative to the Intershops. This expansion initially provided an attractive return on investment, as Delikat stores earned an average 6.2 Ostmark for every West German mark spent supplying the stores.134 This plan ultimately backfired, however, because expanding the reach of these stores to a greater number of customers only contributed to the perception of what was now effectively a three-tiered retail system in an ostensibly egalitarian society. Exorbitant pricing only contributed further to consumers’ perceptions that they were left alone to navigate this three-tiered consumer market, one that actively and structurally favored higher-income earners or those with Western connections, especially as even the specialty stores were struggling to manage a limited supply of these higher-quality brands. By the mid-1970s, East Germans were already spending approximately 25–50 marks per month on coffee (based on a monthly income of 800–1,200 marks), or 3–4 percent of their total monthly income.135 Buying the more expensive brands (that in any event were less accessible) would double a household’s monthly coffee expenditures. Many East Germans therefore called the measures an “indirect” or “illegal” price increase, claiming that despite the government’s official policies of fixed prices for consumer goods, Kaffee-Mix imposed upon citizens a false choice between purchasing poor coffee or spending a higher proportion of their income on more

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expensive brands.136 The “Coffee Collective” from Karl-Marx-Stadt explained that spending an extra 30 to 50 marks per month on coffee was not a simple or easy decision, if indeed such a decision was available “for workers of our wage and salary levels.”137 Many Eingaben highlighted the feeling that expending a greater proportion of one’s resources for a better-tasting coffee was an unreasonable expectation, and that the coffee measures in fact intensified feelings of social inequality.138 Herr von T. spoke of cafés and restaurants as the places where “workers would be provided ‘their’ cup [i.e., the new mix] of coffee during breaks or after work,” but pointed out that “industrial or agricultural workers do not belong to the typical guests of restaurants of high-price categories or Interhotels, where coffee is still offered as before.” In his view, the way in which the regime went about introducing Kaffee-Mix “create[d] the feeling that enjoying a cup of coffee is an extortionate extravagance that the majority of the population ought not to have.”139 Accusing the state of introducing illegal price increases was an effective strategy; first, it belied the state’s claims of upholding fixed prices for consumer goods. Second, it drew on the memory of the failed revolution of 17 June 1953, when public outrage over a 40-percent increase in HO prices sparked a nationwide uprising and forced the regime to adopt the New Course. Following 1953, the regime had become ever more hesitant to even address the question of price increases for fear of causing another popular uprising.140 The immediacy with which customers interpreted Kaffee-Mix as an indirect price increase was a matter of great concern at all levels of industry and government. Hans Joachim Rüscher’s language by month’s end reflected his growing frustration at the ongoing crisis and continued popular dissatisfaction as “the complaints from the population increase[d] by leaps and bounds.” He was particularly concerned with the boycott, writing “the tone of the letters ranges from objections [and] indignation to provocative utterances about the policy of the party and government . . . this mixed coffee is [being] rejected for its price and bad taste.”141 Rüscher understood the boycott as a symptom of public dissatisfaction in quality, finding its origin in people’s distaste for Kaffee-Mix. Pointing out that the public’s dissatisfaction with Kaffee-Mix was also reflected in their refusal to purchase it, and that sales of mixed coffee were in fact declining rapidly throughout the country despite increased distribution, Rüscher expressed his concern that the negative reaction was “solidifying more and more” and that this phenomenon placed the success of the party’s 28 July resolution “at serious risk.”142 Rüscher recognized the far-reaching implications of the crisis, and his repeated warnings suggest a conviction that the government and party could not afford further mistakes in handling the issue. Many East Germans saw these coffee measures as further evidence not only that the state had failed to create an egalitarian society but also that the state and party leadership had in fact abandoned those hit hardest by the country’s economic woes. Frau M. called it “a big disgrace”

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that pensioners were being forced to buy more expensive coffee brands: “Do you think that pensioners can afford more expensive coffee? Do you even know, with your great salaries, what it takes to make ends meet with 300 marks a month? The only thing a pensioner has achieved was coffee, and that is also taken from us. And you want to be a workers’ government?”143 Germans’ complaints and letters confirmed what planners had feared since March: the population would not tolerate a lack of coffee. But the public’s reaction also revealed how greatly state officials misjudged the importance of quality and taste. Turning to adulteration was supposed to have alleviated public concern and distracted Germans from the larger economic woes of the country. Instead, it was precisely adulteration that illuminated how bad things had become: East Germans could literally taste the economic crises their country faced. They also grew resentful of a retail system that, especially through the 1970s, increasingly reinforced social divisions through privileged access to high-quality goods—all in an economic and political system that claimed to have eliminated social hierarchies based on wealth. Rüscher recognized that for all the larger economic crises facing the GDR, a simple cup of coffee had the political power to undermine the SED’s legitimacy as an effective provider of goods to East German citizens/workers and consumers.

Damage Control: Regime Responses to the Public Backlash While direct responses to individual Eingaben would not come until late September, the regime did take some immediate measures to address specific public concerns, from improving the quality of Kaffee-Mix to eventually addressing the lack of information about the measures. Planners formed a working group in mid-August tasked with investigating the possibilities of improving the taste and filter capabilities of the mixed coffee. The easiest way to improve taste—increasing the content of raw coffee in Kaffee-Mix—was not an option: the state was unwilling to pay additional costs to increase imports at current world prices, and the remaining coffee reserves were only sufficient to cover demand until the end of that year. Instead, planners turned to the chemical industry in the hopes of finding alternatives. First, scientists attempted to reduce the bitter taste of Kaffee-Mix, producing some limited results by 19 August, though Rüscher’s report was unspecific about them.144 Next, planners hoped that the mixture could be infused with flavor through aromatization. Having no experience in applying this process to coffee, East German specialists turned to West German firms for advice. The response was less than encouraging; Helmut Stavenhagen, director of the West German institute for luxury goods research, provided some feedback on these ideas and seemed somewhat skeptical of success. He had no experience with spray-dried instant coffee and aromatization; but pointing to previous success with ice cream and similar products, Stavenhagen warned that aromatiza-

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tion only afforded the products “a slight and temporary smell, and provided no impact on taste whatsoever.”145 Finding a solution to the filtering capabilities of Kaffee-Mix proved equally frustrating. First, specialists reexamined the coffee machines themselves, hoping a change in filter paper thickness could help. Despite trying a wide range of papers, however, nothing had any effect. Experiments revealed that grinding both the roasted and surrogate portions more finely prior to packaging produced the best filtration possible, though the brewing process was still quite slow.146 A week later, Rüscher told Hermann Pöschel, division leader of the research and technological development office of the Central Committee, that although specialists remained hopeful, laboratory trials could not confirm that changes in ground would guarantee results.147 By mid-September, the only efforts in which specialists had achieved a degree of success was with the older K104 coffee machines, which did not use a drip method, and the success had been achieved only by reducing the portion of coffee per serving from 6.5 to 5 grams. When it came to the “modern” and “more advanced” drip based “Kaffeeboy,” experts simply could not solve the filter issue.148 Meanwhile, East Germans continued to encounter a dearth of information regarding coffee supply, and what little news they could find did little to illuminate the situation but merely reiterated accusations of Western speculation. On 19 August, Neues Deutschland ran an article addressing the “rising monopoly profits through high raw coffee prices.” The article lambasted the “manipulation” that had resulted in a fivefold increase in the price for raw coffee over the previous two years. Neues Deutschland went further, noting that such large profits hardly benefited coffee producers of developing countries, who “continually receive[d] little more than starvation wages, while the coffee profiteers dissolve into a negligible part of the balance sheets of American and European multis.”149 By blaming world market speculation, the SED hoped to shelter the planned economy from overt criticism and keep citizens’ frustrations aimed at external forces. Furthermore, the emphasis on the negligible impact such high profits supposedly had on coffee farmers in the developing world framed these farmers as the true victims of the coffee crisis, in effect associating East Germans’ struggles with those of the farmers. Given the continued complaints about a lack of adequate explanation for the measures taken in the GDR, however, this lone article did virtually nothing to mitigate public outrage. Something had to be done to inform the public about the rationale behind the coffee measures as citizens were tying the coffee situation to questions of party policy and authority. Industry leaders did try to reply to a number of individual Eingaben in late August and early September, though their explanations tended to be quite general and externalized the coffee problem as merely a rational response to an impossible world market situation. For example, when replying to Frau O.’s complaints, the district director of the trade ministry informed her that it was

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“no longer possible” to produce Kosta and reminded her that Rondo and Mona remained available. Amazingly, despite the vehement complaints and rejection of Kaffee-Mix, he claimed that the “differentiated assortment [in stores] still gives the consumer the opportunity to choose according to his or her individual taste.”150 Instead of responding directly to individual letters (as was customary), the Politburo immediately lifted the restrictions on gift packages that had limited the volume of coffee to 500g and published a nation-wide press release regarding coffee.151 Secretary of the Magdeburg SED Alois Pisnik wrote privately to Honecker on 22 September about his growing concern over discontent among both the public and his district’s party secretaries, telling Honecker he worried that the party’s efforts to inform the public about the coffee situation were “insufficient.” He warned that “the Politburo resolution from 18 May 1977 speaks of the party’s work having the character of a trusting dialogue with the people, but we do not serve [this claim] with our concrete practice in this case.” He praised the Politburo’s decision to publish a press release, saying he believed it would serve as “a visible sign that the state was responding directly to workers’ criticisms in an open manner” and would “bring clarity to the discussion about coffee and understanding from the people.”152 In reality, the press release merely externalized the crisis in another attempt to divert citizens’ frustrations away from the SED. Published in all three of the national East German state-run newspapers, it claimed the Ministry for Trade and Supply had tried “to guarantee the provisioning of coffee into the future despite the extraordinary price increases on the world market.” The release provided specific figures about the price increases since 1975 and the annual import volumes for the GDR. East Germans were not alone in their frustrations over coffee, claimed the release, as the unusual price increases were “forcing all countries that do not cultivate their own coffee to take appropriate measures. In many countries, the consumption of coffee has declined considerably as a result of the increase in retail prices.”153 The implication, therefore, was that East Germans were actually being better served than their counterparts elsewhere because they still had access to coffee: after all, the release pointed out, Rondo and Mona were still available “at their previous prices.”154 Having relativized the crisis, the release only indirectly admitted to the shortcomings of the state measures, promising an improvement in the quality of Kaffee-Mix and a reduction in its price to 4 marks per package; the only genuine admission of failure was in mentioning that Kaffee-Mix could still not filter through household coffee machines.155 But lowering the retail price also introduced two additional problems. First, if the reduced price enticed more sales of Kaffee-Mix, the step would undermine the state’s hidden aim of reducing coffee consumption. Second, reducing the price by a third affirmed the public’s outrage about an “illegal price hike,” and in doing so, provided tacit admission of Kaffee-Mix’s inferior quality and, therefore, its perceived value.

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While officials reported that the population had received the press release in a generally positive way, the article failed to produce the desired result of enticing Germans to purchase Kaffee-Mix. Furthermore, the release did not assuage East Germans or convince them of the state’s supposed benevolence. Only four days after the press release, Erich Honecker mentioned the coffee situation explicitly while speaking at a mass party rally in Dresden: “Last Friday, you read our press release concerning the coffee supply. I only wish to mention once more that our raw coffee imports alone cost about 300 million dollars this year. Spending this much is not easy for us. This was possible through the great efforts of workers in the export sector. Our calculations estimated that in light of the world market prices—which we cannot influence—this was the best solution for our consumers.”156 In almost any other context, the Party Chairman mentioning the supply situation of a seemingly mundane commodity at such a major party event would seem trivial and misplaced. The fact that Honecker felt the need to raise the matter at this rally and to emphasize the necessity of the government’s actions strongly suggests both the party’s continued uncertainty about public opinion and how carefully the leadership was trying to tread on this issue. His figure of US$300 million is interesting because it suggests he was using a foreign denomination to emphasize the broader economic ramifications of the coffee crisis: American dollars were an accessible figure most East Germans could understand in global terms. The figure is also most likely an exaggeration—but not by much: based on world coffee price indexes from 1977 (US$2.29/lb.), the GDR’s total import volume for 1977 (51,457 t) cost the country at least US$250 million, most of which relied on West German loans—a fact Honecker omitted from his speech.157 Furthermore, his words also remind us of the nature of the GDR dictatorship: the government had made a decision regarding coffee and expected the public to understand its necessity. Nonetheless, his words aptly demonstrate the importance placed on coffee: in the view of both the public and the state leadership, coffee may have been a “little luxury,” but this seemingly humble commodity was anything but mundane. Stasi observations revealed that East Germans understood the necessity for taking some action with coffee supply but disapproved of how long it had taken the regime to provide any clear information to the public, especially in light of the newspaper articles about price hikes in Czechoslovakia.158 Antipathy toward Kaffee-Mix continued through the autumn; the flow of petitions and other complaints slowed only moderately. In October, Stasi officials in Karl-Marx-Stadt reported the circulation of a few “poems” containing negative views on the current coffee situation, one of which the Stasi transcribed in its entirety: All our citizens moan and groan, from now on it’s Mischkaffee alone. Kaffee-Mix, a beautiful word; whoever drinks it, his death is assured.

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The state will fill its pockets quick if we drink Kaffee-Mix till we’re sick. Birth control—who needs the pill? Kaffee-Mix works just as well. Kaffee-Mix, when freshly brewed, will ruin your coffee table for good. Today you’re in luck if you’re planning murder: Kaffee-Mix is made to order. Kaffee-Mix for the export trade—all our neighbors will move away. If a whole tribe needs wiping out, use Kaffee-Mix without a doubt. You’ll shudder when you realize: in Kaffee-Mix milk curdles before your eyes. You want to, but your wife’s defiant? Kaffee-Mix makes her still and pliant. Your heart attack is on its way—enjoy Kaffee-Mix every day. Kaffee-Mix, it’s really good; it fattens the budget, but thins your blood.159

Although the author of this poem is unknown, Stasi officers indicated that it had been “widely circulated” in Karl-Marx Stadt district, suggesting that the poem had developed a certain degree of popular traction.160 Additionally, given its format of single-line and grammatically unrelated stanzas, the poem may also have been a collaborative effort, with local citizens adding their own jokes to the piece as they passed it along to friends and colleagues. The poem clearly targeted Kaffee-Mix for its quality; from suggesting its use as a form of birth control to warning against its potential lethality, over half the stanzas launched a vicious assault on the product’s taste, smell, or utility. While the overall tone of the piece was humorous, the poem also contained some overtly political messages, such as the claim that the state “filled its coffers with each purchase of Kaffee-Mix.” The Stasi did not indicate whether any action had been taken against those caught circulating this or other poems, nor did they provide any interpretation of the messages—political or otherwise. Nonetheless, for officials reading these poems, the jokes clearly demonstrated the public’s outrage. Germans’ continued boycott sparked shortages of Rondo in late September and early October as customers scrambled to buy up limited supplies of the better brand. Customers still rejected Kaffee-Mix even after the universal price reduction to 4 marks per package because, even at the lower price, “the quality was still no better.”161 Workers—particularly those whose schedules did not correspond to the ideal shopping hours—also blamed the state for the ongoing crisis and their inability to secure better beans. Hoarding meant Rondo was typically only available on the day it arrived in stores, explained Herr P., who complained that “because I have the late shift, I am punished and can only buy Mona. I don’t find my money on the street. . . . I am outraged that the workers were misinformed. This affects mostly the retirees and the workers because the people with large salaries always drink Mona.”162 In a last bid to win over consumers, planners released an altered form of Kaffee-Mix in November based on recommendations from Drs. Wange and Briksa. Scientists’ earlier attempts at aromatization had failed, so to improve its taste, Kaffee-Mix would now be produced with a slightly higher roasted coffee content (66 percent). Increasing the volume of real coffee in each batch required

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a reduction elsewhere, so the measures simultaneously called for a general reduction in the volume of coffee from 6 g to 5 g per single cup serving in all restaurants, cafés, and factory cafeterias.163 In reality, the modifications in recipe and price came too late and represented too small an effort to significantly affect the public mood. Customers still refused to purchase Kaffee-Mix and, unable to push the new product on the population, retailers sent the remaining Kaffee-Mix back to the roasters, after which Rüscher told Mittag that the issue of selling mixed coffee “should be discussed again.”164

Coffee According to Demand: The End of Kaffee-Mix and the Search for New Coffee As 1977 drew to a close, Erich Honecker presented his annual New Year’s address to the population, reflecting on the events of the past twelve months. His outlook was quite positive, and he characterized the year as one of “economic upturn” and claimed “on the threshold of the new year we can say that the hard work of all has paid off. . . . The economic successes have been turned into social policy measures, in accordance with our socialist principles.”165 In some ways, Honecker’s words rang true: household incomes had increased, affording East Germans greater purchasing power.166 Despite the SED’s public attitude of “business as usual,” however, the experiences with coffee that year had left a bitter taste among the population. The dramatic fourfold increase in the international price for coffee had shattered planners’ faith in the safety nets on which they had relied, precipitating a genuine sense of crisis through the ranks of industry, state, and party officials from March onward. That a consumer good officially designated as a luxury could cause such widespread panic illustrates the degree to which coffee occupied a politicized cultural space in the minds of both state officials and citizens. Two decades of sustained coffee drinking had woven together citizens’ expectations of modern living and their cherished cup of coffee. East Germans further internalized these expectations when the regime explicitly tied rising living standards to political legitimacy with both the Unity of Social and Economic Policy in 1971 and Honecker’s annual declarations of economic success. The state’s efforts to guarantee supply by stretching raw materials as far as possible ultimately failed because planners had neglected the role quality played when interpreting coffee’s cultural significance. Simply providing sufficient volumes of coffee could not stabilize the regime if that coffee possessed an inferior taste—a realization planners had too late. In their petition letters and verbal complaints, citizens prioritized matters of taste and quality over other considerations, a sentiment reinforced by their sustained willingness to reallocate limited income to more expensive coffee brands. Even citizens’ accusations of an indirect price hike were motivated by the fact that Kaffee-Mix did not possess a quality

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comparable to the brand it replaced, despite being offered at the same price. Planners failed to make this connection, literally categorizing petitions based on “price” and “quality”—distinctions that were inseparable in the minds of East Germans. By the time the regime lowered Kaffee-Mix’s price to 4 marks per 125g in September and changed its recipe to include a higher roasted coffee content in November, the public had already cemented its firm rejection of the brand. There was a certain irony—or even a paradox—in the results of the coffee crisis. Quite contrary to their assumptions that keeping the coffee flowing would satisfy demand and avoid rising costs, planners had wasted millions of marks with their decisions. The very product introduced to provide East Germans with their daily cup of coffee was the single source of widespread scorn, and as stock of unused Kaffee-Mix piled up, the product originally intended to replace all that country’s roasted coffee became both an economic and political liability. While coffee was but one shortage of many in 1977, the coffee crisis illuminates broader complexities of consumer socialism and the shaky ground upon which the SED sat by the late 1970s. The coffee crisis was not a failure of planning: despite its delayed response to the Brazil frost, the GDR proved capable of quickly mass producing a substitute coffee in sufficient quantities to supply the entire population for both 1977 and 1978. Rather, the crisis centered on notions of quality: for East Germans, coffee’s value came from one’s ability to enjoy it, a conviction based in tradition as much as in the state’s own portrayal of coffee over the previous two decades. Thus, the very messages inserting coffee drinking into modern socialist life also inadvertently perpetuated some of the cultural mindsets the regime sought to eliminate—in particular, the public’s conceptualization of value. Prices in the GDR never reflected genuine value because they were determined centrally and arbitrarily, without consideration of production costs, supply, or demand. This disconnect between prices and a product’s value exemplifies what Jonathan Zatlin refers to as the SED’s “intellectual debt”—an obsessive antipathy toward money as the primary means of exploitation of those without capital.167 Wealth created social division through an unequal distribution of access to goods. In the eyes of the party, desire for goods was an expression of that social division, “a socially mediated wish to acquire status via material objectives.”168 In this view, value should not be determined by desire but rather social needs. The East German communists believed that eliminating money from the system of exchange “removed the grounds for desire by creating social conditions in which only real needs exist.”169 Planners and party officials certainly viewed coffee as a real social need, and since money meant nothing, planners saw no issue with swapping one coffee for another without regard for price. East Germans’ outrage that Kaffee-Mix’s price did not reflect its quality shows clearly that the state’s attempts to create socialist-minded consumers were failing. While citizens had certainly internalized the language of socialist consumption (“speaking SED” in their petitions) and had learned strategies for coping with constant

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goods shortages, they had not detached themselves from the idea that consumer prices reflected or should reflect a good’s value. By failing to provide an adequate solution to the population’s demands for a quality cup of coffee, the state contributed to growing public concern about the viability of the socialist project. Volker Wünderich called the public’s boycott of Kaffee-Mix a form of “social protest”—and he maintains the coffee crisis “cannot be counted in the history of political opposition” because the protest was neither organized nor unified, and its “dynamic hardly reach[ed] the level of 1989.” Petitioners “only wanted to develop their consumer logic . . . with at least as much chance of success as the housewives of the Federal Republic, who pressured coffee companies a great deal.”170 Comparing the coffee crisis to 1989, however, creates a false dichotomy: the coffee crisis was obviously not an instance of revolt against the state; however, the comparison diminishes the extent to which citizens and politicians recognized the symbolic importance of coffee. The lack of a unified or organized protest does not diminish the political nature of the coffee crisis; in fact, the boycott reflected citizens’ internalization of the regime’s own presentation of coffee drinking as a means of participation in not only the modern socialist state but in modern society writ large. If the regime could not provide so basic an item as coffee, how could it claim to uphold, much less speak of improving, living standards for its people—which formed the primary basis upon which the success of the socialist project rested? The coffee crisis exemplifies a paradox of the East German economy: tension existed between the regime’s attempts to portray the GDR as economically self-sufficient, on the one hand, and its actual dependence on nonsocialist countries and economies, on the other.171 Citizens expressed a clear consciousness of the connections between coffee and the general economic woes of their country, worrying that “yesterday it was the coffee, tomorrow it’ll be oil and the day after that, something else.”172 The coffee crisis demonstrates both the increasing cynicism and growing exhaustion with which East Germans encountered the SED’s failed promises in their daily lives. One petitioner asked, “We’re told over and over that the [COMECON] countries are the most dynamic economic region in the world. But how stable are we really if we have to make compromises to the capitalist world even to get goods like coffee?”173 Planners also faced two additional problems: First, East Germans’ choice to purchase more expensive brands confirmed planners’ assumptions that regardless of the world price situation, East Germans expected to be able to drink their coffee as usual. If East Germans had reacted so vehemently to a change in just one brand, a more general reduction of supply would likely lead to precisely the widespread unrest officials like Norden or even Honecker had feared during the spring. Second, since Rondo and Mona still contained relatively high volumes of real bean coffee, their continued consumption would surely deplete the roasting industry’s nearly exhausted stocks of raw materials. The trade deals with Angola

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and Ethiopia had provided a sufficient infusion of raw coffee to meet production demands for 1977 and most of 1978 but only through the continued production of a mixed brand. World market prices had not declined in any meaningful way by December, leaving planners with few options to replenish stocks, let alone guarantee supply into the future. If planners were going to meet the public’s demand for quality coffee, they were going to have to find alternative sources for beans that would not incur additional expenses: sources they would find in the decolonizing countries in the coming years.

Notes 1. Lothar Görne, “Kontrolle und Hilfe,” BZ, 8 Apr. 1961, 1. 2. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985), 8, emphasis added. 3. John Valentine, “Frost Damages Next Year’s Crop of Brazil Coffee: Half of Output May Be Lost,” Wall Street Journal, 21 July 1975, 14. 4. Usually such frosts result in a superficial layer of “hoar frost” along the surface area of plants, leaving a crystalline-like appearance not unlike the intricate ice patterns on car windows on particularly cold winter days. John Talbot, Grounds for Agreement: The Political Economy of the Coffee Commodity Chain (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 68. 5. Bruce Handler, “The 50-Cent Cup of Coffee? After the Brazilian Freeze,” Washington Post, 5 Aug. 1975, D7. 6. Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 68; Valentine, “Frost Damages.” On the use of reserves, see “Frost in Brazil Said to Ruin Half of Coffee Crop and Peril Herds,” New York Times, 24 July 1975, 10. Parana, Brazil’s main coffee-producing state, suffered particularly devastating losses. Accounting for approximately half of Brazil’s 1975 production, Parana lost virtually all its coffee trees, leaving one inspector to comment, “None of what we’ve seen will produce a single bean next year.” See “Entire Crop in Parana Likely Lost Next Year,” Globe and Mail, 8 Aug. 1975, B3. 7. Valentine, “Frost Damages”; Talbot, Grounds for Agreement, 68. Early damage estimates provided little clarity on the situation; according to some news sources, as much as half to three-quarters of Brazil’s coffee crop had been destroyed, and the 1976 crop produced only four million bags, compared to 27 million in 1975. See “Frost in Brazil Said to Ruin Half of Coffee Crop and Peril Herds,” New York Times, 24 July 1975, 10. On the four-million-bag yield, see “Commodity Update: Frosts May Have Cut Brazil’s Coffee Yield by as Much as 75 percent,” Globe and Mail, 23 July 1975, B9. 8. Valentine, “Frost Damages”; “Retail Coffee Likely Up 20 percent within Month,” Globe and Mail, 23 July 1975, B5. 9. “Brazil Suspends Export of Coffee,” Washington Post, 20 July 1975, A5. 10. “General Foods Raises Coffee 20 Cents a Pound,” Globe and Mail, 29 July 1975, B4; “Coffee Prices to Go Up Soon as Frost Hurts Brazil Crop,” Washington Post, 29 July 1975, D8. 11. For a more detailed summary of the Ethiopian and Angolan civil wars, see Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 257.

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12. See “International Coffee Agreements, 1962–1968,” International Coffee Organization, London, http://www.ico.org/icohistory_e.asp?section=About_Us#sthash.XLTFrgT2.dpuf, accessed 14 December 2021. 13. Hartmut Brandt, The Formulation of a New International Coffee Agreement (Berlin: German Development Institute, 1991), 72–73; and “International Coffee Agreements, 1962–1968,” International Coffee Organization. 14. International Coffee Organization, “Comparative Analysis of World Coffee Prices and Manufactured Goods,” International Coffee Council, 112th Session, United Kingdom, 3–7 March 2014, http://www.ico.org/news/icc-111-5-r1e-world-coffee-outlook.pdf, accessed 13 December 2021. 15. Pablo Dubois, “The International Coffee Organization 1963–2013: 50 Years Serving the World Coffee Community” (London: International Coffee Organization, 2013), 12; see also International Coffee Organization, “Comparative Analysis of World Coffee Prices and Manufactured Goods,” 3. The GDR also recorded prices at the time; see Research Institute of the Ministry for Foreign Trade, Berlin. BArchBL-SAPMO, DL 2/6071, Weltmarktpreise für Rohkaffee, Ministerium für Handel und Versorgung, Planung und Finanzen (Juni 1978). 16. “Ein siecher Koloß: In Brasilien hapert es nicht nur beim Kaffee,” BZ, 17 Mar. 1977, 7. 17. By 1977, a majority of East Germans had at least indirect access to various Western media, from radio to television. Under Honecker, the regime conceded that its efforts to block or vilify Western media had been largely ineffective in preventing East Germans from stubbornly accessing information or entertainment. See Franziska Kuschel, Schwarzhörer, Schwarzseher und heimliche Leser: Die DDR und die Westmedien (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2016), 66–69; Claudia Dittmar, Feindliches Fernsehen: Das DDR-Fernsehen und seine Strategien im Umgang mit dem westdeutschen Fernsehen (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2010), 34. 18. BArchB DY 3023/1218, Rüscher an Mittag, Pro-Kopf-Verbrauch in der DDR/ Rohkaffee/ Sprühkaffee, 25.04.1977, 51. 19. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Rüscher an Günter Mittag, 17/03/1977, 2. The GDR’s coffee imports had increased steadily throughout the 1970s, from 45,000 t in 1970 to 47,915 t in 1975, and to just over 50,000 t in 1976. Planners undoubtedly anticipated a continued pattern of demand that would necessitate further growth in these volumes in the coming years. See BArchB DY 3023/1218, Rüscher an Mittag, Entwicklung des DDR-Imports Rohkaffee, 25.04.1977, 50. It should also be noted that the coffee import volumes for the year included the volume entering the GDR via unofficial means, such as Westpakete, which planners estimated accounted for 19 percent of total supply in 1977. However, planners noted that this volume represented a decline from previous years (23 percent of total supply in 1976), which they blamed on the rising coffee prices in West Germany. See BArchB, DY 30/16775, Bilanz Warenfonds Röstkaffee 1977 für die Versorgung der Bevölkerung (Anlage), 18.05.1978. 20. The total population of the GDR in 1977 was just under 16.76 million (16,757,357). Removing those under the age of 18 (4,553,145), who presumably were not drinking that much coffee, leaves 12,204,212 adults. Accepting some margin for error, given the limitations of statistical data, particularly in a dictatorship, and without knowing the volume of coffee consumed by seniors specifically, if 42,900 t was slated for the adult population, that suggests the per capita import figure is somewhere close to 0.003515 metric tons (or 3.52 kg/capita). Population figures obtained through “Bevölkerungsstruktur und -entwicklung,” Statistisches Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Zeitschriftenband, 1979), Log 103, 341–48, here 341. 21. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Rüscher an Günter Mittag, 17.03.1977, 2. 22. Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 123 (Table 3 notation “a”). The German National Bank’s calculations of GDR payment balances also mentions this official 1:1 ratio. See “Die

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23.

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

Zahlungsbilanz der ehemaligen DDR 1975 bis 1989” (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Bundesbank, 1999), 41, https://www.bundesbank.de/de/publikationen/bundesbank/die-zahlungs bilanz-der-ehemaligen-ddr-1975-bis-1989-689284, accessed 13 December 2021. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Memorandum von Rüscher an Günter Mittag, 17.03.1977, 2; see also BArchB, DC 20/10358, Bericht über Möglichkeiten der Einsparung von Rohkaffee und Kakaobohnen in der Industrie und von Valutaaufwendungen für Import dieser Rohstoffe, 06.04.1977; BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Ehrensperger, Übersicht über die Mehraufwendungen der DDR aus den Preiserhöhungen beim Import von Kaffee, Kakao, Wolle und Baumwolle in den Jahren 1977 und 1978 gegenüber den geplanten Aufwendungen in konvertierbaren Devisen, 25.7.1977, 189. BArchB DY 3023/1218, Rüscher an Günter Mittag, 17.03.77, Appendix: Vorschläge zur Neugestaltung einiger Genußmittelsortimente—Kaffee- und Kakaoerzeugnisse, 12. Stefan Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971–1989 (Munich: Econ&List, 1998), 200. Wolle was the first scholar to apply the term “crisis” to this particular shortage. Scholars have since continued the term’s use. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Preisentwicklung Rohkaffee ab Juni 1975 nach Quartalen, 25.04.1977, 50–52. Certainly, this is an attitude with which planners interpreted the removal of quotas during the 1980s, which will be discussed further below. Brandt, Formulation of a New International Coffee Agreement, 72–73, and “International Coffee Agreements, 1962–1968” http://www.ico.org/icohistory_e.asp?section=About_Us#sthash .XLTFrgT2.dpuf. At the Eighth Party Congress in June 1971, the party announced a new “Main Task of Socialism,” with sweeping changes aimed at appeasing the population. The policy—renamed the “Unity of Economic and Social Policy” (UESP) in 1976—sought to provide the population with social benefits and consumer goods that the party hoped would convince East Germans of the superiority of socialism, as well as provide incentives for increased production and technological innovation. Abandoning the tired rhetoric of present-day sacrifice for future prosperity, the SED promised to adopt social policies that would immediately improve “the people’s material and cultural standard of living on the basis of a fast developmental pace of socialist production.” Protokoll der Verhandlungen des VIII. Parteitages der SED, 15. bis 19. Juni 1971, vol. 2 of Berlin (East) 1971, 296. In addition to tangible social benefits such as a reduction in working hours, increases to pensions, and the introduction of extensive childcare facilities, the Main Task also involved the “comprehensive subsidization” of basic goods, including housing, food, and clothing. Quoted in André Steiner, The Plans That Failed: An Economic History of East Germany, 1945–1989 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 143. See also Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 81. Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 81. Raymond Stokes, “From Schadenfreude to Going-Out-of-Business Sale: East Germany and the Oil Crises of the 1970s,” in The East German Economy, 1945–2010: Falling Behind or Catching Up?, ed. Hartmut Berghoff and Uta Andrea Balbier, 131–44 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 136. Ibid., 137. Ibid., 134. The GDR obtained its oil from a number of sources. In 1978, for instance, the GDR got its oil from Egypt (180,000 t); Iraq (1,576,000 t); Syria (258,000 t); and the USSR (16,012,000 t). See Statistisches Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Zeitschriftenband, 1978), 270–78. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 113.

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35. Mark J. Ellyne, “Eastern Europe: Squeezing Out of Debt,” SAIS Review of International Relations 5, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 1985): 173–88, 175. 36. Ibid., 181. 37. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 75. 38. Ibid., 70. Jeffrey Kopstein provides a figure of over “39 billion marks” in 1979, though it is unclear which denomination he is using for this figure, and he provides no direct source. See Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 88. I have chosen to proceed with Zatlin’s figures as he provides a long list of sources. 39. Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 89. 40. Ralf Ahrens, “Debt, Cooperation, and Collapse: East German Foreign Trade in the Honecker Years,” in The East German Economy, ed. Berghoff and Balbier, 161–76, 172. 41. Kopstein, Politics of Economic Decline, 84. 42. BArchB, DE1, 56323, Mittag und Schürer an Honecker, 14.03.77, 410, quoted in Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 78. 43. BArchB, DE1, 56323, Zum Material vom 14.03.77, 372, quoted in Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 79. 44. Zatlin discusses this correspondence in Currency of Socialism, 78–92. 45. BArchB, DE1, 56348, Interne Beratung mit E. Honecker z. Schrb. 14.03.77, 113, cited in Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 92. 46. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Memo von Rüscher an Mittag, 25.04.1977, 53. 47. Jugendweihe was the state-sponsored “coming of age” ceremony meant to replace the equivalent Christian ceremonies. 48. For more on state attempts to intervene on religious observances, see Paul Betts’s chapter on Christianity in the GDR in Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 51–87. 49. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 3023/1218, Memorandum von Dr. Wange an Günter Mittag, 08.03.1977. 50. BArchB, DY 30/25310, handwritten notes from a meeting with Günter Mittag, 16.03.1977. 51. BArchB DY 30/25310, Rüscher an Günter Mittag, 17.03. 77, Appendix: Vorschläge zur Neugestaltung einiger Genußmittelsortimente—Kaffee- und Kakaoerzeugnisse, 2. 52. Ibid., 14. See also Monika Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum: Kaffeekonsum in beiden deutschen Staaten (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), 166. 53. Monika Sigmund indicates that higher incomes did not necessarily result in a higher purchase rate for Mona. Mona was purchased predominantly by households with incomes of 800 marks per month or higher. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 167–68. 54. BArchB DY 3023/1218, Appendix: Vorschläge zur Neugestaltung einiger Genußmittelsortimente—Kaffee- und Kakaoerzeugnisse, 15. 55. Ibid., 10. Note: his report included recommendations for chocolate production as well, which also suffered significant price increases at the time. He cited savings of 48.5 million VM for all measures including coffee and chocolate; the figure cited above is based on that number minus the estimated savings for chocolate. 56. BArchB, DY3023/1218, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, Konzeption zur Durchsetzung der Einsparung von Valutamitteln beim Import von Rohkaffee, 18.04.1977, 47. For more about KoKo and its operations, see Steiner, Plans That Failed, 154–55. 57. BArchB, DY3023/1218, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, Konzeption zur Durchsetzung der Einsparung von Valutamitteln beim Import von Rohkaffee, 18.04.1977, 48. 58. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 3023/1218, Rüscher an Mittag, 20.04.1977, 1. 59. BArchB, DY3023/1218, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, Konzeption, 18.04.1977, 47. 60. Ibid., 49.

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61. The Institut für Marktforschung’s research indicated that in the fourth quarter of 1977, Westpakete were responsible for the supply of 4,257 t of coffee. See Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 190. 62. See BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Rüscher an Mittag, 08.06.77, 66. 63. See BArchBL-SAPMO DY 30/25310, Gerhard Rüscher, Brief an G. Mittag, 24.06.1977, 2. 64. BStU MfS HA XVIII, Nr. 20842, Bd. 1, Betrifft: Kaffee und Kokao, 02.06.1977. 65. Ibid. 66. BArchB, DY 30 J IV 2/2 1680, Anlage Nr. 8 zum Protokoll Nr. 26/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 28. Juni 1977, 131–33; see also Hans-Joachim Döring, “Es geht um unsere Existenz,” in Die Politik der DDR gegenüber der Dritten Welt am Beispiel von Mosambik und Äthiopien, Forschungen zur DDR-Gesellschaft (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 1999), 58. 67. BArchB, DY 30 J IV 2/2 1680, Anlage Nr. 8, 116. 68. Ibid., 116. 69. Ibid., 136. 70. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Rüscher an Mittag, 08.06.77, 69. 71. Ibid., 70; see also BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Arbeitsgruppe für Organisation und Inspektion beim Ministerrat, Information über die eingeleiteten Massnahmen zur Durchfuhrung des Beschlusses des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 28.6.1977 über die Entwicklung und Produktion eines Mischkaffees, Berlin, den 4. Juli 1977, 1. 72. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Rüscher an Mittag, 08.06.77, 71. 73. Ibid., 71. 74. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Rüscher an Mittag, Appendix, Beschluß zur Durchführung der Produktion und der Versorgung mit Kaffee- und Kakaoerzeugnissen, draft proposal by Buschmann, 17.06.1977, 79. 75. Ibid., 79. 76. BArchBL-SAPMO DY 30/25310, Gerhard Rüscher, “Brief an Günter Mittag,” 24.6.1977, 2. 77. BArchB, DY 30 J IV 2/2 1680, “Anlage Nr. 6 zum Protokoll nr. 26/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 28. Juni 1977,” 52–55. 78. Ibid. 79. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Norden an Honecker, 28.6.1977, 111. 80. Ibid., 112. 81. Volker Wünderich claims that Norden’s letter “remains the only opinion in the entire party files that at least to some extent acknowledged the political sensitivity and symbolic importance of coffee.” Volker Wünderich, “Die ‘Kaffeekrise’ von 1977: Genussmittel und Verbraucherprotest in der DDR,” Historische Anthropologie 11, no. 2 (2003): 240–61, here 248. The evidence here suggests that there were clearly officials within the bureaucracy who felt as Norden did, but who were equally unable to convince decision makers. 82. BArchB, DY 30/25310, “Arbeitsgruppe für Organisation und Inspektion beim Ministerrat,” Berlin, den 4. Juli 1977. 83. Ibid. 84. BArchB, DY 30 J IV 2/2 1680, Axen an Honecker, 1.7.1977, 131. 85. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Mittag und Lamberz an Honecker, 6.7.1977, 156. 86. Ibid., 156. 87. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Mittag an Honecker, 13.7.1977, 162. 88. Ibid., 171. 89. Indeed, some equipment even dated back to the 1930s. Take, for instance, the use of vacuum packing machines in VEB Bero that had not been replaced since before the war. BArchB, DG 5/1893, Memo von Neidergesäß a Wange, 25.2.1974, “Rostkaffeeverpackungsmaschine für VEB Bero Berlin.”

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90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95. 96.

97.

98.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105.

BArchBL, DY 3023/1218, Rüscher an Mittag, 19.7.1977, 185. Ibid., emphasis in original. BArchBL, DY3023/1218, Wange und Rüscher an Mittag, 25.7.1977, 190. BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1685, Protokoll der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 26. Juli 1977, Durchführung des ‘Beschlusses des Politbüros vom 28. Juni 1977 zur Produktion und der Versorgung mit Kaffee- und Kakaoerzeugnissen,’ Anlage 2. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Bericht über die Lage der Durchführung des Auftrages des Präsidiums des Ministerrates vom 1977.07.28 in Bezug auf die Erfüllung der Produktion von und die Versorgung mit Kaffee, 08.08.1977, 1. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 42- 2437, Fengler an Bezirksvorstand Berlin, Information, 03.08.1977, 1. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Bericht über die Lage der Durchführung des Auftrages des Präsidiums des Ministerrates vom 1977.07.28 in Bezug auf die Erfüllung der Produktion von und die Versorgung mit Kaffee, 08.08.1977, 5. Katherine Pence, “Women on the Verge: Consumers between Private Desires and Public Crisis,” in Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Life, ed. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, 287–322 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 291. The role of retail workers as informed, knowledgeable advisors was also visible in Stalin-era Soviet retail environments. See Amy Randall, The Soviet Dream World of Retail Trade and Consumption in the 1930s (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008). In this way, retailers helped promote a specifically German, socialist selling culture (Verkaufskultur), as well as providing a valuable contribution to state-led market research. “Die Erforschung des Bedarfs der Bevölkverung nach Konsumgütern durch den sozialistischen Binnenhandel,” Neue Werbung: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Werbung 5 , May 1960, 3; see also Annette Kaminsky, Wohlstand, Schönheit, Glück: Kleine Konsumgeschichte der DDR (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 72. On the early efforts toward “market observation” and a more detailed discussion of the concept of Verkaufskultur, see Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: East Germany Between Productivism and Consumerism, 1948–1961 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 93. Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 104. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Information für Genossen Hoffmann. Berlin, 03.08.1977. Ibid. BStU MfS BV Halle KD Hohenmölsen Nr. 1850, Information für Genossen Hoffmann. Berlin, 03.08.1977, zu Fragen der Versorgung mit Bohnenkaffee, 06.09.1977, 1. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 42/2437, Aktennotiz über die durchgeführten Überprüfungen zur Einführung der neuen Kaffeesorte ‘Kaffee-Mix’ am 2.8.1977, Berlin, 03.08.1977, 2. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Memo von Rüscher an Hermann Pöschel, 19.08.1977, 4. Rüscher wrote, “Vom Parteiorganisator des ZK in der VVB Süß- und Dauerbackwarenindustrie wurden uns dazu einige der sich bei den Kaffeebetrieben häufenden Eingaben übergeben, die wir abschriftlich als Anlage zur Information beifügen.” Dr. Uto Dietrich Wange provided Günter Mittag with this figure a year after the initial coffee crisis. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Wange an Mittag, Entwicklung der Import von Rohkaffee und der Qualität der Röstkaffeemischungen (10.8.1978), 480–81, here 481. Hans-Joachim Döring mentioned 14,000 Eingaben penned in the second half of 1977 and another 7,000 in the first half of 1978, though he provided no source for these figures. See Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 121. On the percentage of total Eingaben, Jonathan Zatlin provides a total figure of 61,367 oral and written petitions submitted to the Council of State in all of 1977. See Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 300.

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106. See, for example, Jochen Staadt, Eingaben. Die institutionelle Meckerkultur in der DDR. Goldbrokat, Kaffee-Mix, Ausreiseanträge und das Generalsekretärskonto (Arbeitspapiere des Forschungsverbundes SED-Staat Nr. 24, 1996), 5. 107. Anja Schröter, “Eingaben im Umbruch: Ein politisches Partizipationselement im Verfassungsgebungsprozess der Arbeitsgruppe ‘Neue Verfassung der DDR’ des Zentralen Runden Tisches 1989/90,” Deutschland Archiv 45 (2012): 50–59, here 50. 108. See, for example, Mary Fulbrook, “‘Normalization’ in the GDR in Retrospect: East German Perspectives on Their Own Lives,” in Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979, ed. Fulbrook (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 307. 109. Ina Merkel and and Felix Mühlberg, “Eingaben und Öffentlichkeit,” in “Wir sind doch nicht die Mecker-Ecke der Nation”: Briefe an das DDR-Fernsehen, ed. Merkel, 9–32 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1998), 18. 110. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Elfriede L., Weißnfalls, Eingaben, August 1977. 111. Phrasing their criticisms within these “rules,” argues Judd Stitziel, “implied that the GDR’s entire political and economic system, despite its highly visible and dramatic flaws, was fundamentally sound and legitimate and could be reformed through relatively localized, cosmetic measures.” Judd Stitziel, Fashioning Socialism: Clothing, Politics, and Consumer Culture in East Germany, 1948–1971 (New York: Berg, 2005), 160. 112. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 137. Similarly, Stephen Kotkin revealed how by “learning to speak Bolshevik,” Soviet citizens turned the state’s promises against it so as to effect improvements in living standards in Magnitogorsk during the 1930s. See Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 198–237. 113. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/IV B 2/5/947, Sekretariatsprotokoll Nr. 34 vom 18.8.77 (Bezirk KMSt), Anlage 8: Info über Meinungen der Bevölkerung zum Beschluss des Ministerrates über die Versorgung der Bevölkerung mit Kaffee- und Kakaoerzeugnissen, 16.08.1977. 114. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Birgit K., Eingaben, 11.08.1977. 115. BArchB, DL 1-VA, 22954, Eingabe von Ursula B., Leipzig, 10.08.77; BArchB, DL 1-VA, 22954, Johanna F., Eingabe von 10.08.77; BArchB, DL 1-VA, 22954, Bd. 2, Eingabe von Horst T., 31. August 1977. Dr. R. from Zwickau wondered whether it was “really too much to ask that you expect to be an informed citizen about such things, and can learn from more than mere speculation?” BArchB, DL 1-VA, 22954, Bd. 2, Eingabe von Claus R. 95 Zwickau, Ernst G. Str 155, 22.08.77. 116. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Birgit K., Eingaben, 11.08.1977. 117. BArchB, DL 1-VA, 22954b, Eingabe 1517/7. 118. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/IV B 2/5/947, Sekretariatsprotokoll Nr. 34 vom 18.8.77 (Bezirk KMSt), Anlage 8: Info über Meinungen der Bevölkerung zum Beschluss des Ministerrates über die Versorgung der Bevölkerung mit Kaffee- und Kakaoerzeugnissen, 16.08.1977. 119. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 42/2437, Gewerkschaft Handel, Nahrung und Genuss, Info über die Probleme bei der Einführung der neuen Kaffeesorte Kaffee-Mix, 12.08.1977. 120. BStU MfS BVfS Leipzig, AKG 00243 /02, Information über Reaktionen der Bevölkerung unseres Bezirkes zu den Veränderungen im Kaffeesortiment, 23.08.1977, 4. 121. BArch- B, DY 30/25310, Beate S., Eingaben, August 1977. 122. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Bericht über die Lage der Durchführung des Auftrages des Präsidiums des Ministerrates vom 1977.07.28 in Bezug auf die Erfüllung der Produktion von und die Versorgung mit Kaffee, 08.08.1977, 3; BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Kollegen der HO-Werbung, Löbau, Eingaben, August 1977. See also Katherine Pence, “Grounds for Discontent? Coffee from the Black Market to the Kaffeeklatsch in the GDR,” in Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, ed. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, 197–225 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 217.

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123. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Elfriede L., Weißnfalls, Eingaben, August 1977; Herrn u. Frau S., Dresden, Eingabe, August 1977. 124. BStU MfS BVfS Leipzig, AKG 00243/02, Information über die derzeitige Stimmungslage unter der Bevölkerung zu ökonomischen Problemen, Leipzig den 19.09.1977, 5. The use of “final” in this context may have also suggested echoes of the “final solution” of the National Socialist regime, a word choice that would have obvious political implications for a socialist regime whose founding myth was based on antifascism. 125. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Bericht an Genossen Hermann Pöschel: Leicht-, Lebensmittel- und Bez. Gel. Industrie, 19.8.77, Eingabe der “Kaffeetrinker- Kollektiv,” Karl-Marx-Stadt, ErnstEnge-Str. 88. 126. BArchB, DY 20/25310, Gisela U., Eingaben, August 1977. 127. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Eingabe, Anon., August 1977. In the German context, winter barley (Wintergerste) is primarily used for animal feed and is not fit for human consumption. Its application here as a description for Kaffee-Mix is thus quite revealing and might explain the authors’ desire for anonymity. 128. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Eingabe, Kollegen der HO-Werbung, Löbau, August 1977. 129. BStU MfS BVfS Cottbus, AKG Nr. 10176, Information über Reaktion der Bevölkerung zu Problemen der Versorgung mit Kaffeeerzeugnissen entsprechend dem Beshcluss des Ministerrates, 11.08.1977; BArchB, DY 30/25310, Bericht an Genossen Hermann Pöschel: Leicht-, Lebensmittel- und Bez. Gel. Industrie. 19.8.77, 2. The district branch of the MfS for Cottbus reported “vehement reactions” to the austerity measures, including a workers’ strike that necessitated the reversal of the measures in RAW Cottbus. See BStU MfS BVfS Cottbus, AKG 4158, Bezirksverwaltung Cottbus, Information über weitere Reaktionen unter der Bevölkerung des Bezirkes Cottbus zur Versorgung mit Bohnenkaffee, 25.08.1977, 3. On a national level, several districts reported that customers refused to purchase the new brand to the extent that in Karl-Marx-Stadt, retailers faced a stockpile of over 11.6 t of Kaffee-Mix by 15 August. See BArchBL-SAPMO, DY30-IV B 2-5-999, SED-Bezirksverwaltung Karl-MarxStadt, Information über Meinungen und Äußerungen der Bevölkerung über Kaffee-Mix, 3. Aug. 1977, 3. 130. Jutta Voigt, Der Geschmack des Ostens: Vom Essen, Trinken und Leben in der DDR (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenhauer Verlag, 2005), 160. 131. BArchB, DL 1-VA, 22954b, Familie M. K., Eingabe, Cottbus, 22.09.77. 132. Framing their decisions in this way allowed consumers like Frau S. to blame the regime. She claimed that “quality at the expense of the consumer I reject entirely. This is also the opinion of my socialist worker collective.” BArchB, DY 30/25310, Birgit K., Eingabe, 11.08.1977. 133. Voigt, Geschmack, 159. 134. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 268. 135. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Arbeitsgruppe für Organisation und Inspektion beim Ministerrat, Berlin, n.d., 5. 136. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Sektor Bezirksgeleitete Industrie und Lebensmittelindustrie, Information für Genossen Hoffmann, Berlin, 03.08.1977, 7. 137. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Bericht an Genossen Hermann Pöschel: Leicht-, Lebensmittel- und Bez. Gel. Industrie. 19.8.77, Eingabe der “Kaffeetrinker- Kollektiv” Karl-Marx Stadt, ErnstEnge-Str. 88. 138. Scholars have discussed this growing anxiety by the late 1970s about perceived social inequalities. For samples, see Betts, Within Walls, 184–85; Donna Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 284–303; Ina Merkel, Utopie und Bedürfnis. Die Geschichte der Konsumerkultur in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 410–15; Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 300–305.

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139. BArchB, DL 1-VA, 22954 Bd. 2, Eingabe von Horst T., 31. Aug. 1977. 140. Accusations of an illegal price hike drew on the memory of the failed Revolution of 17 June 1953; see Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 7. 141. BArchBL-SAPMO, DY 30/25310, Memo von Rüscher an Mittag, 25.08.1977. 142. Ibid. 143. BArchB, DY 30/9069, Berta M., Betrifft Kaffee! (Eingabe), 23. Sept 1977, emphasis added. 144. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Bericht an Genossen Hermann Pöschel: Leicht-, Lebensmittel- und Bezirksgeleitete Industrie, 19.8.77. 145. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Rüscher an Mittag, 19.09.1977. 146. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Folgeinformation über Probleme bei der Einführung der Mischkaffeesorte “Kaffee-Mix,” Berlin, 11.08.1977. 147. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Bericht an Genossen Hermann Pöschel: Leicht-, Lebensmittel- und Bez. Gel. Industrie. 19.08.77. 148. BArchB, DY 30/25310, Wang an Willi Stoph, 21.9.77. 149. “Riesige Monopolprofite durch hohe Rohkaffeepreise,” Neues Deutschland, 19 August 1977, 7. 150. BarchB, DL 1-VA, 22954, Bernhardt an Frau O. (Antwort auf Eingabe), 09.9.1977. 151. Christian Härtel, “Ostdeutsche Bestimmungen für den Paketverkehr im Spiegel westdeutscher Merkblätter,” in Das Westpaket. Geschenksendung, keine Handelsware, ed. Christian Härtel and Petra Kabus, 45–53 (Berlin: 2000), 48. Cited in Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 187. 152. BArchB, DY 30/25042, Alois Pisnik an Erich Honecker, 22.09.1977, 2. 153. “Weltmarktpreise und Kaffeeversorgung,” BZ, 23 September 1977, 2; “Preisregulierung bei Kaffee,” Neue Zeit, 23 September 1977, 2; “Mitteilung des Ministeriums für Handel und Versorgung,” Neues Deutschland, 23 September 1977, 2. 154. Ibid. 155. Ibid. At the same time, coffee found mention in other news articles, sometimes in contexts that added to the regime’s woes. In an interview with Neues Deutschland, Günter Mittag also commented that the GDR relied on nonsocialist countries for certain goods like coffee, but he went further: “we can only be successful in these dealings if we offer the highest quality in every sphere.” Mittag was referring to GDR goods traded for agricultural goods, but his emphasis on producing “highest-quality” goods likely ruffled a few feathers. See “Unser Weg—das ist der Weg der Hauptaufgabe,” Neues Deutschland, 24 November 1977, 4. 156. Erich Honecker, “Die sozialistische Revolution in der DDR und ihre Perspektiven für Handel und Versorgung,” Neue Zeit, 27 September 1977, 5. 157. For figures on world prices, see “Comparative analysis of world coffee prices and manufactured goods” (Annex II: Complete data on prices), International Coffee Organization, 17 February 2014; for data on total coffee imports, see “Einfuhr ausgewählter Erzeugnisse,” Statistisches Jahrbuch der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Zeitschriftenband, Log 74 (1980), 230–48, here 236. 158. BStU MfS ZAIG, Nr. 4120, Hinweise auf erste Reaktionen der Bevölkerung der DDR zur Mitteilung des Ministeriums für Handel und Versorgung am 23.9.1977 zur Kaffeesituation. 159. BStU MfS KMS, AKG Nr. 10055, Information über die Verbreitung von Gedichten mit negativem Inhalt zur gegenwärtigen Kaffeesituation im Kreis Karl-Marx-Stadt/Land, 3.10.1977. The author is indebted to Paul Malone at the University of Waterloo, who provided a translation of this particular “poem.” 160. Ibid. 161. BStU MfS ZAIG, Nr. 4120, Hinweise auf erste Reaktionen der Bevölkerung der DDR zur Mitteilung des Ministeriums für Handel und Versorgung am 23.9.1977 zur Kaffeesituation. 162. BArchB, DL 1- VA, 22954b, Eingabe von Manfred P., 03.10.77.

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163. BArchB, DY 30/25044, Rüscher an Mittag, 06.12.1977, 1. 164. BArchB, DY 30/25044, Rüscher an Mittag, 08.12.1977, 2; see also Wünderich, “Die ‘Kaffeekrise’ von 1977,” 258. 165. “Viel Glück und Erfolg allen Bürgern unserer Republik für das Jahr 1978,” in Erich Honecker, Reden und Aufsätze, vol. 6, 7–14 (Berlin: Dietz, 1980), 7; also cited in Mark Allinson, “1977: The GDR’s Most Normal Year?,” in Power and Society in the GDR, 1961– 1979: The Normalization of Rule?, ed. Mary Fulbrook, 253–77 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 255. 166. Steiner, Plans That Failed, 158. 167. Zatlin, Currency of Socialism, 5. 168. Ibid., 240. 169. Ibid., 6. 170. Wünderich, “Die ‘Kaffeekrise’ von 1977,” 261. 171. Mark Allinson argues this paradox meant that the coffee crisis “appeared exemplary for the fundamental problems of the socialist bloc, buffeted by fluctuations in world prices, and the misleading nature of the Party line.” See Allinson, “1977: The GDR’s Most Normal Year?,” 274. 172. BArchB, DY 30/25042, A. Pisnik an Erich Honecker, 22.09.1977, 1. 173. BArchB, DY 30/21550, DBD Abt. Parteiorgane, Information Nr. 20/77, 17.08.1977, 2, cited in Allinson, “1977: The GDR’s Most Normal Year?,” 274.

Chapter 4

BREAD AND GUNS FOR COFFEE Searching for Coffee in Ethiopia and Angola

S The surge of public backlash during the coffee crisis had made clear to state officials that the population would not tolerate a loss in coffee quality but still expected to enjoy their daily cup at an affordable price. Without hard currency to purchase more coffee, however, the GDR would be hard pressed to fulfill that expectation as the standard practice in coffee trade required purchases against currency. Faced with no means to purchase coffee, the GDR traders turned to coffee-producing countries, located predominantly in the Global South, that they believed would be open to bartering for coffee beans. These countries were former colonies whose current governments had (or at least claimed to have) socialist leanings, and who had certain economic interests that the East Germans believed the GDR could provide. The East Germans hoped that a shared ideology and the GDR’s capacity to provide industrial finished goods would be sufficient grounds for quick negotiations and mutually beneficial agreements that could help reinforce a global “brotherhood” of socialist nations. As the East Germans discovered, a common ideological worldview was not necessarily sufficient grounds for cultivating trade relationships in the developing world, nor did ideology alone determine the outcomes of these arrangements. Between the spring and summer of 1977, the GDR’s urgent pursuit of coffee led it to conclude somewhat hastily negotiated trade deals with Angola and Ethiopia.1 These negotiations highlight the anxiety East German planners and traders felt regarding the public outrage over the adulteration of coffee as well as the limitations with which the GDR government had to contend in finding new sources of beans. The GDR’s lack of hard currency, its political commitments to the Soviet Union (USSR), and the fact that the governments of both Angola and Ethiopia were currently managing their own local crises Notes from this chapter begin on page 141.

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at the time meant representatives of all parties were driven more by practical interests than by strict adherence to ideology or a commitment to international solidarity. While Angola and Ethiopia proved willing to trade their coffee in exchange for finished goods, neither was keen to barter away high volumes of coffee for which they could otherwise secure hard currency on international markets. Further complicating matters was the fact that Angola and Ethiopia were each embroiled in local military conflicts and prioritized their own needs for military supplies and equipment; neither was particularly interested in the everyday consumer goods the East Germans offered. East Germany could not risk providing military goods to either country before the Soviet Union had indicated its position on the wars, lest the GDR undermine Moscow’s ambitions in the regions. At the same time, even with Soviet support, East Germany had no desire to be dragged into local conflicts by providing weapons, so its representatives struggled to find terms agreeable to these countries’ partners. Ultimately, the urgent need for raw coffee drove the East Germans to relent and settle on an exchange of military supplies for small, short-term deliveries of coffee over the coming year. Despite the practical and political considerations that drove these coffee deals, the GDR framed both trades as important achievements of international socialist brotherhood and as evidence of its commitment to solidarity with the developing world.2 This chapter explores both of these agreements and interrogates the GDR’s claims of international solidarity, arguing that these agreements were far more complicated than the GDR’s framing suggested. Yet it would be an oversimplification to suggest that ideology played a mere rhetorical role in these deals. In addition to the need to identify foreign markets for its goods, the GDR emphasized consumer goods exchange out of a genuine desire to foster mutually beneficial relationships by stimulating its partners’ economies. Furthermore, East Germany sought to use the coffee deals to showcase its own achievements as a modern state and thereby assume a leading role in guiding developing nations in constructing socialism. This strategy relied on the assumption that its position as a modern, industrially developed country gave the GDR not only the ability but also the ideological, moral, and political imperative to provide this guidance to countries it deemed comparatively underdeveloped. This assumption in turn relied on a presupposed cultural difference that privileged the East Germans’ understandings of socialist development. Thus, East German representatives saw the coffee deals as part of the GDR’s broader engagement with the developing world and as part of an East German “civilizing mission” to the developing world.3 German visions of helping guide younger developing nations toward socialist development failed to live up to their own—or, indeed, their partners’—expectations. Despite their eager attempts to sign long-term contracts for coffee, these agreements were tied to the GDR’s ability to produce the finished goods, chem-

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icals, and farming equipment stipulated by those contracts. Particularly in the cases of Angola and Ethiopia, German goods deliveries frequently fell behind or failed to meet the required specifications or needs of trading partners, leading to a breakdown in these projects. Owing to these failures, German officials found it impossible to convince their counterparts to renew or expand existing coffee deals, necessitating a general trade policy shift and focus on coffee procurement the following year.

East Germany’s “Alternative” Foreign Policy After gaining official autonomy from the Soviet Union in 1955, East German foreign policymakers sought to establish the GDR as a viable alternative to the “revival of imperialism” of which it accused West Germany.4 In contrast to the West’s alleged continuity with the National Socialist past, the SED’s legitimacy stemmed in large part from a founding myth of antifascism rooted in the SED’s claims that communism was the first and principal victim of National Socialist aggression.5 Establishing the GDR as a principled alternative to West Germany became all the more important after the Federal Republic proclaimed the Hallstein Doctrine in 1955. Through the Hallstein Doctrine, West Germany claimed the sole right to represent Germans on German soil and threatened to sever diplomatic and economic relations with any state that recognized the GDR. Hallstein denied the existence and legitimacy of the GDR and placed strong limits on East German attempts to insert itself into the international community. Until the two German states signed the Basic Treaty at the height of Ostpolitik in 1972, which nullified Hallstein by granting East Germany official recognition, the GDR prioritized two overall aims in its foreign policy: to seek recognition by any means available to overcome its international isolation, and to find trade partners despite that isolation.6 In following these two goals, East Germany found ways to circumvent the limits imposed by Hallstein. For instance, by turning to cultural exchanges and tourism programs, argues Michael Scholz, the GDR managed to foster meaningful, albeit largely unofficial, relations with the Scandinavian countries during the 1960s. These programs proved so successful that the Scandinavian countries were among the very first to grant East Germany recognition after the Basic Treaty.7 In a similar vein, the GDR’s early and unwavering support of North Vietnam provided East Germany with considerable international clout, particularly as worldwide public opinion turned against American intervention. East German investigations into the war unearthed evidence of the use of chemical weapons, findings that earned the GDR a seat on the Executive Committee of the Stockholm Vietnam Conference in the early 1970s. Choosing the “right side” of the Vietnam conflict also contributed to the GDR’s domestic stability: as public opinion shifted against the war, the SED’s antiwar stance appeared to

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bolster the party’s legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens, something Gerd Horten has called the GDR’s “Vietnam bonus.”8 The “Vietnam bonus” represents a particularly successful example of the GDR’s attempts to fashion itself as an alternative to the West by demonstrating its solidarity with the developing world. Central to this strategy was the GDR’s attempt to differentiate its own forms of humanitarian and development aid from those offered by the West. Western humanitarian aid, according to GDR spokesmen, targeted only select industries or regions of specific economic value to the imperialist powers. In its report on the 1964 United Nations conference for trade and development, the SED’s party newspaper, Neues Deutschland, argued that development aid was most often used “to exert political pressure” and to secure “new cheaper sources of raw materials for Western European and North American companies.”9 According to the East German women’s magazine Für Dich, Western aid did nothing to “help against hunger, but rather against ‘Revolution from hunger.’”10 Thus, these “neocolonial programs” worked against social change in the developing world and provided the capitalist nations with large profits. By contrast, the SED claimed to support the demands of developing nations for “equal trade, not aid [Handel statt Hilfe].”11 At the core of “socialist aid” lay the principle of mutually beneficial cooperation in the economic and political spheres.12 Rather than only target specific industries of interest, “socialist aid” sought to invest broadly in developing nations’ economies, building up “the young nations’ own modern industry and agriculture.”13 Through its solidarity with the developing world, the GDR would assist developing countries in their struggle for independence, as well as their economic and social development.14 Conceptually, this approach to trade relations certainly presented an egalitarian portrayal of European socialism’s engagement with the developing world, framing socialist assistance “as collaborative, enabling, and noninterventionist to distinguish it from capitalist aid tied to a neocolonial politics of pity and codependency.”15 Nonetheless, even this “alternative” retained a vocabulary that reduced “young” developing countries to a subordinate position in a global development hierarchy. Coffee’s history as a colonial good made it a perfect example of precisely the kind of disparate trade practices the GDR sought to eliminate, and this message found its way into the cultural milieu of East German society. Product advice books, or Warenkunde, aided East German shoppers with technical details on the origins, contents, and health effects of consumer goods, particularly food. One Warenkunde handbook about coffee and tea published in 1963 provided a grand narrative of the history of coffee as a colonial good. The account bemoaned the practices of the world coffee market, accusing plantation owners of exploiting their workers, and suggesting that North American influence in South America compounded the problem by supporting abusive local governments. According to the text, millions of people in Central and South America had to live “in

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chronic malnourishment,” and “thirty percent of children do not survive their first six years” because of the coffee trade.16 Although the International Coffee Organization had been formed for the ostensible purpose of stabilizing the economic and political situation in Central America, the booklet’s authors argued that its real motive lay in preventing liberation movements in these countries from gaining momentum.17 Meanwhile, trade with socialist countries would put an end to this exploitation. Warenkunde informed readers that, through trade with socialist countries, “these economically underdeveloped regions are able to rebuild their industry, without being bound by adverse agreements, because the socialist countries run a trade policy of equality, mutual respect and mutual benefit.”18 The booklet did not elaborate further on what, precisely, distinguished socialist practices from those the authors vilified. By presenting East Germany’s coffee procurement practices as a means to help improve the local economies of its trade partners, coffee thus fit nicely into the SED’s existing narrative for development policy. Framing the coffee trade in terms of demonstrating East Germany’s solidarity with the developing world also allowed the GDR to use trade, development, and humanitarian assistance as “advertisements” for socialism, and as a means to strengthen the links that tied together an international socialist community. This approach also conveniently facilitated the consumption of coffee in East Germany while avoiding any critical reflection on the legacy of colonial exploitation: East Germans could simply enjoy their coffee without worry because socialist trade “corrected” the trade inequities of colonialism. Yet in treating coffee-producing countries as either passive victims of capitalism or as potential benefactors of socialism, Warenkunde established a clear hierarchy between the developed and “underdeveloped” world. Despite the government’s rhetoric of equality, mutual respect, and benefit, its public message also positioned the GDR as an economically developed state with the capacity—and moral obligation—to provide coffee-producing countries with the means to industrialize, and instruction on how to do so along socialist lines. This basic assumption, which underlay the GDR’s engagement with the developing world, led East German traders to believe that securing emergency contracts for coffee with socialist-leaning states and “progressive developing countries” would not pose any significant challenges. On the contrary, they believed countries like Angola and Ethiopia represented ideal trade partners who would be eager to secure extensive and long-term trade with East Germany because each country was in the process of adopting and implementing socialism. In the scramble to secure more coffee beans during the crisis, however, East German officials would realize that ideology alone was insufficient to create the ideal conditions for trade. Rather, the agreements proved quite challenging to develop because each country—including the GDR—prioritized its own material and political interests over a more general commitment to international socialist brotherhood.

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Reluctance and Secrecy: Coffee from Angola and Ethiopia, 1977 In December 1976, East German Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer traveled to Africa in the hopes of strengthening economic ties, and while there he discussed the possibility of obtaining coffee from a number of countries, most notably Angola and Ethiopia.19 In February 1977, Werner Lamberz, a representative of the Politburo’s Department of Commercial Coordination (Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung—KoKo), led a delegation to follow up on Fischer’s initial probes. In his report, Lamberz estimated that both countries presented favorable conditions for coffee export to Germany. Ethiopia produced approximately 150,000 t of coffee per year, of which it exported 90,000 t; Angola produced 90,000 t that year, though the outbreak of civil war had drastically affected production, and this figure was a drop of nearly half compared with previous years, according to the Foreign Ministry’s calculations.20 If negotiations were successful, the coffee deals would represent East Germany’s first significant trade relationship with either Angola or Ethiopia; but through these negotiations, the GDR also risked blundering into delicate political and strategic situations. Since the beginning of the decade, the Soviet Union had increased its involvement in Africa in an attempt to buttress its influence in the area and counteract perceived American and Chinese interests.21 In fact, it was precisely in Angola and Ethiopia—the two countries capable of providing coffee to East Germany—where Soviet efforts saw their most direct and significant impacts. Almost immediately after Angola gained independence through the Alvar Agreement in January 1975, power struggles between the former liberation movements—the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola—MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola—UNITA)—erupted into a civil war.22 The Soviets and Cubans supported the MPLA, the highlight of which was a joint military operation from December 1975 to March 1976, through which Soviet-supported Cuban forces captured Huambo.23 For the Soviet leadership, the operation demonstrated the socialist world’s solidarity with Africa and Asia, as well as the fact that the USSR “could advance socialism in the Third World during a period of détente with the United States.”24 Moreover, Soviet observers in Angola were encouraged that “internationalists” like Angola’s prime minister, Lopo de Nascimento, were rising in power.25 For Ethiopia, the Provisional Military Committee’s (Derg) top priority since 1974 remained securing military equipment and arming its citizens’ militias. The Soviets had initially refused to support the Derg, unwilling to damage relations with Somalia until, in spring 1977, the United States threw its support behind Siad Barre, who moved troops to support the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) in the Ogaden region of eastern Ethiopia. Increasingly,

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Moscow perceived Somalia—and Siad Barre—as a liability and shifted its support to Derg Chairman Mengistu Haile Mariam.26 East Germany was still reluctant to provide Ethiopia with the weapons the Derg desired because the Soviets had not yet committed to military support of Mengistu’s government.27 Yet while Berlin could not break with Soviet policy, neither was it prepared to abandon its coffee needs solely because of this barrier. Thus, East German traders argued their efforts should focus on a few “key areas” of economic cooperation “in the interests of securing raw materials, and mutual benefit.”28 The East Germans suggested a list of consumer and industrial goods that would help develop Ethiopia’s economy after the war, including harbor cranes, machines for textile factories, plastic bottles, small pharmaceutical laboratories, and radio equipment.29 Although East Germany would not openly act in its own interests against those of the Soviet Union, it did prove willing to navigate a delicate balance between these competing interests. The GDR also sought to create a long-term export line for East German finished goods, goods the GDR struggled to find a market for elsewhere.30 Unwilling to fulfill the Derg’s wishes by arming Ethiopian militias, the East Germans instead tried to define “mutual benefit” according to their own perceptions of what constituted—or ought to constitute—priorities for Ethiopia’s economic development. Since 1976, the Derg had requested political assistance in its negotiations for military aid from the socialist bloc countries. Specifically, Ethiopia claimed it wanted to “build socialism” along Marxist-Leninist lines and asked for education programs and political training for youth.31 The European socialist countries had already provided some assistance, specifically when East German ambassador Helmut Gürke presented Ethiopian schools with a gift of key socialist texts in November 1976.32 Yet the East Germans remained somewhat skeptical of the course of socialism in Ethiopia. In their summary of the general political and economic situation, members of Lamberz’s delegation claimed a great deal of work remained in building mass support for the revolution, particularly among the youth: “Currently, no youth organizations yet exist in Ethiopia. Due to the strong influence of Trotskyites and Leftist extremists, a large portion of the youth and students remain opposed to the PMRV [Derg]. Because the youth is not a homogenous group, a fierce class struggle is taking place within it. . . . The forming of a revolutionary youth organization has been necessary for a long time.”33 In the eyes of the East Germans, inadequate ideological training contributed to wider political disunity and, in the case of the youth, social unrest. The Germans blamed this ideological deficiency for much of the Derg’s struggles, claiming to have reportedly encountered “dangerous leftist exaggerations” in their encounters with local party leaders.34 In the East Germans’ assessment, helping to correct these “mistakes” was a necessary step to continued cooperation. While the Derg’s military coup had successfully overthrown the crown, a great deal of work remained in the cultural and social process of revolution. East German officials

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presupposed their country possessed the consumer and industrial goods, as well as the ideological sophistication, to guide the Ethiopians through that process. Nonetheless, Ethiopia remained steadfast in its preference for military goods. On 9 March 1977, Mengistu Haile Mariam wrote directly to Erich Honecker for military support, claiming that Ethiopia was beset by “multiple enemies” and that, despite the Ethiopian people’s willingness “to fight to the last,” they were “unarmed, and must fight with clubs and knives against powers armed to the teeth by imperialists and reactionary Arab countries.”35 The East Germans had little desire to disrupt their diplomatic relations in the Horn of Africa, but they had little choice so long as Moscow maintained a status quo between Ethiopia and Somalia. Meanwhile, industry specialists and ministry officials at home had not yet finalized plans to implement a solution to the coffee crisis, and, in any event, supplies would still run dry by the fall if no new source of beans could be secured. The GDR still preferred to concentrate its trade with Ethiopia in finished goods and political assistance rather than weapons, but it relented in light of the lack of better options. From 11 to 25 June 1977, Lamberz and his delegation visited Angola and Ethiopia, carrying final proposals for coffee agreements. The Derg agreed in principle to deliver 5000 t of raw coffee each year between 1977 and 1982 and to accept payment in finished goods for the deliveries in 1977 and 1978.36 The preliminary agreement, signed on 15 June, included political cooperation, such as setting aside five spots at East German Party Schools for Ethiopian candidates, and the printing and delivery of a few “fundamental works” by Marx and Engels.37 The agreement also called for the delivery of 550 W50 trucks to Ethiopia, as well as military goods (“equipment of special foreign trade” [Ausrüstungen des speziellen Außenhandels]) worth 53 million ValuTable 4.1. East German munitions to tamark, that together would account for Ethiopia, 29 June 1977. 4,000 t of raw coffee.38 On 29 June, a Number of units ship carrying military equipment and Item 64,500 arms left Rostock Harbor destined for AKM Assault Rifles the Ethiopian port of Assab. The ship, M-43 ammunition 23,953,000 the MS Wismar, carried a range of arms PKM Submachine gun 100 and ammunition, as seen in Table 4.1 PKM ammunition 350,000 at right. PKS Submachine gun 100 A second ship, the Friedrich Engels, 700,000 followed the Wismar three days later PKS ammunition 27 with a load of medical supplies, and RPG-7 over the course of the next week, eight Grenades PG-7 540 more deliveries were flown in to Addis 7.65mm pistols 1,040 Ababa, including a shipment of 5,000 7.65mm ammunition 120,000 submachine guns and 2,250,000 rounds Steel helmets 6,000 of ammunition; 320 cubic meters of

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medical bandages; additional ammunition for all small arms; additional helmets; and more W50 heavy trucks.39 In production since 1965, the W50 was an established and recognized truck line, both within the GDR and internationally.40 With applications for both civilian and military transport, it is not surprising that the Ethiopian military leadership responded positively to the first shipments. The W50s were also simple and inexpensive to produce and could be delivered with ease. In his reports home, Lamberz could not contain his enthusiasm at the prospect that providing this military equipment could help lay the foundation for broader, more comprehensive trade between the two countries, thus securing a future export market for East German goods.41 Neues Deutschland interviewed Lamberz in December 1977, and he said the growing relationship between their two nations was “a reflection of the close friendship” and the GDR’s “strong sympathy for Ethiopia.”42 Confident that they had guaranteed a reasonable contract with Ethiopia, Lamberz’s delegation rushed south to Angola on 17 June to present its proposal to the MPLA. Negotiations here proved difficult, due mostly to Angola’s insistence on accepting payment only in hard currency. In exchange for coffee, the East Germans offered an extensive list of goods and services, from sending 200 experts to aid in the expansion of the textile and fishing industries to providing 2,800 trucks, 3,000 t of pork, 500 t of broilers, machines, and consumer goods.43 The Angolan side countered that, based on Angola’s domestic economic situation and its international payment obligations, the GDR could receive 5,000 t of coffee annually but only in exchange for the immediate payment of hard currency.44 The outbreak of civil war between the ruling MPLA and UNITA put enormous and ongoing strain on the Angolan economy, and trade officials were disinclined to sell their coffee at a loss when they could normally sell it through the usual coffee markets as member signatories of the International Coffee Agreement. Meanwhile, East Germany was hesitant to sell arms and military equipment to Angola, lest it be perceived as taking a side in the conflict. Far more attractive was a potential market for finished goods and industrial equipment—goods East Germany had been unable to sell elsewhere. According to an informant of the East German Secret Police (Stasi), while socialist countries had provided a great deal of aid to Angola in previous years, this aid had been largely limited to weapons rather than a meaningful, long-term commitment to helping the Angolans build socialism. Continued lack of assistance contributed to “growing skepticism among other African countries regarding the socialist countries” because “the example of Angola demonstrates that promises alone are useless.”45 After three days of what Lamberz called “complicated negotiations,” the Angolan and East German delegates agreed to two different proposals, pending the approval of their respective governments. In the first, Angola would supply the GDR with 5,000 t of raw coffee annually from 1977–1982, payable in hard currency. In addition to this arrangement, however, the two parties wrote a separate

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contract for 1977–1978, in which Angola pledged to accept payment for the coffee delivered in those two years through direct barter—not currency—and also promised to deliver 2,000 t of raw coffee to East German ports within six to eight weeks.46 Clearly, these two contracts stipulated entirely different and seemingly contradictory terms for the coffee trade. Only the first document would be acknowledged publicly and thus form the “official” conditions of the Angolan– East German cooperation. The second agreement stipulated that both parties would keep its contents “absolutely secret,” a clause no doubt added by the Angolans who had, as the agreement further explained, “rejected similar proposals from other socialist countries (Bulgaria, Yemen, Czechoslovakia, and Cuba).”47 Finally, Angola also requested favorable credit conditions for the repayment of machines, trucks, and so on, including the “lowest possible interest rate.”48 As in the case of Ethiopia, the coffee deal with Angola required considerable collaboration with and concession to Angolan interests. With an estimated annual production of 90,000 t, Angola did not produce enough coffee to afford losing the precious hard currency it could earn on international markets, especially in light of the current high prices. While it was willing to assist the GDR with its great need for coffee by accepting nontraditional forms of payment, Angola clearly had no desire to extend this arrangement beyond its German partner or beyond a limited period of time. Part of Angola’s motivation to show such preference for East Germany at the expense of the other socialist countries lay in economics: President Neto bemoaned the current situation in Angola, telling the East Germans that his country struggled to maintain, let alone expand, its economic capacities. Production in industry and agriculture was “significantly lower than before independence and currently sinks further,” he claimed, adding: “In the cities there is unemployment and provisioning of the population has deteriorated in recent months.”49 Another motive may have been political. It is likely that, encouraged by the support of the Soviets and Cubans, the Angolans were willing to cooperate with the East Germans as a show of good faith, but the fact remained that Angola was giving more in these coffee deals than it was getting. At the same time, East Germany had little desire to become embroiled in a civil war by supplying weapons. Keeping the true deal secret accomplished two things; first, by publicly “purchasing” coffee, the “official” trade deal allowed East Germany to claim it had no direct involvement in the civil war. Second, hiding the details of a bartered deal avoided the perception of favoritism toward East Germany—particularly among the socialist countries Angola had turned down, like Cuba, which had provided military support just a year prior and may have taken exception to such an arrangement. The East German–Angolan coffee deal could be perceived as belying each country’s supposed commitment to international socialism, a sin that could likely have seriously jeopardized the Angolans’ relations with other European socialist countries (especially the Soviet Union) and East Germany’s relations in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world.

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In its 28 June session, the SED Politburo approved the domestic measures to stretch the coffee supply through Kaffee-Mix, as well as the trade agreements with Angola and Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, a Joint Council was formed comprised of representatives from both countries and tasked with overseeing the fulfillment of the coffee contract. Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend—FDJ) brigades were to be dispatched to Angola immediately to help organize shipping procedures.50 Trips abroad, like that to Angola, formed an important part of the FDJ’s contributions to East Germany’s demonstrations of solidarity with “brother socialist nations.” Hopes were high among the SED leadership that these contracts could solve the coffee supply problem and contain the crisis. In the Politburo’s estimation, the contracts not only helped secure emergency infusions of raw coffee to satisfy public demand for the next year but also offered East Germany a potential long-term market for its trucks and other heavy equipment.51 The specific mention of industrial goods here reinforced the East Germans’ view that the concessions they had made in these contracts—especially supplying Ethiopia with weapons—represented a necessary and temporary measure, one that demonstrated East Germany’s commitment to international solidarity but that the GDR hoped and intended to change in time.

Early Frustrations and Problems, July–September 1977 Anticipating a viable solution to the crisis, the responsible ministries acted immediately to implement the new measures. Werner Lamberz and Günter Mittag’s confidential letter reached Erich Honecker on 6 July, informing him of the coming price hikes for coffee in Poland and Czechoslovakia.52 The same letter also included a detailed update reporting that, aside from a few logistical issues, the first deliveries of GDR goods to Ethiopia was proceeding “without particular problems.”53 The first convoy of ships was currently en route, carrying trucks and noncivilian goods, while those goods traveling by air, including steel helmets and ammunition, had already arrived at their destinations. A small group of technicians and specialists was also en route to Angola to make the necessary preparations for the arrival of two hundred FDJ brigades who would assist in the coffee deliveries from Luanda. In a surprising move, Ethiopia had apparently also offered to deliver an additional 7,000 t of raw coffee immediately, over and above the contracted 5,000 t. Lamberz and Mittag could barely contain their excitement, exclaiming “this is a magnificent concession and shows the unmistakable bond of trust toward the SED.” Here too, Lamberz and Mittag reminded Honecker of the potential to expand the terms of the existing contracts, saying that if the GDR pursued “flexible trade measures,” it would be possible to secure further coffee imports and save more hard currency.54

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Lamberz and Mittag also warned Honecker that expanding trade with Ethiopia required “immediate decisions” on several pressing matters. A backlog in production on the German end resulted in a shortage of twenty trucks in the first delivery.55 Of the forty-thousand steel helmets owed to Ethiopia, only nine thousand had been delivered by July. Finally, despite Honecker’s orders, the Minister for National Defense had not yet indicated the availability of additional military goods requested by Ethiopia. The list, approved by Honecker, is provided in Table 4.2 below. During their visit to Berlin between 12 and 16 July, the Ethiopian delegates requested additional support for their militias. To maintain the supply of daily rations to frontline soldiers, they requested 7,000 t of double-baked bread.56 In exchange, the delegation expressed Ethiopia’s willingness to double the volume of coffee in its 1977 and 1978 deliveries to a total of 10,000 t per year. East Germany agreed to supply the bread, but its bakeries lacked the capacity to produce the required volume. To make up the difference, the foreign trade ministry planned to purchase bread from West German firms and reexport it.57 Though the terms of the new Ethiopian contract doubled the volume of raw coffee, it also increased costs to East Germany. The value of Ethiopia’s coffee deliveries in 1977 and 1978 now totaled over 131 million VM per year, while the GDR’s export commitments through the contract reached only 53 million VM, leaving a payment imbalance of approximately 78 million VM in Ethiopia’s favor.58 To make up the difference, further substantial contracts for East German goods would have to be concluded in 1978. That autumn, German traders held an export trade fair in Addis Ababa, hoping to use the event as a means to entice the Ethiopians to commit to further contracts.59 Each of the twenty-three East German firms assigned to the fair had contracts and presentations prepared for other countries, but their representatives were suddenly ordered to Addis Ababa instead.60 These firms’ representatives received word of their altered schedules Table 4.2. East German munitions to Ethiopia, 6 July 1977. Ammunition type

Total amount

7.62mm ammunition for automatic carbines

22,500,000 cartridges

tracer rounds

4,500,000

light machine gun ammunition

720,000 rounds

sub-machine gun ammunition

3,000,000 sounds

RPG-7 ammo

9,000 grenades

60mm grenade launcher ammunition

12,000 high explosive grenades; 900 smoke grenades; 200 flash bangs

82mm grenade launcher ammunition

15,000 high explosive grenades; 900 smoke grenades; 200 flash bangs

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only days before the fair, leaving them insufficient time to change their presentations to suit a new audience. Perhaps predictably, the fair failed to impress the Ethiopian visitors, and no new contracts emerged from these efforts, meaning that the payment imbalance continued to harry the trade relationship between Ethiopia and East Germany into the New Year. Efforts to expand the existing terms of trade in Angola suffered similar setbacks. In Angola, responsibility for carrying out the trade deals fell to the FDJ brigades that were sent to assist in the coffee deliveries over the summer and fall of 1977. FDJ brigades maintained the German trucks delivered as part of the contract and assisted in the loading and unloading of the coffee in Angola’s ports. The SPK’s original recommendations in July included a total of twenty-nine brigades comprising approximately 290 East Germans, assigned according to their skillsets, from vehicle repair to drivers, logistics experts, and electricians. A German export delegation traveled to Luanda from 29 July to 9 September to inspect the progress.61 In the hopes of enticing the Angolans to import additional German goods, the delegation hosted a trade exhibition similar to that in Addis Ababa, showcasing East German consumer goods and technical equipment. The East German Stasi monitored the delegation’s activities and noted the visit of high-profile Angolan representatives, including Prime Minister Nascimento, as well as President Neto’s wife. Though the visitors were generally “satisfied and impressed” by the exhibition as a whole, the event failed to spark interest in contracts. In frustration, the Stasi informant remarked that “the exhibit was not being sufficiently utilized for purchasing activities.”62 Even when the East Germans finally managed to secure a set of meetings with the Angolan deputy minister for foreign trade, Erera, and the director of the new state trade firm Importang, Antonio do Santos, they complained that the Angolan side “conducted these discussions in an extraordinarily sluggish [schleppend] manner, and in any event did not give the impression of a larger interest.” A Stasi informant even accused Erera and do Santos of derailing the negotiations, saying “their behavior often appeared inconsistent and ambiguous. They frequently declared their readiness to settle a contract ‘the next day,’ but it took many days, and several complaints were necessary on our part to affect even a partial fulfillment of the given commitments.”63 Despite their best efforts, the East Germans seemed unable to receive a guaranteed audience, let alone secure additional contracts. The contracts with Angola and Ethiopia secured an emergency influx of raw coffee, covering about 40 percent of the East German raw coffee needs until the end of 1978, but hardly represented long-term solutions. Each country had only agreed to accept direct barter until 1979, and if neither were willing to expand or extend these deals, East Germany would find itself in a second coffee crisis by the time these contracts expired. The GDR needed to expand its coffee sources if it hoped to maintain constant supply levels beyond 1978. Compounding the matter, officials within the MBL, MHV, and Politburo faced quite a different set of

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figures: roughly fourteen-thousand Eingaben had reached state leaders by the end of 1977, complaining about the poor quality of Kaffee-Mix.64 Far more frustrating—and financially dangerous—were the growing stockpiles of Kaffee-Mix in stores and warehouses as East Germans continued to purchase Rondo and Mona instead, prompting the Stasi to report a growing “boycott” of the new mixture.65 Public rejection of Kaffee-Mix astonished planners who had assumed that maintaining sufficient supply of coffee would solve the crisis. The project had involved enormous effort, including the complete conversion of many roasting plants, extensive scientific trials to determine the most efficient recipe, and of course great expense, none of which could be recovered, which threatened to cause inflation. The boycott revealed a considerable chasm between what consumers expected and what state officials believed to be the public’s priorities. Despite planners’ attempts to provide East Germans with a replacement product that could satisfy both consumers’ desire for coffee and the budget constraints, the boycott showed that East Germans based their consumer choices on their belief that a product’s price ought to reflect its value, rejecting a product whose quality failed to match their taste expectations. In their Eingaben, citizens concluded that replacing Kosta with Kaffee-Mix robbed them of what they perceived as “genuine” choice, forcing them to spend more money on the more expensive brands. The boycott also jeopardized the state’s original plan to replace the majority of roasted coffee with the new mixture by 1978, measures on which Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski’s carefully balanced hard currency savings rested. In November 1977, Schalck submitted his draft of an import structure for 1978 that called for 49,609 t of coffee, and he expressed his pride in the fact that East Germany had secured its coffee needs for the first half of the year despite the international pricing situation.66 Schalck’s jubilation ignored the fact that his draft reflected a drop from the previous few years, precisely because planners had intended to replace 80 percent of total coffee supply with Kaffee-Mix.67 By January 1978, it was clear that consumers were not relenting; so as long as the public rejected the coffee, the government had no choice but to find alternative sources for raw beans, in spite of the challenges in avoiding hard currency expenditures. On 9 January, Gerhard Schürer wrote to Mittag outlining the new supply lines for 1978 and seeking approval for some alterations. Under the new plans, he explained, the roasted brands Mona, Rondo, Mocca-Fix Gold, and Kaffee-Mix would all remain in circulation, but volumes in circulation were to be dramatically altered along the following lines: Mona Rondo Kaffee-Mix Tschibo/Jacobs

0.4 kt 37.85 kt (of which 14.0 kt would be Mocca-Fix Gold) 6.0 kt 1.25 kt68

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Clearly, planners had abandoned their original plans of a ratio of 80 percent Kaffee-Mix and 20 percent Mona, but this new proposal represented no mere reversal of the ratios. Kaffee-Mix accounted for only 13 percent of total provisions, and it was Rondo, not Mona, that would account for the majority of the coffee supply, which was significant because of Rondo’s higher content of roasted coffee (and therefore higher production costs). Furthermore, planners were ordered to apply market principles to the production of the mixture: a Politburo directive on 24 January 1978 declared that “the production and provisioning of Kaffee-Mix for the population must be made according to demand. If there is no demand, the production of Kaffee-Mix is to cease.”69 The public’s refusal to accept the coffee measures had now caused the government to reverse its plans and to adopt practices that ran counter to its basic economic tenets. The concession to demand-based principles reflected the political implications of the coffee crisis and tacitly acknowledged the public’s demands for consumer choice and quality for this household good. With Kaffee-Mix abandoned, industry planners and foreign trade staff found themselves back where they had begun at the outset of the crisis, except this time, they faced heightened political and public expectations with far fewer options for meeting them. On 26 January 1978 the Council of Ministers announced that the GDR’s coffee interests would henceforth be pursued on a strict “goods for goods” (Ware gegen Ware) basis, including with nonsocialist countries and firms willing to accept payment in GDR goods deliveries.70 Under the ruling, East German trade officials were to prioritize procurement from “progressive developing countries . . . that meet the commercial interests of the GDR”—Ethiopia, Angola, Mexico, Madagascar, and Tanzania were specifically listed as examples—and were also supposed to investigate the options for procuring coffee in other socialist countries like Laos and Vietnam.71 Coordination of the GDR’s projects in developing countries fell to the Commission for Developing Countries (Kommission Entwicklungsländer) and the KoKo. The commission was formed on 20 December 1977 to oversee fulfillment of the initial coffee agreements, but its responsibilities reflected the GDR’s intent to use those agreements to foster long-term trade relations, including supervising trade exchanges, managing formal relations between state officials and experts, as well as securing further trade contracts.72 Whereas the coffee contracts with Angola and Ethiopia reflected a hasty solution during an emergency, Ware gegen Ware now formed the GDR’s official trade policy with regard to coffee. The GDR still faced payment imbalances with both Angola and Ethiopia that needed to be resolved before barter could be applied more broadly. In June 1978, Wolfgang Rauchfuß led an East German delegation to Luanda to discuss possibilities for paying the outstanding balance on the Angolan contract. Rauchfuß described negotiations as “constructive,” and, despite the Angolans’ previous misgivings about bartering, the two sides not only concluded a new contract for

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10,000 t of coffee per year in 1979 and 1980 (payable in goods); Angola also agreed to send an additional 2,000 t of raw coffee above the 5,000 t already delivered for 1978 in exchange for East German trucks and some consumer goods, such as forklifts, soap, and toys. Both sides agreed that the payment for these deliveries would follow the conditions of the 1977 agreement—that is, through the delivery of GDR goods, not convertible currency.73 Given Angola’s reluctance in 1977 to accept goods in exchange for coffee, the new contracts represented a considerable about-face. Indeed, according to Rauchfuß, the Soviet ambassador remarked that the extended coffee deal represented a “novelty” that “even the Cuban comrades have so far failed” to accomplish.74 Rauchfuß cited the conclusion of additional export contracts over the previous twelve months that would pay for the 1978 coffee deliveries as a leading factor in this change of policy. Securing such contracts no doubt helped to build the Angolans’ confidence in the GDR’s capacity to fulfill its contracts. It is also plausible that the MPLA saw an expansion of its coffee deal with East Germany as a means to ensure continued Soviet military support in Angola’s ongoing civil war. Despite this apparent success, however, the new deal remained limited in two key ways. First, as they had in 1977, both countries agreed “to keep these coffee agreements secret,” thus allowing both countries to maintain a façade of political and military neutrality in terms of both the civil war and relations between socialist countries. Second, this new deal could not solve the GDR’s long-term coffee dilemma as the MPLA had indicated there was “currently no willingness” to sign any further agreements beyond 1980.75 East Germany’s efforts to secure new export contracts in Ethiopia proved frustrating as a dramatic shift in the local military situation fundamentally changed the conditions of the original arrangement. From September 1977 onward, the Soviet Union had fully committed to supporting Ethiopia in the Ogaden War, sending nearly one thousand soldiers and over US$1 billion worth of military equipment, effectively taking over the supply of such goods to Ethiopia.76 By March 1978, Soviet-led forces (including Ethiopian, Cuban, and South Yemeni troops) defeated the pro-Somalia Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF) and secured the Ogaden region. In one sense, the war’s end no doubt seemed to present an opportunity for the GDR to change the form of its trade vis-à-vis Ethiopia. Far more preferable would have been a long-term trade agreement involving East German consumer or industrial goods. However, it had been precisely its urgent need for military supplies that had motivated Ethiopia to accept direct barter for its coffee in the first place. With Soviet support secure and the war over, Ethiopia’s need for East German munitions ground to a halt, leaving German traders the unenviable task of finding alternative goods with which to fill outstanding balances on coffee. Even before victory in Ogaden removed most of Ethiopia’s motivation for goods-based trade, however, a number of mistakes on the German side mired

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relations. During the first set of deliveries in 1977, instruction manuals for East German equipment arrived in insufficient numbers, and in a few cases manuals were supplied in German, not English.77 Herbert Graf, who had replaced Werner Lamberz as head of the SED Central Committee Working Group in Ethiopia following the latter’s fatal helicopter crash in March 1978, warned that the GDR’s failure to fulfill its payment obligations threatened to jeopardize potential future contracts.78 To Graf ’s mind, the greatest danger in not rectifying the payment imbalance lay in the threat of Ethiopia taking its coffee westward. Coffee represented Ethiopia’s primary source of hard currency, accounting for roughly 50 to 75 percent of the country’s total annual earnings.79 Considering these figures, even the 10,000 t Ethiopia agreed to send East Germany represented a significant loss of potential cash earnings, a prospect that sparked some dissent among Ethiopian officials.80 According to Graf, in May 1978 the European Community offered Mengistu over US$200 million in aid, while the World Bank and International Monetary Fund had also extended their own offers. Given Ethiopia’s financial difficulties, argued Graf, the Derg was likely to accept these “and other offers.”81 Graf complained that it was “increasingly clear that the imperialists are developing long-term economic politics with Ethiopia under the mantle of humanitarian aid in order to regain lost ground.”82 Warnings that Ethiopia could turn its coffee trade westward concerned East German officials who assumed Ethiopia was already predisposed against barter-based trade with the GDR. In an unforgiving analysis from late June, the general director’s office of the East German Foreign Export Company (Außenhandelsbetrieb—AHB) Genußmittel complained at length about the problems the firm had encountered in Ethiopia and with the Ethiopian state Coffee Marketing Corporation (CMC) in a lengthy written analysis. The analysis blamed coffee production delays on an allegedly inefficient local industry, saying that as an organization the CMC was “unable to cope with substantially higher volumes of coffee exports.”83 Transportation posed the largest problem as only one-third of the harvest made it to Addis Ababa on time for delivery; in addition, since the fall of Djibouti, the harbor at Assab (the only viable harbor in Ethiopia at the time) had been inundated with heavy traffic, causing delays. Genußmittel’s analysis noted a “surtax system” in Ethiopia, a tax levied on all shipments in and out of the country that was collected before any ship was permitted to depart Assab. Although this tax was calculated on the “average price of the previous month,” no adjustments to it had been made and it remained fixed on the average “despite changes in price on the world market.”84 Furthermore, despite being the state organization responsible for coffee production, the CMC did not control the entire coffee industry. As Genußmittel’s analysis also noted, five “large export firms control half of the Ethiopian coffee exports—and therefore one-third of [the country’s] total exports.”85 The company suspected that those in charge of these private firms were not interested

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in the trade contract with East Germany and sought to profit from coffee sales. The analysis even claimed that company staff had encountered similar attitudes within the state CMC, alleging that at least one general manager repeatedly complained that his firm’s—and therefore his country’s—deliveries to the GDR “would greatly limit the sales opportunities to capitalist countries.”86 In the analysis, Genußmittel remained optimistic that the current problems could be solved, provided that East Germans were willing to change the parameters of their relationship with Ethiopia. “In the interests of improving the market and price,” Genußmittel recommended that the GDR should “no longer agree to any fixed price” in terms of coffee and should also “examine the inclusion of powerful private export firms” to improve East Germany’s negotiating position “while maintaining the primacy of the state enterprise CMC.”87 The firm’s report clearly indicates that it was willing to adopt practices that prioritized the delivery of coffee for East Germans even if those practices did not conform to established socialist principles, or if they did not necessarily reflect the wishes of the Ethiopians.88 It is unclear whether government officials adopted Genußmittel’s recommendations, but the struggles to meet deliveries, as well as the mounting confusion and frustrations between the export firms, caused problems on the ground sufficient enough to generate growing concern at the diplomatic level, straining the relationship. Coffee was far too valuable a crop for Ethiopia to trade at a disadvantage, a fact on which Mengistu Haile Mariam drew in a personal letter to Erich Honecker in mid-June. Mengistu declared Ethiopia’s readiness to continue trading coffee with the GDR but told Honecker that continued cooperation “required that trade relations must develop . . . in such a way that they will be mutually beneficial.”89 Deploying the GDR’s own rhetoric about development aid, Mengistu insisted on a more equitable relationship, suggesting that both countries form a group of representatives who would conduct a thorough investigation of the current agreements.90 Experts from both sides met from 21 to 25 August to discuss the extension of the current trade program; but after months of delays in payment, German promises that the GDR would “fulfill its obligations through goods deliveries and services in full” no longer inspired any confidence among Ethiopian delegates.91 Between the continued payment imbalance, Ethiopia’s persistent unwillingness to entertain additional export contracts for East German consumer goods, and growing mutual frustrations on the ground, the conflict of interest between the two countries proved irreconcilable. Despite Ethiopia’s faithful coffee deliveries, there remained an outstanding balance of 82 million Birr (60 million VM) in its favor. The country could no longer accept delays in payment as its domestic circumstances “no longer reflected” the conditions of the original agreement, and the country now needed to grow its currency reserves.92 Consequently, Ethiopia expected payment in full of the outstanding balance—in convertible currency—by the end of the year. Honecker managed

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to gain an extension until 30 June 1979 by appealing directly to Mengistu, who also allowed the final payments to continue in goods deliveries. While the GDR would be permitted to purchase coffee in the future, Ethiopia imposed an annual limit of 2,000 t.93 Thus, “only fourteen months after its signing, the long-term coffee agreement had failed.”94 East German state media continued to celebrate relations with Angola and Ethiopia as key examples of the GDR’s commitment to international solidarity, downplaying the various challenges associated with these agreements. Such portrayals also highlighted and emphasized the GDR’s assistance in both nations, especially noting its role in guiding young states in building socialism in their societies. In 1978, while praising Angola’s MPLA for nationalizing industry and agriculture—including the coffee industry—Neues Deutschland nonetheless reminded readers of the GDR’s assistance, including a picture of GDR physiotherapists working with their Angolan counterparts to treat patients.95 During the 1978 Leipzig trade fair in March, Neues Deutschland focused on exhibits from the developing world—many of which appeared at the fair for the first time that year. The Leipzig fair presented an opportunity to portray the GDR as a modern, developed state. By positioning the booths from developing countries together, apart from European booths, and by featuring the “traditional handcrafts” of these countries, Neues Deutschland also used the article to highlight elements of civilizational difference between the GDR and the developing world. Neues Deutschland dedicated a full two pages to the fair, the majority of which discussed the relationship between the GDR and the developing world, claiming the GDR was “a good partner for young nation-states.”96 In September, Neues Deutschland again wrote about Angola’s “course toward a stable economy,” telling East Germans, “the young republic is in the first stages of ‘national rebuilding’” that laid “the basis for the later construction of socialism.”97 The paper emphasized that the construction of socialism in Angola was a project still in the making, a goal not yet achieved despite taking important “first” steps. This language served to set Angola—and by extension the developing world—apart from the world of industrially and economically developed nations to which the GDR claimed to belong. When it reviewed the implementation of Ware gegen Ware in December 1978, the SED Central Committee proclaimed the program a success, duly noting that the import plans for raw coffee that year had been “fully secured”—by which the Central Committee meant that “all purchases in 1978” had been made on the basis of goods for goods.98 To some extent, this confidence seemed justified as the country had, after all, managed to cover its coffee needs through contracts with nearly a dozen different countries over the past year.99 Confident not only that the GDR had managed to acquire the coffee it needed, the Central Committee also expressed its satisfaction regarding the new trade relationships formed as a result of the coffee contracts. Based on the past

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year’s experiences, the committee concluded that developing countries shared the same motive as East Germany in entering into these kinds of agreements because through them these countries could “simultaneously guarantee a long-term sale of raw coffee and can pay for GDR imports through agricultural goods.”100 As both Ethiopian and Angolan reluctance had demonstrated, the East Germans could rely on neither of these outcomes. Indeed, the report even mentioned traders’ struggles to obtain lists of desired GDR goods, noting the repeated need to appeal to each country in pursuit of expanded trade deals.101 In 1978 world prices declined, allowing the GDR to increase its coffee imports from its traditional sources, principally Brazil and Colombia, beginning in 1978 and 1979, respectively (see Tables 4.3 and 4.4). While the Central Committee concluded that the international pricing situation and the domestic demand for coffee necessitated the continued adherence to Ware gegen Ware, a number of changes were necessary to address the problems that arose as a result of this trade policy. The Central Committee decided that because coffee was so important a commodity, the state’s policies needed to be flexible, rendering certain “deviations from this principle [Ware gegen Ware]” permissible in “exceptional” cases.102 No specific detail was provided for what sort of “deviations” the committee had in mind, but this acknowledgment of the coffee market’s unpredictability further illustrates the government’s commitment to coffee, as well as to a practical approach that could remain flexible. Despite this shift, coffee still cost more than twice as much as it had in 1975, making it only relatively more affordable than in the immediate crisis years. Additionally, the GDR’s hard-currency debts continued to skyrocket as the country imported DM 21 billion more goods and materials than it exported between 1971 and 1980, and foreign debt sat at roughly DM 28 billion by 1980 (see Table 3.3). Throughout the 1970s, Mittag had tried to slow the debt’s climb by selling Russian oil and petro-chemical equipment and converting as much of the Table 4.3. ICO composite indicator prices for coffee, 1976–1981 (US cents/lb.). Comparative analysis of world coffee prices and manufactured goods. ICO composite indicator price

1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

71.73

141.96

229.21

155.15

169.50

150.67

115.42

Table 4.4. GDR coffee imports by country (in t), 1977–1981. Country

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

Angola Ethiopia

5,514

6,549

9,058

11,351

8,033

9,126

10,016

–

–

2,998

Brazil

9,896

15,101

17,520

18,723

24,710

Colombia

6,271

2,272

5,952

9,538

7,202

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economy as possible to fueling by lignite. This plan relied on the price for oil remaining high in Western markets and proved disastrous when Iraq and Iran went to war in 1980, and their overproduction of oil drove prices down to less than half their 1981 level by 1985.103 In this climate, the return to traditional coffee sources despite the continued high prices further demonstrates the state’s genuine commitment to managing its coffee supply. But it was clear to planners and party leadership alike that these prices and the overwhelming debt necessitated not only a continuation but an expansion of the goods for goods trade policy enacted during the crisis. Yet, as the experience of 1978 had demonstrated, the policy had its limits. In particular, Ethiopia’s unwillingness to accept goods for its coffee any longer and the one-thousand-ton limit it placed on East German coffee imports meant that the planned import structure for 1979 and beyond could not be sustained by the existing trading partners. State estimates of coffee consumption added to officials’ fears that the GDR’s capacity to provide this basic good was only going to further diminish. Official reports tracked increases in coffee drinking across the country in both household and workplace consumption, as seen in Tables 4.5 and 4.6 below. Table 4.5. Average weekly household coffee consumption, 1972 and 1978 (in g). 1972 District

1978

Per household

Per person

Per household

Per person

DDR, Total

138

71

153

79

Berlin

155

89

160

91

Cottbus

143

73

144

77

Dresden

129

66

150

76

Erfurt

123

63

139

70

Frankfurt

161

87

136

61

Gera

119

58

146

79

Halle

132

63

161

84

Karl-Marx-Stadt

143

75

146

77

Leipzig

165

86

177

86

Magdeburg

142

78

163

88

Neubrandenburg

113

57

132

63

Potsdam

129

70

173

90

Rostock

145

67

149

71

Schwerin

142

74

137

74

Suhl

119

61

157

74

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Table 4.6. Average weekly household coffee consumption at the workplace, 1972 and 1978 (in g). Households that drink coffee at work (percent)

Cups per person per week at the workplace

District

1972

1978

1972

1978

DDR, Total

43.7

49.1

5.9

6.6

Berlin

56

47

6.5

6.7

Cottbus

46

52

6.1

6.3

Dresden

52

55

5.3

7.1

Erfurt

41

53

5.2

6.7

Frankfurt

46

43

7.0

6.6

Gera

38

60

6.5

5.3

Halle

37

44

5.7

6.9

Karl-Marx-Stadt

53

54

5.8

7.2

Leipzig

48

59

6.9

6.6

Magdeburg

38

44

6.8

6.1

Neubrandenburg

31

34

5.1

5.7

Potsdam

44

45

5.6

7.1

Rostock

26

38

5.4

5.3

Schwerin

20

49

4.9

6.1

Suhl

46

46

5.5

5.2

While outlining options for maintaining supply from 1981 to 1985, the Institute for Market Research (IfM) claimed: “for the majority of the adult population, coffee has become an inseparable part of everyday life. As is the case with all basic products, a stable supply is expected as a given.”104 The IfM’s prognosis warned there had been no decline in demand for coffee, a fact it attributed to increases in income. Its recommendations assumed that gift traffic, which represented 20–25 percent of total consumer supply at the time, would increase because official relations between the two Germanys had stabilized.105 East Germany depended on these unofficial sources of coffee to keep supply levels up, but the same report noted that any number of factors—changes in diplomatic relations, price increases for coffee in West Germany, or other “changes to the international coffee trade” (such as another major frost)—could easily disrupt the flow of “gift coffee.”106

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Conclusion The coffee arrangements East Germany made with Ethiopia and Angola highlight the complexity of relations between socialist nations in the late Cold War. A shared ideology provided some common ground on which to negotiate but was insufficient to override practical concerns such as economics, politics, and military concerns. Neither the GDR nor its partners were willing to sacrifice too much to achieve their own objectives, and each tried to limit the concessions they made to one another. Acknowledging these limits, however, does not mean ideology played a mere rhetorical role in providing a backdrop for trade; nor was ideology absent or downplayed in relations or negotiations. East Germans’ hopes that Angola and Ethiopia would be willing to barter for coffee instead of expecting hard currency derived from an assumption that each country shared a commitment to international solidarity with fellow socialist nations and would be happy to demonstrate that commitment by helping the GDR on principle. East German decision makers also initially accepted both the Derg and MPLA leaderships’ commitments to building socialism in their nations at face value and had no reason to doubt this conviction until after the agreements were signed and the challenges of implementation emerged. Both Ethiopia’s and Angola’s reluctance to expand or extend the coffee trade fed growing frustrations among East German delegates, who took for granted both the practical and ideological desirability of expanding these deals. Because both Angola and Ethiopia were taking steps toward modernizing their economies, the German delegates assumed the countries would be eager for assistance—particularly for heavy industrial and agricultural goods and equipment. Meanwhile, East Germans could hardly afford to miss this opportunity to foster strong economic ties with these countries as both a long-term source of raw materials and a market for GDR goods. In the eyes of German delegates, the African countries’ attempts to sell coffee for hard currency rather than exchange it through barter suggested a lack of commitment to Soviet-inspired communism and international solidarity. Yet the GDR’s urgent need for coffee had led its officials to conclude hasty trade deals before adequately calculating the GDR’s ability to fulfill its end of the bargain. Consequently, when the GDR proved unable to deliver its goods on time or according to the agreed specifications, its partners grew tired of a deal that benefited their countries so little. For German officials who had envisioned these deals as a means to showcase the GDR’s accomplishments and its place in the modern industrialized world, these failures proved embarrassing. Meanwhile, neither the GDR’s need for coffee nor its need to minimize its dependency on countries that would demand hard currency in payment had diminished. As the barter agreements with Angola and Ethiopia collapsed, East German traders had little choice but to continue their search for countries they hoped would be

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willing to accept payment in kind. This search would lead to an intensification of their negotiations in East Asia, particularly with Laos and Vietnam, neither of which exported coffee but were, as the East Germans discovered, each looking to invest in this industry as part of their own broader economic reconstruction initiatives.

Notes 1. The GDR also signed much smaller coffee trade deals with the Philippines and India, though the volumes of coffee traded through these contracts were very small (1kt or less) compared to the volumes sought in Angola or Ethiopia (and were lower still than the amounts purchased from Colombia, Costa Rica, and Brazil before the crisis broke). See BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2J/8001, Information zur Sicherung der Versorgung der Bevölkerung mit Bohnenkaffee (Röstkaffee); 19. Mai 78, 2. 2. As I noted in the introduction, my use of the term “developing world” in this book is intended to merely reflect the language used by contemporaries—whose use of the term was just as problematic then as its use today because it reproduced many of the structural power imbalances and notions of civilizational difference that this term imbues. 3. Here I borrow from Young-Sun Hong’s comparison of East and West German humanitarian work in the Global South, in which she argues that Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain were guided in part by notions of “civilizational difference” in their encounters with the recipients of their aid, which could reproduce structures of power between Germans and the local populations. See Young-Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chapter 1. Christina Schwenkel challenges this notion, suggesting that while the GDR’s relationship with the Vietnamese could certainly reflect European paternalism, East German solidarity was based on nonhierarchical relationships with their partners in Vietnam, which relied on an understanding of East Germans and Vietnamese as “covictims” of capitalism. See Schwenkel, Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 80–83. Scholarly work on the Soviet Union and Eastern European states has also recently begun exploring the ways in which socialist states used concepts of race, ethnicity, nationalisms, and identities to expand their power and authority. See Tracy McDonald, Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside under Soviet Rule, 1921–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011); Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001); Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Quinn Slobodian, ed., Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). 4. Ingrid Muth, Die DDR-Außenpolitk 1949–1972: Inhalte, Strukturen, Mechanismen (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2001), 17. East German autonomy was nonetheless always limited, and the country remained heavily influenced by Soviet trajectories throughout its existence. The GDR followed the Soviet Union’s commitment to “peaceful coexistence” in the 1950s and 1960s. Wherever Soviet and East German interests collided, primacy fell to Soviet considerations. Nonetheless, in many respects, the GDR practiced its foreign policy independently—including in its humanitarian projects in the Third World. See Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets

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5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

Up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953–1961 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Michael Scholz, “East Germany’s North European Policy Prior to International Recognition of the German Democratic Republic,” Contemporary European History 15, no. 4 (Nov. 2006): 553–71. Because the Social Democratic Party of Germany had not actively supported the German communists during the Weimar Republic, the communists could claim that they alone possessed “antifascist roots.” SED official policy also distinguished between “active resistance” of communist “fighters” and the “passive victimhood” of the Nazis’ racial targets. This tactic allowed the East German leadership to couch its legitimacy in terms of privileged victimhood. See Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Jon Berndt Olsen complicates this narrative by discussing the evolution of memory politics in the GDR. See Berndt Olsen, Tailoring Truth: Politicizing the Past and Negotiating Memory in East Germany, 1945–1990 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 61–62. Scholz, “East Germany’s North European Policy,” 553. Ibid., 554. Gerd Horten, “Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the ‘Vietnam Bonus’ of the Early 1970s,” German Studies Review 36, no. 3 (2013): 557–78. Rolf Gutermuth, “Freier Welthandel setzt friedliche Koexistenz voraus,” Neues Deutschland, 22 March 1964, 7. “Hat die Erde Brote für Alle?,” Für Dich 41, no. 2 (Oct. 1968): 26–27, emphasis added. Ibid. Hans-Joachim Döring also discusses the GDR’s conceptualization of “Handel statt Hilfe” in his “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” in Die Politik der DDR gegenüber der Dritten Welt am Beispiel von Mosambik und Äthiopien (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1999), 16. Also, at the 1955 Bandung conference, a range of Third World countries founded the “Third World Movement,” which sought to create a united front against the exploitation of colonial and neocolonial forces to level the terms of trade. See Hong, Cold War Germany, chapter 1. “Hat die Erde Brote für Alle?,” Für Dich 41, no. 2 (Oct. 1968): 26–27. Ibid. Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz, ” 41. Schwenkel, Building Socialism, 89. Günter Bürgin, Vinzenz Ulbrich, and Kurt Wolf, Warenkunde Kaffee und Tee (Leipzig: VEB Fachbuchverlag Leipzig, 1963), 14. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 15. Anne Dietrich, “Kaffee in der DDR—‘Ein Politikum ersten Ranges,’” in Kaffeewelten: Historische Perspektiven auf eine globale Ware im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Christiane Berth, Dorothee Wierling, and Volker Wünderich, 225–47 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015), 230; Döring. “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 60. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/IV/2/2033/87, Notiz über ein Gespräch mit Genossen Clausnitzer und Baum (MfA), no date, 1. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 218. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (Toronto: Doubleday, 2009), 366. Eager to show its reach “even after the Vietnam debacle,” the United States threw its support behind UNITA and a third liberation movement, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola—FNLA) in summer 1975. The Chinese, as well as the South African apartheid government, also provided some support for the anti-MPLA forces. See Westad, Global Cold War, 237. Cuba supplied roughly four thousand ground troops in support of the MPLA. David C. Engerman, “The Second World’s Third World,” Kritika 12, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 183–211, 193.

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

Westad, Global Cold War, 237. Ibid., 239. Ibid., 273. Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 56. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/IV/2/2033/87, Bericht über die Reise der Delegation der SPK der DDR zur Zentralen Plankommission Äthiopiens in der Zeit vom 21 bis 26.2.1977, 7. Ibid., 7. In particular, the State Planning Commission (SPK) saw a large need for trucks in light of the Derg’s collectivization of agriculture, adding that with good planning and preparation, “our trucks can penetrate the market.” Ibid. Westad, Global Cold War, 269. “Political School gets books on Philosophy handed over by Ambassador Helmut Gürke of DDR on behalf of his government and the governments of six other countries,” in Ethiopian Herald, 23 Nov. 1976, cited in Haile Gabriel Dagne, The Commitment of the German Democratic Republic in Ethiopia: A Study Based on Ethiopian Sources, sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG) (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2006), 13. It should be noted that Czechoslovakia also pursued coffee in Africa during the crisis, but it tended to focus its efforts on central African countries. See Pavel Szobi, “Konsumsozialismus in den 1970er und 1980er Jahren am Beispiel der DDR und der ČSSR,” in Die ČSSR und die DDR im historischen Vergleich: Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede zweier staatssozialistischer Systeme in Mitteleuropa, ed. Miloš Řezník and Katja Rosenbaum, 49–62 (Leipzig: Kirchhof & Franke, 2013), 59. SAPMO-BArchB DY 30/J IV 2/2/1680, Anlage zur Protokoll Nr. 26/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 28. Juni 1977, 122. Ibid., 122. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/IV/2/2033/87, Klaus Willerding an Werner Lamberz, 15. März 1977 (Anlag: Brief von Mengistu Haile Mariam an Erich Honecker, 9. März 1977). Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 116; BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1680, Anlage zur Protokoll Nr. 26/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED 28. Juni 1977, 122. Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 117. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1680, Anlage zur Protokoll Nr. 26/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 28. Juni 1977, 123–24. BStU, MfS Abt. BCD Nr. 3292, Information zum Stand der Lieferungen von militärischer Technik und Ausrüstung an das Ministerium für Verteidigung Äthiopiens, signed by Colonel Metzler, no date, 46–48, here 47–48. For more on the LKW W-50 and its production, exportation, etc., see Günther Wappler, Der gebremste Lastkraftwagen. Entwicklung und Produktion der LKW W50 und L60 in Ludwigsfelde. (Aue: Verlagsges. Bergstrasse, 2003). SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1680, Anlage zur Protokoll Nr. 26/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 28. Juni 1977, 123–24. “Demonstration der tiefen Freundschaft mit Äthiopien,” Neues Deutschland, 9 December 1977, 2. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1680, Anlage zur Protokoll Nr. 26/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 28. Juni 1977, 144. Ibid., 145. MfS HA XVIII 7603 Teil 1, Bericht von IM “Peter Reimann,” vom 15. Juni 1977 (20. Juni 1977), 12. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1680, Anlage zur Protokoll Nr. 26/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 28. Juni 1977, 136. Ibid., 151. Ibid.

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49. Ibid. 137. 50. Ibid. For more on the social and political importance of youth brigades to East German socialization, see Alan McDougall, Youth Politics in East Germany: The Free German Youth Movement 1946–1968 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004), 6. 51. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1680, Anlage zur Protokoll Nr. 26/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 28. Juni 1977, 114. 52. See chapter 2. 53. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1680, Günter Mittag und Werner Lamberz an Erich Honecker, 6 Juli 1977, 151. 54. Ibid., 153. 55. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/IV/2/2033/87, Werner Lamberz, Entscheidungsvorschläge für die Sicherung der getroffenen Vereinbarung Äthiopien—DDR, 6. Juli 1977, 85. 56. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1685, Anlage 1 zum Protokoll 30/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 26. Juli 1977, Bericht über den Aufenthalt einer Delegation des Provisorischen Militarischen Verwaltnungsrates Äthiopiens (PMVR) vom 12. bis 16. Juli 1977 in der DDR, 16; see also Trade Protocol in MOFA (Ethiopian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), GDR folder, cited in Haile Gabriel Dagne, Commitment of the German Democratic Republic, 68. A second significant request was for the GDR to transport fuel from Addis Ababa to the Derg’s military base in Assad. After discussing the matter with Stasi chief Erich Mielke, Lamberz and Mittag warned Honecker against granting the assistance, recommending that he inform the Soviets about the request and tell the Ethiopians that “we have absolutely no aircraft of this kind.” For East Germany, the political risks were unacceptable because “such forms of aid could be equated with direct and open military assistance and could exacerbate tensions with Somalia and other Arab countries.” SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1680, Günter Mittag und Werner Lamberz an Erich Honecker, 6. Juli 1977, 152. 57. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1685, Anlage 1 zum Protokoll 30/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 26. Juli 1977, Bericht über den Aufenthalt einer Delegation des Provisorischen Militarischen Verwaltnungsrates Äthiopiens (PMVR) vom 12. bis 16. Juli 1977 in der DDR, 16. See also Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 119; and Dietrich, “Kaffee in der DDR,” 234. On tractors and cement, see Dagne, Commitment of the German Democratic Republic, 68. 58. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1685, Anlage 3 zum Protokoll 30/77 der Sitzung des Politbüros des ZK der SED vom 26. Juli 1977, Ökonomische Ergebnisse seit dem 15. Juni 1977, 19–20. 59. Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 124. 60. Ibid. 61. While the delegation comprised twelve representatives, most members often traveled between Angola and East Germany. The main portion of the group was present in Luanda from 29 July until 25 August. MfS HA XVIII 7603 Teil 1, Bericht von IM “Weber,” 22. Sept 1977, betr. Export Ausstellung in Luanda vom 27. Juli bis 9. Sept 1977, 14. 62. Ibid., 17. 63. Ibid., 18. 64. Dr. Uto Dietrich Wange provided Günter Mittag with this figure a year after the initial coffee crisis. See SAPMO-BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Wange an Mittag, Entwicklung der Importe von Rohkaffee und der Qualität der Röstkaffeemischungen, 10.8.1978. 65. I have placed the term “boycott” in quotation marks here because this is the term applied to citizens’ refusal to purchase Kaffee-Mix by state officials, Stasi officers, and even some Eingaben throughout the crisis. In reality, there is little evidence to suggest any organized consumer boycott took place, though the vast majority of East Germans made the individual choice not to purchase the product. It should also be noted that the MfS’ use of the term “boycott” could

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66. 67. 68.

69.

70.

71.

72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

also indicate its interpretation of this rejection as a potentially political provocation on the part of consumers. BArchB DY 3023/1218, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, Information über die Realisierung der Beschlüsse zur Kaffeeversorgung, 25.11.1977, 388. See chapter 2. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Gerhard Schürer an Günter Mittag, Information über die KaffeeVersorgung, 9.1.1978, 415. Note that Jacobs Kronung would only be distributed to speciality shops, like Intershop, and would therefore remain difficult to secure for most East Germans, as these stores only accepted western currency. BArchB, DY 30/J IV 2/2/1709, Protokoll der Sitzung des Politburos am 24.1.1978, Anlage Nr. 9, 113; also quoted in Volker Wünderich, “Die ‘Kaffeekrise’ von 1977: Genußmittel und Verbraucherprotest in der DDR,” Historische Anthropologie 11, no. 2 (2003): 240–61, 258. BArchB DC 20/I/4/3990, Beschluß über die Versorgung der Bevölkerung mit Röstkaffee, 26. Januar 1978, 111; see also MfS HA/XVIII/8379 Teil 2, Maßnahmen zur Durchsetzung des Prinzips Ware gegen Ware beim Rohkaffeeimport auf der Basis von Weltmarktpreisen, 10. Feb. 1978. BarchB, DC 20/I3/1468, Ministerrat der DDR, Maßnahmen zur Durchsetzung des Prinzips Ware gegen Ware beim Rohkaffeeimport auf der Basis von Weltmarktpreisen, 16. Februar 1978, 157. For more details about the roles played by KoKo and the Commission of Developing Countries, see Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 30–100. MfS HA XVIII 7603, Information über die 2. Tagung des Gemeinsamen Wirtschaftsausschusses (GWA) Deutsche Demokratische Republik/Volksrepublik Angola in der Zeit vom 21. bis 24.06.1978, 2–4. See also BArchB, DL2/17255 Bd.2, Abkommen zwischen der Volksrepublik Angola und der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik über die regelmäßige Lieferung von angolanischem Kaffee im Zeitraum 1979–1980, 23. Juni 1978. MfS HA XVIII 7603, Information über die 2. Tagung des Gemeinsamen Wirtschaftsausschusses (GWA) Deutsche Demokratische Republik/Volksrepublik Angola in der Zeit vom 21. bis 24.06.1978, 5. Ibid. Westad provides the financial and personnel figures. See Westad, Global Cold War, 276; Döring argues the Soviets “took over the military supply of Ethiopia.” Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 125. Dagne, Commitment of the German Democratic Republic, 72–73. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 3023/1466, Herbert Graf, Zu einigen Fragen der ökonomischen Situation in Äthiopien, 28.6.1978, 110–12, here 111. SAPMO-BArch, DY 3023/1218, Analyse Rohkaffee Import 2. Halbjahr 1977, 1. Halbjahr 1978, 28.6.1978, 493. Coffee exports earned over 300 million Birr from the sale of 69,838 tons of coffee in 1976 and 540 million Birr for 50,000 tons the following year. See Ethiopian Herald, Wednesday, 19 January 1977, 1, and Ethiopian Herald, Sunday, 1 January 1978, 1, cited in Dietrich, “Kaffee in der DDR,” 236. The Ethiopian ministries for Foreign Trade and Industry, as well as the national bank, objected to the “political decision to regard coffee as a barter commodity.” See Dagne, Commitment of the German Democratic Republic, 68. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 3023/1466, Herbert Graf, Zu einigen Fragen der ökonomischen Situation in Äthiopien, 28.6.1978, 110–12, here 112. Ibid. SAPMO-BArch, DY 3023/1218, Büro der Generaldirektor, AHB Genußmittel, Analyse Rohkaffee Import 2. Halbjahr 1977, 1. Halbjahr 1978, 28.6.1978, 493–509, 496. Ibid., 495. Ibid., 496.

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86. Genußmittel also suspected that many coffee growers in Ethiopia still had large stocks of coffee but lacked sufficient interest in selling because they were “negatively influenced by counterrevolutionaries.” Citing testimony from the Ethiopian Coffee Board’s general manager, Genußmittel also suggested that coffee smuggling to neighboring countries had increased dramatically over the past two years, up by 233 percent. See ibid., 493–97. 87. Ibid., 504. 88. Dietrich, “Kaffee in der DDR,” 234. The original memo only refers to “considering the inclusion” of “private export companies,” which most likely refers to large export/shipping firms. Exercising this option would not have threatened to approach alternative sources of coffee within Ethiopia but rather alternative delivery methods that would still have helped bypass some of the issues; but these were mostly logistical, and even the memo makes it clear the state firms would retain priority. 89. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 3023/1466, Mengistu Haile Mariam an Erich Honecker, no date (sent to Honecker from the East German Embassy in Addis Ababa 27 June 1978), 108. 90. Ibid. For more on Honecker’s relationship with Mengistu Haile Mariam, see Klaus Storkmann, Geheime Solidarität: Militärbeziehungen und Militärhilfen der DDR in die “Dritte Welt” (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2012), 376–80. 91. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 3023/1466, Information zum Ergebnis der Expertenverhandlungen zur weiteren Gestaltung der Wirtschaftsbeziehungen DDR-Sozialistischen Äthiopien, 30.8.1978, 117–25, 122–23. 92. Ibid., 124. 93. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 3023/1466, Information über die 2. Tagung des Gemeinsamen Wirtschaftsausschusses DDR/Sozialistischen Äthiopien vom 16.–19.10.1978 in Addis Abeba [sic], 21.10.1978, 139–42, 141. 94. Döring, “Es geht um unserer Existenz,” 128. It should be noted that the archival record does not make it clear whether East Germany ever fulfilled its financial obligations through this agreement. 95. Dr. Dieter Coburger, “Angola stärkt den staatlichen Sektor,” Neues Deutschland, 22 March 1978, 6. 96. “DDR—leistungsstarker Partner im Welthandel,” Neues Deutschland, 13 March 1978, 3–4. 97. “Angolas Kurs auf stabile Wirtschaft,” Neues Deutschland, 16 September 1978, 6. 98. BArchB, DC 20 I4/4238, Die Erfahrungen und Schlußfolgerungen bei der Durchsetzung des Prinzips Ware gegen Ware beim Import von Rohkaffee und Kakaobohnen, 6.12.1978, 90–103, 90. 99. Ibid., 96. 100. Ibid., 90. 101. Ibid., 92. 102. Ibid. 103. Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 113. 104. BArchB, DL 102/1276, Petra Knötzsch, Die Bedarfsentwicklung bei Röstkaffee und echtem Tee in den Jahren 1980 bis 1985, Institut für Marktforschung: Forschungsberichte, 15. Apr. 79, 1. 105. Ibid., 4. The legal limits on the volume of coffee permitted in gift packages had also doubled in 1972, from 250g to 500g per package. See BArchB, DL 102/1197, Petra Knötzsch, Die Bedarfsentwicklung bei Röstkaffee in der DDR und in den Bezirken im Jahr 1979, Institut für Marktforschung: Forschungsberichte, 30. Jun. 78, 3. 106. BArchB, DL 102/1276, Petra Knötzsch, Die Bedarfsentwicklung bei Röstkaffee und echtem Tee in den Jahren 1980 bis 1985, Institut für Marktforschung: Forschungsberichte, 15. Apr. 79, 12.

Chapter 5

CULTIVATING COFFEE Brewing Solidarity in Laos and Vietnam

S In early June 1979, staff and administrators in the GDR’s coffee industry and food ministries seemed to be experiencing a sense of déjà vu. In an update on coffee imports on the thirteenth, Gerhard Rüscher warned that a major frost had struck Brazil’s coffee-growing regions in May, and early reports from the country’s plantations estimated damage ranging between 10 to 30 percent—in some regions, the damage was as high as 50 percent. Since the Brazilian winter typically lasts approximately twelve weeks, Rüscher said the major implications for the global coffee market were “still up in the air.”1 Two days later, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski added that Brazilian coffee prices had climbed between 19 and 29 percent in mid-May.2 For both men, the news from Brazil no doubt recalled memories of two years prior, and given the challenges the GDR had in both securing and executing coffee deals since that time, this new frost created additional pressures on an already strained supply line. By now, it was also clear that the GDR had exhausted its options for barter with producing countries like Angola and Ethiopia, which had made it clear that the GDR would have to pay for future deliveries in hard currency and which, as ICO-member states, had little interest in sacrificing potential coffee revenue they could secure on the capitalist market. Diversifying the GDR’s sources had formed the basis of the government’s Ware gegen Ware policy in 1978. The policy directed German coffee specialists to “maximize the growing export potential” of socialist countries like the People’s Democratic Republic of Laos (DRL) and Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV).3 Circumstances in Laos and Vietnam were uniquely situated to make the governments of both countries amenable to coffee deals. Both countries had recently emerged from lengthy, brutal wars. Vietnam’s war against the United States had Notes from this chapter begin on page 174.

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ended in 1973, leaving the country under communist control but facing widespread demographic, environmental, and economic devastation. Le Duan’s government sought to secure its rule across a now-unified Vietnam, stabilize the country’s economy through the construction of socialism, and assert its regional influence. Laos faced similar challenges as the communist Pathet Lao emerged victorious against Lao royalist forces in 1975 after a civil war lasting nearly seventeen years. The country had suffered destruction—especially along its eastern border, where US-backed royalists had fought to halt North Vietnamese troop movements along the Ho Chi Minh trail.4 The DRL signed a treaty with the SRV after the war, though Vietnam quickly began to assert its political will on Laos. Emboldened by the Laotians’ turn to communism, Le Duan spoke in 1977 of Vietnam’s responsibility to be “the leading standard bearer of world revolution in Asia.”5 Reconstruction and internal stabilization thus constituted key priorities for both governments at precisely the moment East Germany approached them with proposals to build coffee export industries. One key challenge stood in the way of pursuing coffee agreements with either country: neither Laos nor Vietnam could currently produce coffee in volumes that would meet East Germany’s needs. The French had introduced coffee to both regions under colonial rule, but these industries had sat dormant during the intervening struggles for independence and wars. For instance, Laos harvested a mere 2,000 t of raw coffee during the entire 1978–1979 season.6 Before either country could export coffee, it would first need to develop its industries—undertakings that would require significant investments. Yet these countries were attractive partners for a number of reasons. Neither Laos nor Vietnam were members of the ICO, so they were not bound to the ICO’s quotas or pricing schemes. Both countries expressed a particular interest in developing coffee as an export commodity as part of their national rebuilding projects. With Vietnam, in particular, East Germany had a long-standing and developed relationship: the GDR had been Vietnam’s third largest provider of aid by 1957, next only to China and the Soviet Union.7 From providing vocational and university training to students from “socialist brother states” and construction projects to gifts of bicycles or sewing machines, East Germany supported initiatives ranging in scale and scope with both financial and technological assistance, always framing its support as mutually beneficial to both benefactor and beneficiary.8 These kinds of projects also fostered cooperation and interaction between individuals over an extended period of time. East German technical experts lived and worked in their host countries, exchanging ideas with the locals so that both sides came to understand one another a little better. These experiences in turn created opportunities for cultural exchange between citizens of each country, facilitating what Christina Schwenkel has called “affective solidarities” that lasted long after the relevant projects and, indeed, the collapse of the GDR.9 Likewise, the coffee projects in Laos and Vietnam were framed in

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terms of mutual benefit and egalitarian exchange and relied on similar methods to cultivate solidarity between the citizens of each country. The development projects in Laos and Vietnam also make clear the need to adjust the temporal framing of GDR historiography beyond 1990 as they highlight the persistent long-term plans of the GDR with its partner nations, as well as its lasting impact both locally and internationally. Planners on both sides of these exchanges saw the coffee projects as only the beginning of a much longer cooperative effort: the new coffee fields in Laos and Vietnam would only reach full fruition within a decade, and the subsequent trade deals were intended to last for the next twenty years. Meanwhile, over the course of the 1980s, East Germany’s domestic political and economic woes continued to mount. The GDR was becoming increasingly reliant on foreign credit, especially West German loans of DM 1 billion in 1983, followed by another DM 950 million in 1984, in exchange for concessions such as the easing of West German travel restrictions in the GDR.10 In many sectors of the economy, Western currency had completely displaced East German currency as the primary means of exchange, and the renewed expansion of the black market further diminished what little faith remained in legal trade.11 The domestic consumer shortage challenges continued unabated, and the population grew increasingly frustrated by poor economic performance, political stagnation, and the ongoing oppression of personal freedoms. These tensions culminated in mass demonstrations by late 1989 that ultimately forced the state to relent and relax travel restrictions, opening the door for its eventual political capitulation over the coming year. As this chapter demonstrates, however, negotiations with both Laos and Vietnam continued in good faith well into the GDR’s final year as a state, involving plans for the coming years. While the collapse of the East German government in 1990 meant the official cooperation in Laos and Vietnam came to an abrupt end, this did not diminish the lasting impact these projects would have. East German financial, logistical, and knowledge-based support throughout these projects was fundamental to the growth of coffee industries in both countries, especially in Vietnam, whose coffee production soared, making it the world’s second largest exporter of Robusta coffee in the 1990s. Vietnam retains that title to this day: from October 2020 to September 2021, Vietnam exported over 24 million 60kg bags of coffee beans, second only to Brazil’s 43 million bags.12 At the same time, this chapter explores the ways in which East German understandings of what constituted socialist ideals could and often did clash with local knowledge, at times challenging the successful completion of the projects. Despite their genuine commitment to solidarity and mutual benefit, in their interactions with their counterparts in the developing world, many East German leaders, planners, and visiting technicians were nonetheless guided by assumptions about the relative economic, social, and cultural development of

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their hosts. These beliefs seldom matched reality and could cause misunderstandings, frustrations, or even tensions between East Germans and their Laotian and Vietnamese partners. This is not to say that East German solidarity efforts were somehow disingenuous; for many East Germans, the wartime destruction in Laos and Vietnam recalled memories of the devastation in Germany following World War II. As Christina Schwenkel points out, East Germans’ own wartime trauma helped encourage “sympathetic solidarities” with the Vietnamese people; a shared sense of “covicitimization” lay at the heart of “a discourse of common struggle” that fostered an authentic affinity between East Germans and the Vietnamese.13 Underlying these affinities, however, was a paternalism that informed the perceived need to guide and mentor “young nations” toward socialist development, influencing the forms that East German aid would take and the structures through which it would be provided. As Young-Sun Hong argues, East German assistance to the developing world was frequently premised on notions of “civilizational differences” between European benefactors and the beneficiaries in the developing world, attitudes that could “reproduce the structures of domination and exploitation characteristic of its capitalist counterpart.”14 This paternalism, according to Schwenkel, “underscored the vast global disparities in wealth, power, knowledge and technology that were constitutive of international solidarity and its regimes of expertise.”15 The expectations inspired by this paternalism often clashed with the political, economic, and cultural realities in both Laos and Vietnam. Despite a collaborative spirit, problems arose over the course of both projects, often at the local level in the form of disputes between German representatives and local managers over appropriate agricultural methods or disagreements over policy. East German experts firmly believed in socialism’s superior capacity to deploy technological, scientific solutions that could overcome the perceived obstacles facing each country. This faith in science reflected a “cult of technology” present in much of European socialist thinking since the late 1950s, founded on the belief in “communism’s (supposedly) highly scientific, rational nature.”16 Their faith in scientific socialism meant the East German specialists sent to Laos and Vietnam brought with them a number of assumptions about agriculture and production methods that did not always work in the specific conditions they encountered on the ground. Yet the Laotians and Vietnamese, too, saw mechanization as the key to the success of their reconstruction projects—that is, as a vehicle for self-sufficiency through increased yields—and they had their own concepts of how best to apply technology. East German technological specialists, meanwhile, looked to mechanization as the “lynchpin of progress that separated socialist Europe” from its Southeast Asian partners, a tool that would ensure the successful cultivation of coffee in Laos and Vietnam by emancipating both countries from manual labor.17 The East Germans’ approaches to mechanization proved insufficiently flexible to adapt when local conditions did not meet their expectations. These problems led

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to delays in production, in turn fostering tensions that needed to be overcome if the projects were to be successful over the intended twenty-year duration.

Coffee in Laos The East German delegation that traveled to Laos from 25 March to 3 May 1979 consisted of technical and industrial experts from the Agricultural Industry Association and VEB Kaffee Halle. The group’s directives were straightforward: First, the specialists were to provide recommendations for developing coffee firms, for using existing facilities, and for nationalizing the coffee industry. Second, the group was to advise local producers in the cultivation of coffee, as well as “establish the conditions for improvements” to quality and quantity of Laotian coffee production, particularly for export to the GDR.18 Laos’ coffee fields comprised 70,000 hectares (ha) in the province of Champasak, a region located in the southwest of the country that shared borders with Thailand and Cambodia. Champasak’s natural climate conditions were ideal, according to the Germans’ report; humidity in the region fluctuated between 85 and 96 percent, and the soil possessed good water absorption and retention rates.19 Laos possessed only one collective farm, State Farm 08, founded in 1977, which administered six sub-farms throughout the region, most of which had either recently planted or planned to plant coffee trees, including 186 hectares of Arabica coffee at Nong Luang. Although these trees had not yet reached maturity, the prognosis seemed encouraging to the delegation as the coffee plants were healthy, strong, and growing well. A number of private family farms also grew coffee, although the vast majority of trees on these farms were far too old to be reliable, some approaching thirty years of age. Most Laotian coffee growers at the time cultivated both Robusta and Arabica, although Robusta represented a clear majority at 75 percent of the total.20 Though the natural conditions seemed suitable for coffee cultivation, a number of key issues troubled the Germans. Nearly all aspects of coffee cultivation—from plant breeding, planting, and harvesting to the drying of the grapes—occurred “exclusively through manual activity.”21 Peeling the fruits was the only procedure involving mechanization, but the single state processing firm, located in the provincial capital Pakse, possessed only one peeling and one cleaning machine that were currently inoperable due to a lack of parts for repairs. More concerning were several “major defects” in the production process that the Germans claimed “negatively affected” the overall quality of the finished product. For instance, most farms dried their harvested coffee cherries directly on the ground rather than on clean sheets or racks, causing soil contamination during production. The Germans discovered “high proportions” of unripe or moldy cherries mixed into dried batches for production, the inclusion of which would not only adversely

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affect the taste of the final coffee but could pose health risks. As well, it was very common for farms to dry multiple harvests together, regardless of when the cherries had been picked, which would lead to inconsistencies in taste within a given batch.22 Laotian farmers did not use fertilizers or herbicides, and the longpracticed slash-and-burn agriculture of Champasak had destroyed most of the local natural vegetation.23 By German assessments, Laos could currently only produce coffee in small batches of extremely inconsistent quality, and turning Laos into a reliable long-term source for the GDR required the immediate introduction of modern technology and farming methods. The Laotian provincial leaders had an existing plan to modernize their coffee industry that called for a general expansion of the coffee fields to 5,000 hectares over the coming three to five years and converting an additional 70,000 hectares in the future. Their largest obstacles to this goal lay in mechanizing existing manual practices, and in convincing farmers to replace the oldest (and largely unproductive) trees with new saplings. They also highlighted plans to collectivize coffee production into central farms, citing recent experience in applying collectivization techniques in the water rice industry—techniques they suggested could be similarly applied in the coffee industry. Their challenge lay in opposition to collectivization among many Laotian farmers.24 It became clear to the East Germans rather quickly that collectivizing the Laotian coffee industry was not a simple matter of setting policy. Here, the East Germans demonstrated flexibility in the application of socialist agricultural principles, though their response nonetheless reflected the underlying paternalism guiding their evaluations. In the Germans’ estimations, forming production cooperatives “as we know them in the GDR . . . does not seem suitable under the conditions of the VDR Laos, especially for coffee growing.” The existing independent farms were “very scattered,” a circumstance that would hinder the creation of “uniform production areas.” At the same time, most of these farmers grew other foods besides coffee and relied on these goods either to sell or to feed their families. “Under these conditions,” argued the German delegates, “the combination of these areas would surely lead to major loss of production.”25 Rapid, forced collectivization was likely to backfire, so the East Germans instead recommended a more measured approach, suggesting that the process begin in individual villages, with careful attention paid to the selection of work cadres to ensure their political and professional acumen. Their recommendations indicate that the East Germans were willing to adapt to local conditions when doing so presented the greater production potential, though in this case their approach did not align with the Laotians’ desire to expand their state farms. On 18 December 1979, representatives from the GDR and Laos met to discuss possible options for initial cooperation to prepare the country’s coffee industry for long-term development. The initial conceptual plan called for East German investments to assist with the planting and cultivation of coffee trees over the next

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four years. These were to be repaid in annual coffee exports of between 800 and 1,000 t beginning in 1981 that would continue and increase each year so that total coffee exports would reach 2,300–2,500 t per year by 1985.26 The proposed coffee project would represent the first major cooperative effort between these two countries, and officials from both sides hoped these initial meetings would lead to future collaboration and exchange. Initially, negotiations and preparations began with a great deal of mutual optimism, collaboration, and exchange of ideas. Even so, there were already signs of the paternalism, miscalculations, and differing views on methods that would mire the project in later years. The project experienced a number of production setbacks over the next two years. A poor harvest in the first year meant Laos was unable to make its delivery of 500 t in 1980, and the country’s representatives worried that under the current conditions, Laos would be unable to maintain coffee exports through 1985.27 In August 1981, the East German Foreign Trade Ministry sent two experts to Laos to identify appropriate areas for the expansion of coffee cultivation, as well as to assess local processes. Bernd Stege served as an economist at a collective farm in Cottbus, and Alfred Jankus was the director of research and manufacturing at VEB Kaffee Halle.28 The pair’s analysis reflected their faith in and prioritization of European socialist science and technological knowledge, as well as in a mechanized approach to agriculture that emphasized production volumes over most other considerations. They blamed local conditions for the very limited yields of the current harvest—the first on State Farm 08—saying the coffee fields “must be rearranged” because they “are so poorly organized that tractors cannot be used on them.” They dismissed the local harvesting methods as “primitive” because they “relied so heavily on manual labor and wasted a great deal of time.”29 “Without assistance,” claimed Stege and Jankus, coffee production could not be expanded; criticizing the managers of State Farm 08, they claimed that “the technical qualification of all leaders is too limited. . . . They are not in the position to make the necessary management decisions for an orderly workflow.” Furthermore, they deemed the local party leadership too “disorganized.”30 The pair called for additional East German experts to train the Laotians in “the usual international methods for ascertaining the quality of raw coffee.” In their trials of harvested coffee, Stege and Jankus claimed that “the quality of Laotian raw coffee is one of the worst in the world.”31 Blame for the poor quality allegedly lay solely with the Laotian people themselves, who “alone regard their coffee as good because they lack the scale and the possibility of comparison outside their region.”32 Yet the Germans’ own conceptualization of quality was based not on provenance but on production methods. In Jankus’ and Stege’s own words, quality was “not a question of the origin of the coffee. . . . High-quality coffee is solely the result of the care, experience and determination in all stages of production.”33 Genuine “quality” could only be guaranteed with “proper” production methods and achieved through the careful application of scientific socialism. In

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other words, because Laotians did not follow the principles of standardization, mechanization, and rationalization, they had “no concept of good coffee quality” and lacked the ability to produce a cup of coffee that could meet East Germany’s taste expectations. Furthermore, the delegates argued that by not holding Laos to higher standards, socialist countries enabled the continued dearth of quality in Laos’s coffee because improving quality never became an “acute problem” for Laotian coffee farmers.34 Stege’s and Jankus’ report painted a grim picture of Laos’s coffee industry just as both governments were negotiating a trade agreement to develop it. To determine appropriate next steps, another East German delegation traveled to Vientiane in the first months of 1982. In addition to thorough technical evaluations of existing coffee plantations and the 5,000 ha of fields proposed for new cultivation, the resulting plan called for a number of immediate capital investments, new measures and procedures, and technical exchanges. New “breeding and testing” facilities would cultivate and select the best seeds with which to grow new coffee saplings, focusing on the more resilient Robusta plants that would replace older existing trees to ensure “a quick and safe increase in coffee yields.” The plan also stipulated the creation of new prerequisites for quality checks and implemented “binding quality guidelines” for sorting and collecting fresh coffee fruit to ensure consistent quality of harvested raw coffee.35 The GDR agreed to provide the necessary equipment and materials that would be needed to build the various facilities, as well as deliveries of various everyday consumer goods for the people who would be living and working on the coffee plantations, to be paid through donations to the East German solidarity program. A team of East German technical specialists, including an agriculturalist, an agronomist, a mechanic specializing in farming equipment, a forestry specialist, a qualityassurance expert, and a purchasing expert to organize the initial sale of coffee, would also go to Laos for a full year.36 Laos would arrange for room and board for these specialists during their stay. The work plan established an education exchange program through which a group of Laotians would receive technical training in East Germany on topics such as agriculture, mechanical repair, and forestry. After their training, Laotian trainees would return home for apprenticeships, serving as assistants to East German specialists “with the goal of later taking over leadership functions.” The terms indicated no specific length for the time each candidate would serve as an “assistant,” however, so it is unclear at what point the Laotians would be placed in control of their own coffee production.37 In addition to physically preparing the land required for an expansion of the coffee fields, Laos agreed to a number of capital projects, including the construction of large storage facilities for agricultural equipment as well as paving the transportation routes to and from the coffee region. Laos would also provide the fuel that would be needed for the coffee industry’s mechanization.38

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Having settled on the specific terms and conditions of their coffee project, Laos and East Germany signed an official contract on 5 May 1982, agreeing to both a cooperative project to develop Laos’s industry as well as a long-term trade agreement. One of the first priorities under the agreement was the complete overhaul of current coffee fields that would be replanted “to ensure a quick increase in yield,” while the harvesting process would become fully mechanized to improve quality. Since the initial stages of this project concentrated on preparatory work, East Germany provided Laos with a line of credit of 2 million clearing rubles to cover the various capital costs for the first four years, repayable through coffee deliveries in ten annual payments, beginning in 1986. The second part of the agreement established long-term exchange of coffee for East German goods over the coming twenty years, starting with 600 t in 1982 and increasing each year, though even these reflected minimum expectations since the agreement also stipulated that, “depending on the possibilities,” Laos was to deliver “up to” 1,000 t per year. Although the specific volume of annual shipments after 1985 would largely depend on the success of the project, the agreement anticipated coffee deliveries totaling 9,000 t between 1986 and 1990 and annual shipments of 2,500 t after 1991. Beyond the loan repayments, these terms anticipated a minimum of 36,700 t of coffee to be delivered over the coming twenty years.39 These projected volumes may have been ambitious given the initial challenges of the project, but they also reflected the optimism and commitment to cooperation that both sides brought to the coffee deal. There seemed little doubt on either side that this coffee project represented only a beginning, and that the East Germans and Laotians anticipated meaningful collaboration and trade relations well into the twenty-first century. Laos and East Germany renewed their coffee project in 1986, agreeing to further cooperation in developing Laos’s industry.40 Future work would concentrate on expanding the acreage of Laotian coffee fields to 21,600 hectares by 1990, thereby increasing annual harvest yields from 4,500 t to 10,100 t.41 Up to this point, both sides viewed the deal as a general success—coffee deliveries to East Germany totaled 2,749 t between 1982 and 1985, consistent with the planned loan repayments.42 Unfortunately, problems emerged in 1986 that both sides feared could jeopardize the project, most notably a significant drought that reduced planned deliveries for 1987 to only 1,050 t—half the planned volume. These delays and shortfalls frustrated the East Germans, who complained that despite “extensive GDR assistance for years . . . the Laotian side has failed to fulfill its duties.”43 Since Laos assumed responsibility for the collaboration in Champasak in 1986, the East Germans claimed, the situation had “further deteriorated” through indecision, and the living conditions of people living in the coffee region had “hardly improved.”44 By the end of 1987, the East Germans grew anxious that deliveries of Laotian coffee could not be guaranteed over

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the long-term since it appeared that under the present conditions, anticipated increases in yield could be reached “only very slowly.” Further complicating the situation, East Germany faced competition with other socialist states. The German report claimed that deliveries to the GDR were “decidedly influenced” by demands from the Soviet Union and other socialist states to maintain and increase coffee deliveries to their own countries.45 Attempts between these countries to expand other areas of Laos’s economy had also reportedly failed to produce results, so coffee remained the main export good for Laos in its relations with socialist countries. Under these circumstances, the East Germans suspected that Laos would “have no particular interest in keeping to the agreement with the GDR in its current form.”46 Such fears about this alleged competition reveal the limits to international solidarity and brotherhood among the socialist countries. When faced with competition over a particularly scarce commodity in a developing country, East German planners assumed Laos would prioritize its own interests, suggesting a degree of frustration—or perhaps even resentment—toward fellow socialist states that potentially threatened East Germany’s investments in fostering a new coffee source. Despite its claim that socialist aid was intended to foster self-sufficiency and independence for developing nations, East Germany was surprised when a more confident Laos did not prioritize relations with the GDR. East German concerns seemed warranted when Laos began to suggest changes to the project’s scope and structure in the autumn of 1987. Through recent shifts in Laotian economic policy, initiated in 1986, Laos had begun to abandon its hitherto hard-lined commitment to centralized planning, moving instead toward autonomous state enterprises and collectives.47 In the original agreement, the work plan organized production through a mixture of state, cooperative, and private farms throughout the entire region of Paksong. Now Laos proposed instead to limit the GDR–Laos project to a single, large coffee company with roughly 1,000 ha of land while production at other farms “should be carried out independently of the GDR.”48 German observers recommended an immediate and strong response to minimize the potential impact on the GDR’s investments and anticipated coffee deliveries. Laos still owed East Germany 1,725 t of coffee, a balance that, in addition to the failed deliveries from 1987, “must be reduced by targeted measures” before 1990. GDR advisors saw the upcoming annual project consultations in January as an opportunity to reinforce the terms of the 1982 agreement, notably, that work in Champasak Province continue to be coordinated by state bodies, and that deliveries to the GDR still proceed at the agreed-upon rates of 2,500 t/year. Any suggestions about limiting the cooperative project to a single company, however, “cannot be accepted” and “should be rejected” because they would simultaneously “lead to a reduction of coffee deliveries to the GDR . . . contradict the agreement, and largely violate the conditions in Paksong region.”49

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In January 1988, East German Ambassador Dietrich Jarck met with representatives of the Laotian government. “In a nutshell,” he reported on his discussions, the Laotians argued that the cooperative agreement did not “sufficiently take into account the limited Laotian possibilities for production . . . despite the promises made by the GDR.” Yet Jarck believed an opportunity remained to correct the course of the relationship; he pointed out that the Laotian representatives requested a joint consultation between officials and experts on both sides to address these issues and find a solution.50 He requested a meeting with Khamsai Souphanouvong, the first deputy chairman of the state planning commission, who Jarck suspected would soon be appointed minister for foreign relations and trade. Souphanouvong made clear Laos’s desire to alter the form of GDR–Laos cooperation, asking Jarck: “Would it not make more sense if coffee was grown by private coffee farmers or cooperatives, rather than in a state-owned company or state property?” The existing coffee project, he offered, could remain responsible for supplying the coffee region with needed goods and equipment.51 Jarck advised a cautious examination of Souphanouvong’s proposal because, although Laos appeared dissatisfied with the results of the project so far, he believed both conversations revealed that Laos “wishes to continue working with the GDR and is looking for new forms from which it hopes to be more effective.” The idea had some merit, he argued, but pointed to remaining challenges that hindered the project, from shortages in materials and fuel to structural problems. The Agricultural Department for the region of Champasak had been in closed meetings “for several weeks,” so local administrators and managers had been absent from the plantations. The German specialists were not permitted in these meetings, nor did they have access to their proceedings, so they were unable to make “necessary decisions.” Meanwhile, an overgrowth of weeds on farms meant that, “at best,” only 30 percent of the trees planted in 1987 remained viable; consequently, only “an average harvest” could be expected for the 1987–88 harvest year. “For my part,” Jarck advised, “I will continue the efforts to clarify [the Laotian and GDR positions] again, but I consider the short-term arrival of experts to be indispensable.”52 Pressure to resolve these challenges increased the following month as Laotian criticism of the current terms of cooperation bled into the public realm. On 26 February 1988, just a few weeks after his meeting with Ambassador Jarck, Khamsai Souphanouvong gave an interview with the East German State news services, the Allgemeiner Deutscher Nachrichtendienst in Hanoi, Vietnam. Souphanouvong reportedly criticized the current state of cooperation with the GDR, claiming that the project had not yet produced desired results because its scale was far too large, and it relied too heavily on technology. This failure could be remedied, he argued, by turning instead to the expertise of local, private farmers who “have the most precise knowledge of locally required technology,” such as the best sites for seeding. Alleging that East German weeding methods had damaged the roots

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of trees, for instance, he claimed “the weakness of the GDR is that it does not grow coffee itself. . . . To be a good coffee grower, you have to have twenty to thirty years of practical experience. You can’t just use any inexperienced people.”53 Before the interview concluded, Souphanouvong admitted that his tone was rather blunt, but he assured the reporter that he made these remarks because he “wanted the two countries to work together to find ways” of cooperating more effectively.54 In his report on this interview, Klaus Werner remarked that “even if ” Souphanouvong’s concerns about the overuse of mechanization had any merit, the examples he provided “represent a total distortion of the facts. It is the GDR specialists who keep calling for weed control to be carried out manually near the plants, distancing each plant to make the use of machines possible, and who call for selective picking.” Nonetheless, the interview presented a real diplomatic problem for the GDR because Khamsai Souphanouvong was not merely the chairman of the State Planning Commission; he was also the son of the late Prince Souphanouvong, who had been one of the leaders of the Lao revolution and the first president of the communist government from 1975 until 1988.55 Given his status within the Laotian government, Werner suggested that the GDR “must accept Khamsai’s remarks as representing the official position of the government.”56 Whether or not Werner correctly assessed the situation, the incident demonstrated the growing tensions between the two countries. While it would be impossible to ignore Souphanouvong’s public comments, it would be equally difficult for the GDR to offer any public rebuttal without further undermining relations with his government. Indications that Laos’s trade interests lay elsewhere than with East Germany continued to worry GDR officials throughout the rest of the year. Laos’s economy was increasingly dependent on foreign aid, and by 1987 its foreign debt had climbed to US$736 million, representing 109 percent of its GDP.57 A major policy shift in early 1988 sought to address Laos’s deteriorating economic and debt situation. At the plenary session of the Laotian Supreme People’s Assembly in February, the government announced its intention to increase the autonomy of state enterprises (186 of the 377 state-owned enterprises had become fully autonomous by the end of 1987) and to abolish these enterprises’ mandatory production targets. The government also sought to expand its connections to world markets and foreign investments, including in capitalist countries.58 The country recognized coffee as a potential cash crop and source of hard currency with which to service this debt. East German analysts expressed concern that these broader policy shifts could adversely affect the GDR’s trade position with Laos—for instance, their claim that Laos’s potential entry into the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) would increase competition for goods of interest to the GDR and further the expansion of private firms “that will become the main route for profit.”59

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The final stroke came in December 1988 when Laos suggested fundamental changes to the terms of their coffee cooperation, including a request to “significantly reduce” the GDR’s 50-percent share of coffee exports so that Laos could “use it for obligations toward other countries.” As well, Laos sought to determine delivery volumes by production results rather than having fixed volumes. Completely tying coffee deliveries to relative production levels was an “unacceptable” solution to the East Germans, who recommended the GDR insist on minimum requirements for coffee purchases between 1991 and 1995, especially to ensure continued credit payments to the GDR.60 As the coffee agreement with Laos continued to deteriorate, growing anxiety about the state of its own contracts, as well as the competition with its own partner countries, led East Germany to become increasingly defensive and rigid in its relations with Laos. The GDR’s representatives remained extremely pragmatic in their approach; their internal correspondence reveals growing frustration about the GDR’s apparent loss of a perceived privileged trade status with the Laotian government rather than concerns about Laos’s ideological commitment. Their objections to Laos’s proposed changes to the cooperative project were about holding Laos to its contractual obligations under the 1982 coffee agreement. Likewise, anxieties regarding Laos’s growing connections to capitalist rather than socialist markets were primarily perceived as a direct threat to East Germany’s coffee ambitions because they generated greater competition over Laos’s scarce coffee exports. The Laos–GDR coffee agreement demonstrates that solidarity was an important foundation upon which to build trade relationships, and it continued to act as the principal vernacular in which to discuss them publicly. Nonetheless, the practical challenges and concerns that ultimately limited cooperation throughout this project could also undermine and, at times, belie the GDR’s commitment to international solidarity when the circumstances of the coffee project threatened to undermine the GDR’s economic or domestic interests. The East Germans fundamentally misjudged the circumstances surrounding the project, as well as the motivations of the Laos government, and could often be inflexible toward their supposed partners. On the other hand, both sides remained committed to maintaining some form of cooperation and continued to carry out several elements of the coffee project. For instance, Siegfried Kaulfuss, director of VEB Nahrungsmittel und Kaffee, the Halle firm overseeing the coffee projects in Laos and Vietnam, traveled to Laos and met with his counterparts in late November 1989—just weeks after the Peaceful Revolution and opening of the Berlin Wall—to discuss the ongoing work. At this meeting, Laos requested additional training for four residents of Paksong, asking that they be brought to East Germany in 1991.61 Despite the challenges of implementation, therefore, both sides saw value in continuing the relationship into the future, even amidst growing political uncertainty in East Germany.

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Coffee in Vietnam In Vietnam, the GDR already had a trusted and long-standing political and economic partnership that extended back to the 1950s. Yet the GDR also recognized a unique opportunity when it came to coffee as both countries saw the potential for long-term agricultural development and trade: the climate of Vietnam’s highlands was suitable for coffee cultivation, and its coffee fields were, miraculously, still largely intact after the war with the United States. The end of the Vietnam War in 1973 opened new opportunities for cooperation with other socialist states, particularly in light of the need to rebuild much of the country’s urban and industrial infrastructure. The war had exacted an enormous toll, including approximately seven hundred thousand casualties and the destruction of 45 percent of the country’s towns.62 The war had destroyed much of the country’s industrial and agricultural infrastructure, and famine threatened to take hold in a number of regions. With the exception of rice, production had fallen well below prewar levels.63 Keenly aware of the need to provide employment, as well as the need to feed the population, the government launched a widespread program of collectivization throughout the south, bringing farms and factories into the centrally planned economy. Vietnam joined COMECON in 1978, seeking to alleviate some of its economic woes and to secure lines of trade, especially in light of American-led embargoes and a damaged relationship with Beijing by war’s end.64 Hanoi sought to rebuild Vietnam’s cities, towns, and industry according to socialist ideals, but it had to contend with a level of destruction so severe that it was not clear whether the country possessed the necessary infrastructure to even begin this process. Indeed, the American air war, in particular, had been intended to bomb Vietnam into a premodern state of development, and as party officials considered the task before them, “Vietnamese aspirations to socialist modernity were tinged with temporal anxieties about lagging behind.”65 For the Vietnamese, East Germany was an attractive partner because of its long-standing support and solidarity, and because of its seeming capacity to help Vietnam overcome this perceived lag through modernization. East Germany had taken an early and vehement stand against what it called the “American war of aggression.” In their morning newspapers and household magazines throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, East Germans were bombarded with gruesome imagery, from burntout residential buildings and abandoned and injured children to dead bodies.66 Headlines often deployed vivid language in text and headlines, referring to the American air war as “terror bombing,” or using terms such as “mass murder” and “genocide” to draw direct comparisons to the crimes of National Socialism, especially when condemning West Germany’s support for America.67 These images were often gendered, depicting women and children as the ultimate victims of the war to inspire sympathy. Conversely, some GDR media—aimed primarily at East German housewives—would also showcase Vietnam’s defiance and resil-

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ience through the lens of its women, who served as soldiers and medics, or those who helped others escape combat zones, such as an article discussing one of the “heroes of Ham-Rong: a nine-year-old girl serving food to wounded soldiers and helping clean up rubble.”68 These images were meant to provoke both outrage and sympathy, to make Vietnam and its people more familiar to East German readers through “a politics of proximity that mediated cultural intimacy.”69 This “politics of proximity” encouraged East Germans to donate their wages to the national Solidarität (solidarity) program, which raised funds to finance projects throughout the developing world, especially in Vietnam. As Gerd Horten has shown, East Germany’s early condemnation of the war garnered considerable support from the population, especially as global opinion turned against the Americans. Yearly donations amounted to approximately 16 million marks in 1966 and “more than doubled” by 1968. In 1973 they reached 48 million, and by 1975 they grew to 83 million marks.70 Faced with an acute need after the war for economic development, the Vietnamese communists recognized the potential of coffee as a cash crop and began projects to rebuild the coffee industry. In 1975, Vietnam possessed approximately 20,000 hectares of coffee fields, scattered throughout the country, and produced a meager five- to seven-thousand t per year.71 Doan Trieu Nhan, a young scientist and soil expert, led a team into the Vietnamese central highlands in 1975; the team found the region remarkably untouched by the war and ideal for Robusta coffee cultivation.72 During its Fourth Party Congress the following year, the Vietnamese Communist Party began an ambitious project to increase Vietnam’s exports and trade relations with socialist countries. In particular, the government’s plan would focus on agricultural goods exports, including coffee.73 Almost two years later, the East Germans approached Vietnam in urgent need of large volumes of coffee. During Erich Honecker’s state visit to Hanoi in December 1977, at a time when it was already clear East Germans were rejecting Kaffee-Mix, he spoke with Vietnamese leaders and signed a general treaty of friendship and economic cooperation. Both countries agreed to the goal of “intensify[ing] the export power of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam [SRV] above all for such products in which the GDR is interested,” including tropical fruits, rubber, and, of course, coffee.74 A delegation to Vietnam in the first quarter of 1978 followed up on this agreement and found an incredibly strained economic situation. Most Vietnamese coffee cultivation took place in the province of Dac Lac, with 11,200 hectares of fields, of which 8,000 hectares belonged to state farms.75 Saplings had to be painstakingly hand-picked from the existing coffee trees to ensure the best growth potential. With no industrial infrastructure, the work was labor intensive, and the province of Dac Lac was sparsely populated. The country had produced 12,500 t of coffee in the last harvest, which, despite being 500 t above planned production, still represented quite a small volume overall. Yet the German delegation indicated that the basalt-rich soil in

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that province “guaranteed a very high quality of coffee bean.”76 Thus, while it was clear Vietnam could not provide immediate relief to East Germany’s coffee needs, it seemed that developing the Vietnamese coffee industry promised a potential long-term solution. A number of issues prevented a start to any development projects in 1978. Especially difficult was the rising tension with Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge had been carrying out a bloody and devastating series of political purges and ethnic cleansing—the latter targeting Vietnamese within Cambodia. After two years of border skirmishes, Vietnamese forces invaded in December 1978, hoping to dislodge the Khmer Rouge, an action that, while successfully removing Pol Pot’s government, nonetheless angered the Chinese.77 Immediately following the Vietnamese invasion, Chinese troops destroyed the rail connections between northern Vietnam and China on 22 December 1978, reducing Vietnam’s capacity to export goods.78 The United States and many Western European countries also opposed the invasion, seeing it as a proxy for Soviet intervention.79 These interventions also adversely affected Vietnam’s payment balance to its socialist allies. According to a report from the East German foreign ministry, by the end of 1978 Vietnam had only made goods deliveries totaling 92 million marks of the 139-million-mark total deficit.80 By the spring of 1979, Vietnam had fulfilled only 6.5 million rubles worth of its outstanding 33.7-million-ruble contracts to the GDR.81 To meet its export obligations, Vietnam required further assistance— and East Germany was willing to provide it, both to demonstrate continued solidarity with Vietnam amid increasing animosity vis-à-vis China and as a means to help secure a long-term supply of coffee. Negotiations were renewed in 1980, and by August, a deal was struck through which East Germany would provide credit to Vietnam totaling 45 million marks from 1981 to 1985 to finance the development of an additional 10,000 ha, with repayment to take place over ten years beginning in 1986 according to the terms of the coffee agreement.82 Traders adopted the language of socialist solidarity and East Germany’s official development policy, writing that the coffee agreement would strengthen “mutually beneficial economic cooperation between the countries.”83 From 1981 to 1985, East Germany would provide equipment and materials for planting and fostering coffee plants, as well as fertilizers and pesticides to ensure a high yield of coffee plants and a high quality of raw coffee.84 The GDR would send specialists to train Vietnamese workers in the use of this equipment, as well as to help organize and supervise coffee cultivation. This investment represented a massive undertaking on the part of both countries. For the GDR, no less than eight different ministries and industries shared the various responsibilities of the project, including their subordinate departments and organizations. The chemical industry provided the fertilizers and pesticides that would help cultivate and safeguard Vietnamese and Laotian plantations; the Ministry of Science and Technology coordinated training efforts for technical specialists; and the

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State Planning Commission and Foreign Trade Ministry coordinated the GDR’s efforts. In Vietnam, extensive measures would be necessary to carry out the expansion of the coffee industry. The adverse climate conditions of the highlands necessitated a focus on Robusta cultivation because the hardier Robusta plants could withstand harsher environments. Due to the higher altitudes of Dac Lac, coffee tree seedlings had to be cultivated for at least seven months before they could be planted in order to safeguard them against winds and other conditions after planting. Existing trade embargoes against Vietnam rendered seed acquisition from the world market impossible, so seedlings had to be handpicked from those few trees that were still viable.85 Such a massive undertaking would also require a sizable and consistently available workforce; with a population density of twenty inhabitants per square kilometer, Dac Lac was a very thinly populated area. Vietnam’s second Five-Year Plan (1976–1980) called for the forced relocation of nearly four million people throughout the entire country, including the forced resettlement of nearly seven hundred thousand people belonging to the nomadic hill tribes of the Central Highlands.86 Between sixty and seventy-five thousand people lived in the region by 1977.87 These new arrivals required housing, access to medicine, and educational materials. Coffee cultivation would also require the construction of irrigation systems and, because the region was not currently used for growing rice—the main food crop of Vietnam—there was little industrial infrastructure in place. One of the largest aspects of this project was East German assistance in constructing a 12-megawatt power plant in the province to provide sufficient energy for production.88 In exchange for its assistance, the GDR placed specific expectations on Vietnam. First, Vietnam agreed to prepare and cultivate an additional 10,000 hectares of fields by the end of the five-year plan. The agreement stipulated that as part of its commitment, Vietnam would use the equipment and materials delivered under the agreement specifically for this field cultivation.89 While it made practical sense to specify the use of GDR goods and services in the industry for which the agreement was signed, such specificity also meant Vietnam was not free to use East German support from the coffee agreement in other areas of its economy. By including this clause, East Germany asserted de facto control over its goods and machines for five years after delivery to ensure a return on its investment in the form of increased coffee production (and delivery). Such concentration of its efforts in a single industry and region formed a trade practice not that dissimilar from those of Western development aid during the 1960s, demonstrating that the urgent need for coffee could and did trump the GDR’s commitment to its proclaimed ideological convictions regarding development policy. Vietnam was obliged to deliver coffee to East Germany in ten annual installments, beginning with 700 t in 1986 and increasing each year until 1991, after which payments would continue at 3,000 t per year.90

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The agreement also defined the standards for the delivered coffee, stipulating the minimum and preferred qualities for the finished product, as well as a specific bean size. Using words like “pure,” “tangy,” and “strong,” the Germans outlined the most essential, minimum qualities for coffee deliveries, establishing a baseline to which German experts would hold Vietnam in the years to come. German traders defined cup quality and taste independently of the type of bean cultivated and focused more on production standards than on the quality of the raw material itself. Just as they had in Laos, German officials sought to implement socialist means of production that they believed would ensure consistent and high-quality coffee yields. Final negotiations for the coffee agreement took place in Hanoi between September and October 1980. Publicly, East German media sources praised the long-term agreement as a meaningful sign of continued mutual cooperation and solidarity between the two countries.91 The Berliner Zeitung told readers that Vietnamese state farms hoped to triple existing coffee fields to 73,000 hectares—an exaggeration that anticipated the potential of this agreement.92 GDR journalists compared the coffee agreement to similar cooperation in Vietnam’s textile industry to demonstrate the “mutual benefit” for both countries. Yet publicity surrounding the coffee agreement also belied an underlying paternalism, often positioning the East Germans as the driving force of modernization in Vietnam, such as a Neues Deutschland article claiming that it was East German assistance that allowed Vietnam to “productively utilize its large labor reserves.”93 This paternalism was no less present in the private correspondence of state officials. For instance, when ten thousand Vietnamese trainees arrived in Germany in March 1983, the state secretariat for vocational training lauded East German generosity and solidarity, saying all firms and enterprises of the GDR shared their “willingness to impart their experience and knowledge to the Vietnamese citizens.”94 The vocational official’s claim that Vietnam’s potential “depends on properly directing the use of these citizens” fit awkwardly with the spirit of solidarity, especially their suggestion that “it is in our interest that these cadres are primarily used for the objectives of our cooperation—such as in the coffeegrowing region.”95 The recommendation that the GDR define the use of these new cadres served as a reminder that solidarity did not preclude self-interest, and that East Germany ought to ensure its own part of the “mutual” benefit from this exchange. East German investments concentrated in the regions of Dac Lac and Gia Lai Cong Tum, though initial results led some officials to doubt Vietnam’s viability as a coffee producer. Despite climbing yields in the preceding years, German observers noted in 1983 that “neither the yields per hectare, nor the quality of bean, achieve the international standards of a coffee producer and exporter.”96 In his reflections on the GDR–Vietnam coffee project years later, Siegfried Kaulfuss, at the time deputy director of VEB Kaffee und Nahrungsmittelwerk in Halle,

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mentioned some of these challenges. “It was difficult to convince the partner,” he wrote, “that there were different expectations of quality in the GDR than there were in Vietnam.” He also mentioned that harvests frequently took place over a two-week period due to a transient work force, so harvested fruits often sat exposed outdoors as they accumulated to a sufficient volume for sorting and transport, placing them at risk of rotting.97 The language with which East German officials expressed their dissatisfaction with Vietnamese performance mimicked the descriptions for Laos’s coffee industry.98 These early reports from Dac Lac suggested that Vietnam’s ability to build a viable coffee industry—or, more importantly, to produce a coffee that met East German expectations—depended on the successful adoption of European socialist production methods. German planners called for the Vietnamese to “further increase their efforts to carry out their obligations toward the GDR.”99 By 1985, the coffee project finally witnessed some measurable success. Farmers on one state plantation, Kaffeekombinat “Vietnam/DDR,” more than doubled the annual rate at which they planted new fields, from 400 hectares in 1981 to 900 hectares in 1984, earning praise as “an exemplary farm for Vietnamese coffee growing.”100 East German observers increasingly claimed responsibility for these developments. The use of German machines, fertilizers, and pesticides was “increasingly better organized and controlled” by the end of the first five-year plan “with the assistance of GDR specialists.”101 In another report from 1986, the Center for Information and Documentation of Foreign Trade (Zentrum für Information und Dokumentation der Außenwirtschaft—ZIDA) claimed that assistance from the GDR over the previous years “puts Vietnam in the position to intensify production of important export goods . . . for socialist countries, especially the GDR.”102 Much as the GDR’s early support for Vietnam had provided political dividends for the SED through the 1960s and 1970s, state media saw the coffee agreement as the perfect opportunity to emphasize the GDR’s commitment to Vietnam’s postwar recovery, hoping to bolster domestic political legitimacy.103 East German journalists couched the projects in the coffee regions in the language of progress and modernity and privileged the GDR’s role in this process. In December 1986, Berliner Zeitung published an article about Vietnamese coffee under the unambiguous subtitle “Vietnam seeks to advance its underdeveloped regions with the help of socialist brother countries,” tying Vietnamese developments directly to aid from the GDR. The article described Vietnam’s central highlands in romantic language, saying that “a seemingly undeveloped, rolling forest landscape awaits visitors,” and that small villages “emerge only after many kilometers down the few roads.” Over the previous five years, this “untouched” region had experienced “fundamental change” in the name of fulfilling “all goals of social development and economic construction.” In addition to the new fields and trees, the region also experienced a surge in population: over two hundred

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thousand workers had migrated to the highlands since 1975.104 The provincial secretary of Vietnam’s communist party spoke of the changes as “revolutionary,” saying that the “centuries-old traditions and customs of minorities are being turned inside out.” The article also mentioned that 950,000 “former nomads” had settled in the region over the past few years. The article’s neutral tone presented these population movements and settlements as a natural response to development and ignored that the arrival of so many “new” workers had resulted from forced resettlements of hundreds of thousands of people, including the indigenous nomadic hill tribes—such as the Rhadé, Jarai, Bahnar, Stieng, Koho, and Mnong, to name a few—whose way of life was completely uprooted for this project.105 Meanwhile, the article claimed that the Vietnamese were “not capable of managing everything on their own” and required the GDR’s assistance in founding a state coffee enterprise. “From almost nothing arose a company that now employs 7,800 men and women,” wrote the BZ journalist, forecasting an additional 5,000 hectares of coffee fields by the middle of that year.106 Technological and information exchanges—the basis for much of the coffee project—also served a dual purpose. On the one hand, “new” equipment and machinery helped improve production, thereby “signify[ing] Vietnam’s progress and recovery.” Yet these transfers also “showcase[ed] East Germany’s prosperity and technological superiority,” first to the Vietnamese—even when that technology was already used—and second to the East Germans themselves, as a demonstration of the GDR’s capacity to affect positive change on the other side of the world.107 The delivery of technology may not have always been motivated strictly by altruism, however; as Christina Schwenkel points out, a considerable volume of the equipment East Germany delivered to the reconstruction project in the city of Vinh was in fact discarded from GDR factories because GDR factory managers used the Vinh project as an opportunity to replace outdated equipment already nearing the end of its life.108 By framing the developments in Vietnam as part of a modernizing enterprise that relied on East German assistance, GDR state media still positioned the country’s assistance to Vietnam—as well as to Laos—as a hierarchical, rather than symbiotic, relationship. The agreement with Vietnam was renewed in February 1986 and included an additional credit to Vietnam of 16 million rubles, with a 2-percent interest rate, in exchange for coffee deliveries totaling 48 kt over the next twenty years. East Germany would continue to send materials, machines, and experts to train more Vietnamese farmers and managers under the same conditions as the previous agreement. Between 1986 and 1990, Vietnam agreed to use GDR goods received through this additional credit to expand the coffee fields by another 5,000 hectares.109 Estimates for future production were promising as German experts reported improved yields on both state-owned and private farms. Survival rates of newly planted trees had also reached 90 percent in the previous year. Coffee yields in Dac Lac province grew by nearly 6 percent per year, and by 1989, the

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Kombinat Viet-Duc plantation had grown from 600 to 8,000 hectares, becoming the largest coffee plantation in the country.110 A key factor in this growth was the Vietnamese government’s “renovation” (doi moi) reforms starting in 1986 that sufficiently liberated certain economic activities to encourage and allow this kind of growth in its export markets. For instance, in 1988 the Politburo passed a resolution that effectively ended collectivization by transferring land-use rights to village households, which were now granted autonomy—though the state retained ownership of land.111 The entire region witnessed incredible growth over the lifespan of the coffee agreement and beyond, eventually growing to 130,000 hectares by 1997, with coffee yields growing by 6 percent each year. While the coffee industry benefited a great deal from the doi moi reforms of this period, this enormous growth had been made possible through the cooperation between Vietnam and East Germany that rebuilt the coffee industry from the ground up.112

Tensions and Collapse: East Germany and the ICO in the late 1980s East German industry experts continued to monitor trends on the international coffee market, watching for changes in global price or production that might have signaled looming shortages to which the GDR would need to respond domestically. In January 1986, world coffee prices climbed to US$2.50 per pound, a price that was alarmingly close to those of the crisis years—for instance, US$3.56 per pound in 1977. The price remained high well into February, at which point the ICO suspended import and export quotas because the price had remained above the official threshold.113 Despite the higher prices for coffee, officials in the East German Foreign Trade Ministry (MfA) observed that “this [probability of suspension] means that the member/nonmember price question is no longer important, and there is only one market and one selling price.” This, in turn, meant that there were no limits to the volume of coffee East Germany could purchase from ICO member nations.114 The suspension also meant that the coffee market was temporarily “leveled” because everyone—member and nonmember states alike—all had to pay the higher price. The suspension remained in effect until the end of 1986, and during that time, East German officials were hopeful of potential structural changes to the global coffee market. In September, for instance, the MfA reported on a new ICO resolution that encouraged nonmember nations to join the organization, hoping it represented an opportunity for the GDR to do the same. The ICO began negotiations for a new International Coffee Agreement in April 1988 because the current agreement would expire in September 1989, and East German trade officials watched the proceedings carefully. The negotiations

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were plagued by disagreements between members of the ruling Coffee Council, specifically over the quota system and market share between large and small producing countries. The largest producing countries, such as Brazil, wanted very little to change about the price and quota system and sought a simple extension of the 1983 agreement. Meanwhile, smaller producing nations—in particular, those growing milder Arabicas that were gaining popularity—felt disadvantaged by the quota system because the quotas were adjusted too slowly to keep up with these shifts in demand.115 The impasse between these producing nations led to the formation of a subcommittee to research the situation and provide recommendations over the rest of 1988 and 1989. From the records of the East Germans’ observations, it is clear the GDR sought to use the breakdowns in ICO negotiations to secure more—and better—coffee for its own people at prices it could afford. East Germany had a unique opportunity, urged one trade representative, to take advantage of the delay in negotiations and perhaps even influence their outcome. Since membership on the newly formed subcommittee was to be open to all countries, he suggested, “it is possible that the GDR will be invited by the President of the Council to take part in the consultation, especially since the GDR is the largest nonmember importer.”116 This insight reveals that for some East German officials, the GDR’s position as a major importing country (among nonmember nations) could open diplomatic doors beyond its immediate agreements with Laos or Vietnam and provide an opportunity to potentially influence coffee politics and trade on a global scale. Despite this enthusiasm, the prospect of a revised ICA also introduced a great deal of uncertainty to the market and to East Germany’s coffee prospects, especially in Laos. The quota system had come under increasing scrutiny in the preceding years for effectively creating a two-tiered market for coffee as nonquota markets were not subject to limits or minimum prices. East German analysts expressed some concern that Laos might seek to sign the ICA, as well as about what the forthcoming changes in the agreement might mean, should Laos do so. At that time, the ICA exempted countries that produced fewer than 100,000 sacks (6,000 t) per year from being subject to export quotas. With its annual production at around 4,000 t per year by this time, Laos would fit into this category, but the GDR’s principal concern was the potential effect of the as yet unknown terms of the new ICA on Laos’s coffee ambitions. If the quota system assigned minimum prices to nonquota markets or altered the exemptions for producing countries of certain annual production volumes, the East Germans worried that Laos might be tempted to focus production on export to Western markets, placing its coffee out of East Germany’s reach.117 By July 1989, the ICO still had not settled on terms for a new agreement, and time had nearly run out. Under pressure to meet the October 1 deadline, the council approved a resolution to extend the 1983 agreement until 1991 but to suspend the quota and control provisions temporarily.118

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East Germany could hardly celebrate this result as domestic pressures for political reform and increased civil liberties were peaking over the summer and fall of 1989. Despite gradual political reform throughout most of East Central Europe in the wake of glasnost and perestroika, the SED opted to tighten its grip, increasing political arrests and clamping down on travel. Over the summer of 1989, thousands of East German “tourists” traveled to Hungary, trying to use Hungary’s recent easing in travel restrictions to cross over into Austria, resulting in a mass exodus when Hungarian authorities agreed to let them cross the border in September.119 On 7 October—the fortieth anniversary of the GDR—fifteen thousand people marched in Plauen to protest state oppression. In Leipzig, weekly prayer services on Monday evenings expanded into peaceful demonstrations calling for political reform and freedom of travel that culminated in the Peaceful Revolution of 9 October, when seventy thousand Leipzigers marched around the city center, chanting “Wir sind das Volk!” (We are the people) and “keine Gewalt!” (no violence). Adding to this dilemma was Moscow’s declaration that it would not lend further military support to prop up the GDR so long as the SED refused to follow the political reforms taking place in the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. Finally relenting, the SED announced a relaxation of its restrictions on travel to the West at a press conference on 9 November 1989. During the conference, Politburo spokesperson Günther Schabowski was asked when the changes would take place; unprepared for the question on live television, Schabowski flipped his cue card, but when he could find no more information, he hastily—and fatefully—answered, “Immediately, without delay!”120 Rushing to the border crossings, thousands of Berliners confronted border guards with the news and demanded access to the West. Without instruction or direction, the border guards astonishingly complied with the citizens’ demands, opening the Wall and beginning the process of the GDR’s collapse as a state over the next year and the eventual reunification with West Germany in 1990. Although East Germany’s political dissolution brought the coffee agreements with Laos and Vietnam to a sudden and abrupt end, the story of coffee in those countries was only just beginning. These cooperative development projects were, after all, far more than mere trade agreements; they represented a planned exchange of technology, knowledge, resources, and coffee that both sides had intended to adhere to well into the twenty-first century. During the 1990s, Vietnam’s coffee industry exploded to become the world’s second largest producer of Robusta coffee next to Brazil, jumping from 1.2 percent of world production in 1989 to 12.4 percent by the turn of the century.121 Yet Vietnam’s rise as a global coffee producer can only be understood properly if one considers the cooperative projects between Vietnam and socialist partners like the GDR in the previous decade. Without these efforts, the development of a mass coffeeproducing industry would likely have taken far longer, given trade embargoes and an inflexible ICO.122 The collapse of state socialism in Europe left a degree

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of uncertainty in the global coffee market, specifically with regard to the sudden emergence of “new” coffee producers such as Vietnam and Laos. According to the preamble of the 1991 international coffee agreement, the ICO feared the impact on the world coffee market of East Germany’s cooperative partnerships with the developing world—in particular, the coffee project in Vietnam. These projects had introduced new competitors into the global coffee market, and the ICO felt the long-term implications of these developments were too uncertain. Vietnam, which was already showing signs of rapid growth in terms of coffee production, was not a member of the ICO, so it lay outside the organization’s purview (and, therefore, control). The ICO had very little information about the Vietnamese coffee industry and had no means to assess the consistency or quality of either its production methods or final product. In recent years, argued the council, Vietnamese coffee exports to the GDR had “been priced well above the average world market level,” suggesting that the ICO suspected inflationary pricing in Vietnam. Since the GDR’s trade status with Vietnam as a preferred partner expired in 1990 and in any event was based on a barter system, the ICO argued that “there is no real way to determine what the value of Vietnamese coffee beans really is as yet.”123 Thus, it would be difficult for the ICO to effectively formulate policy and strategies to cope with the emergence of these new coffee markets, especially if major producers like Brazil (which held a majority interest in the ICO) would now have to compete with new producing countries. Vietnam’s status as a socialist state was also hardly reassuring to the ICO’s leading export countries. A second concern was the fact that the collapse of state socialism in Europe also meant the entry into the market of new consumers who had hitherto been excluded by ICO policies. East Germany’s incorporation into the Federal Republic was particularly troubling because the GDR “[brought] with it 8–10 percent of the noncapitalist coffee trade into the market.”124 Adding so many consumers to the market—as well as new member states to the ICO—would result in both increased demand for coffee and a potential imbalance within the ICO between producing and consuming members. In other words, the addition of millions of new consumers into the coffee market would place new pressures on the ICO and potentially further destabilize negotiations over the quota system, which had already caused such grief over the previous decade.

Conclusion In 2011, the Federal Republic of Germany celebrated the “Year of Vietnam,” commemorating thirty-five years of cooperation between Germany and Vietnam—a periodization that began in 1976 with West Germany’s formal relation-

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ship with a unified Vietnam. In a publication that same year, Ilona Schleicher criticized the government’s choice of date for being misleading since it ignored the fact that North Vietnam and East Germany had enjoyed close relations since the former’s declaration of independence in 1945. Schleicher argued that “astonishingly little” discussion about this longer relationship could be found in German media after 1990, “although these successes had a great deal to do with the so-called “unique bridge” between Vietnam and Germany.”125 One of these bridges, clearly, was the coffee project of the 1980s that proved successful and had lasting effects well beyond the GDR’s dissolution. Coffee presented East Germany, Laos, and Vietnam with a perfect opportunity for collaboration, demonstrating that relatively marginalized countries found ways to maneuver the complicated geopolitical and economic circumstances brought about by both decolonization and the global Cold War conflict. East Germany’s urgent need to expand its coffee supply coincided with both Laos’s and Vietnam’s desire to use coffee cultivation to rebuild their economies. For the GDR, not only could these projects provide an inexpensive source of coffee for the foreseeable future; demonstrating solidarity with developing countries could provide a distraction from social issues in East Germany, such as the incongruities of domestic consumer supply. The government hoped to leverage these collaborations to stabilize its domestic political legitimacy. Concepts of mutual respect and benefit formed the basis of the GDR’s activities in both Laos and Vietnam, though—as they had in Angola and Ethiopia— practical concerns remained central factors in implementing the coffee projects. In Angola and Ethiopia, the GDR’s willingness to prioritize practical considerations, including the consideration to adopt capitalist market principles, had placed its actions at odds with its ideological commitment to international solidarity.126 Yet as the Laos and Vietnam projects demonstrate, challenges to building a coffee industry in both countries emerged from assumptions about the best approach to cultivation, especially when they clashed with contradicting local practices. German experts had assumed that the largest problems facing both countries stemmed from allegedly unsophisticated and primitive production methods. Manual practices, transient labor forces, a lack of organization and structure, local managers who were insufficiently trained in socialist methodology, and so on all supposedly hindered Laos’s and Vietnam’s potential to establish successful coffee industries. Guided by their absolute faith in science, the East Germans’ solution to all these perceived problems had lain in the immediate and nearly complete application of technology—implemented by East German experts and German-trained local farmers. This fixation on (European) scientific socialism did not always match with local realities, including long-standing traditional practices and specialized local knowledge of the soil and climate conditions.

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Despite this technological bias, the coffee projects in Laos and Vietnam remain important for what they reveal about relations between European and East Asian socialist states and the abilities of these nations to successfully implement complex cooperative projects spanning years and great distances in spite of global economic isolation. In highlighting the extent to which each country prioritized practical considerations of implementing the agreements, as well as the differences in approach to agricultural science between East Germans and locals, the projects reveal some of the limitations of international socialist solidarity. Related to these limits, the projects demonstrate the ways in which, like Angola and Ethiopia, both Laos and Vietnam entered these agreements with an existing set of goals and priorities for achieving postwar recovery and domestic stability, goals they pursued by leveraging their relationship with the GDR. Both projects ultimately succeeded in creating viable coffee industries in each country despite the challenges outlined in this chapter. Neither Laos’s nor Vietnam’s coffee industries grew quickly enough to produce a sufficient volume to meet East Germany’s expectations before the latter’s dissolution, but this hardly constitutes a failure of either project. Rather, through these exchanges, Laos and Vietnam were able to stimulate growth in industries that both countries identified as priority sectors for their economic recovery. The very persistence of the coffee industries following the abrupt end of the formal agreements after 1989—and especially Vietnam’s growth as a global coffee producer—is evidence of the success of the collaborative projects. It is important to consider these projects in their own temporal context; planners on all sides of these exchanges anticipated that these projects were simply the beginning of broader initiatives that would last well into the future. The coffee development projects were expected to take five to ten years before either Laos or Vietnam reached the levels of production all sides hoped for, and the trade contracts that followed were scheduled to last until 2001. Nobody involved in these projects could have thought to predict that the GDR would experience political capitulation within a decade. East Germans, Laotians, and Vietnamese on the ground focused on the task at hand, growing coffee as effectively as possible, with a long view unencumbered by the knowledge of what was to come. Too often, scholarship (and especially popular writing on the subject) dismisses diplomatic relations between socialist states as representing failure, a characterization that ultimately relies on (equally flawed) assumptions about the inherent and inevitable failure of state socialism itself. The success or failure of the coffee projects in Laos and Vietnam, however, was not preordained but rather came about because of a number of complex factors, the vast majority of which—whether they be debates over agricultural practices, disagreement about the terms of exchange, the challenge of dealing with local climactic conditions, or technical difficulties—were practical in nature and were issues representatives on all sides felt they

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could navigate together. Even after the Peaceful Revolution and the opening of the Berlin Wall brought the GDR’s political instability into stark relief, officials from all three countries were still making plans and signing additional contracts for training and goods exchanges with anticipated end dates of 2001, suggesting that all three sides intended to act in good faith and saw no reason these contracts could not be fulfilled. Despite the challenges in Laos, and in addition to the comparable success in Vietnam, the value of these exchanges went beyond production levels. Media coverage of the coffee deals encouraged East Germans to take pride in the assistance their country provided by showcasing the GDR’s capacity to guide “young” nations toward meaningful economic development. Meanwhile, the interpersonal connections between Germans and locals in developing countries also contributed to a genuine belief that both sides were involved in an important humanitarian project. Yet European socialism’s collapse left legacies around the world, in this case, a thriving coffee industry in Vietnam. These connections cannot be understood as mere trade agreements arranged for the sake of political or economic efficiency but rather as a lasting sign of a system of cooperative relationships that affected the lives of thousands of people and permanently changed the global market for the world’s second largest commodity (the first being crude oil; the third being natural gas). The projects also reveal the complexities of these exchanges, challenging overly simplistic interpretations regarding the foreign relations of socialist countries during the Cold War. The coffee agreements were bilateral affairs, and while Soviet diplomatic aims were considered during initial negotiations, the cooperative projects themselves proceeded without Soviet interference or even significant influence. Further, the coffee projects defy assumptions that ideological common ground created natural alliances, were universally united in vision and aims, or that countries fit neatly into one ideological camp or another. Socialist nations could, and did, pursue their own interests, often through bilateral arrangements like these coffee projects. Although considerations such as Soviet (or increasingly for Laos and Vietnam, Chinese) regional interests remained important, and while the GDR was not the only country providing aid in building coffee industries in Laos or Vietnam, the coffee projects demonstrate that these countries collaborated directly and independently of those considerations. In their diplomatic relations, socialist states were motivated as much, if not more, by economic considerations as they were by commitments to international solidarity based on shared ideology. A more fulsome understanding of how these arrangements played out requires an acknowledgement and exploration of the complexities that characterized the creation and management of these cooperative projects.

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Notes * Parts of this chapter previously appeared in two publications. See Andrew Kloiber, “Brewing Relations: Coffee, East Germans, and the World, 1977–1989,” special issue of Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 17, no.4 (Fall 2017): 61–74; and Andrew Kloiber, “Brewing Global Relations during the Cold War: Coffee, East Germans, and Southeast Asia, 1978–1990,” in Food and Modern Warfare in Germany’s Global Century, ed. Heather Benbow and Heather Perry, 247–70 (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019). The contents of these previous works are reprinted here with permission. The author thanks the University of California Press and Palgrave Macmillan Press (Springer Nature AG) for permission to use this content. 1. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Rüscher, Merkblatt an Günter Mittag, 13.6.1979, 528. 2. BArchB, DY 3023/1218, Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, Information zum Import von Rohkaffee, 15.06.1979, 535. In fact, though Rüscher did not mention it here, the Brazilian Coffee Institute announced it had ceased exports by 4 June. See Larry Rohter, “Brazil Awaits Full Impact of Early Frost in Coffee Areas,” Washington Post, 24 June 1979. 3. BArchB, DC 20 I3/1468, Maßnahme zur Durchsetzung des Prinzips Ware gegen Ware beim Rohkaffeeimport auf der Basis von Weltmarktpreisen, 16. Februar 1978, 147–62, 153; see also MfS HA/XVIII/8379 Teil 2, Maßnahmen zur durchsetzung des Prinzips Ware gegen Ware beim Rohkaffeeimport auf der Basis von Weltmarktpreisen, 10. Feb. 1978. 4. Norman G. Owen, ed., The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia: A New History (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005), 375. 5. Lorenz Luthi, Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 159. 6. BArchB, DK1/24499, Reisebericht über die Dienstreise vom 25.3. bis 3.5.1979 in die VDR Laos, 11. 7. Gerd Horten, “Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the ‘Vietnam Bonus’ of the Early 1970s,” German Studies Review 36, no. 3 (2013): 557–78, here 567. 8. Bernd Schaefer, “Socialist Modernization in Vietnam: The East German Approach, 1976– 1989,” in Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, ed. Quinn Slobodian, 95–113 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 96–97; Karin Weiss, “Vietnam: Networking between Socialism and Capitalism,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 27 (July 2005): 24–30. 9. Christina Schwenkel, “Affective Solidarities and East German Reconstruction of Postwar Vietnam,” in Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, ed. Quinn Slobodian, 267–92 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 269. 10. Jonathan Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 140–41. 11. Ibid., 324–25. 12. “Exports of All Forms of Coffee by Exporting Countries to All Destinations, September 2021,” International Coffee Organization, Sep. 2021, https://www.ico.org/trade_statistics.asp, accessed 19 Nov. 2021. 13. Christina Schwenkel, Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 81. 14. Young-Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 5. 15. Schwenkel, Building Socialism, 133. 16. Eli Rubin, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 118. 17. Schwenkel, Building Socialism, 155.

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18. BArchB, DK1/24499, Reisebericht über die Dienstreise vom 25.3. bis 3.5.1979 in die VDR Laos, 8. Mai 1979, 4. 19. Ibid., 5. 20. Ibid., 10. 21. Ibid., 7. 22. Ibid., 11. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. Ibid., 17. 25. Ibid., 18. 26. BArchB DK 1 24499, Konzeption zur langfristigen Sicherung von Kaffeeimporten aus der VDR Laos durch die Entwicklung geeigneter Formen der Zusammenarbeit, 22. November 1979, 3. 27. BArchB, DY 3023/992, Information über die Entwicklung der Wirtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen der DDR und der VDR Laos, 19. Juni 1981, 104. 28. BArchB, DK 1/24498, Direktive für einen Spezialisteneinsatz in der VDR Laos, August 1981, 2. 29. BArchB, DK1/24498, Bernd Stege, Alfred Jankus, Reisebericht über die Dienstreise vom 13.9.81 bis 21.12.81 in die VDR Laos, Halle/S., den 4.1.1982, 7. 30. Ibid., 15, 17. 31. Ibid., 35. 32. BArchB, DK1/24498, Bernd Stege, Alfred Jankus, Analyse der Ausgangsbedingungen für den Aufbau der Kaffeegesellschaft Paksong. 33. BArchB, DK1/24498, Bernd Stege, Alfred Jankus, Reisebericht über die Dienstreise vom 13.9.81 bis 21.12.81 in die VDR Laos, Halle/S., den 4.1.1982, 22. 34. Ibid. 35. BArchB, DK 1/24489, Arbeitsprogramm für 1982, zur Realisierung des zwischen der Regierung der DDR und der Regierung der VDR Laos abzuschließenden Abkommens über die Zusammenarbeit bei der Produktion von Rohkaffee und die Lieferung on Rohkaffee aus der VDR Laos in die DDR, 5. April 1982, 1–11, 2–3. 36. Ibid., 7. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 8. 39. BArchB, DK1-28475, Abkommen zwischen der Regierung der DDR und der Regierung der VDR Laos über die Zusammenarbeit bei der Produktion von Rohkaffee und die Lieferung on Rohkaffee aus der VDR Laos in die DDR, 5. Mai 1982, 5. 40. BArchB, DL 2 17442, Bd. 1, Protokoll über die Ergebnisse der Koordinierung der Volkswirtschaftspläne der DDR und der VDR Laos fur den Zeitraum 1986–1990, 7. Januar 1986; BArchB, DC 20/5428, Abkommen zwischen der DDR und Laos über die Gewährung eines Kredites für VR Laos, 18.3.86, Bl. 194–95. 41. BArchB, DL 2 17442 Bd. 1, Information über die Reise des DDR Botschafters in die Provinz Champasak und einige Schlussfolgerungen zur weiteren Zusammenarbeit DDR-VDR Laos bei der Produktion von Rohkaffee, 21. Dezember 1986, 1. 42. BArchB, DL 2/17442 Bd. 2, Standpunkt zu den Vorschlägen der Botschaft Vientiane zur Zusammenarbeit DDR/VDR Laos bei der Produktion von Rohkaffee, 2.11.1987, 1. 43. Ibid., 2. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. William Worner, “Economic Reform and Structural Change in Laos,” Southeast Asian Affairs (1989): 187–208, 187.

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48. BArchB, DL 2/17442 Bd. 2, Standpunkt zu den Vorschlägen der Botschaft Vientiane zur Zusammenarbeit DDR/VDR Laos bei der Produktion von Rohkaffee, 2.11.1987, 4. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. BArchB, DK 2/17442, Bd.2, Brief von Dietrich Jarck an Uto-Dieter Wange, den 29.1.1988, 1–5, 1. 51. Ibid., 3. 52. Ibid., 5. 53. BArchB, DK2/17442 Bd. 2, Klaus Werner, Vermerk über Ausführungen des Gen. Khamsay Souphanouvon, 1. Stellvertreter des Vorsitzenden der SKP in einem ADN Pressegespräch am 26.2.88, 1. 54. Ibid., 2. 55. Martin Stuart-Fox, Historical Dictionary of Laos, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008), 157. 56. BArchB, DK2/17442 Bd. 2, Klaus Werner, Vermerk über Ausführungen des Gen. Khamsay Souphanouvon, 1. Stellvertreter des Vorsitzenden der SKP in einem ADN Pressegespräch am 26.2.88, 2. 57. Worner, “Economic Reform,” 192. 58. Ibid., 199. 59. BArchB, DK 2/17442 Bd. 1, Fischer, Konsequenzen eines Beitritts der Volksdemokratischen Republik Laos zum GATT, 21.12.1988, 1–3, here 3. 60. BArchB, DL 2 17442 Bd. 1, Standpunkt zur Forsetzung der Zusammenarbeit bei der Produktion von Rohkaffee, 27.12.1988, 1. 61. BArchB, DQ 4/5002, Berufsausbildung laotischer Bürger in der DDR ab 1991, Brief von Siegfried Kaulfuss an Gennrich, 14.2.1990. 62. Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (Toronto: Doubleday, 2009), 345. 63. Schaefer, “Socialist Modernization in Vietnam,” 96. 64. Even here, Vietnam’s relationship with the USSR was also “relatively distant and difficult” as Vietnam continuously proved its willingness to pursue its own policy initiatives. For more on this strained relationship, see Céline Marangé, “Alliance ou interdépendance inégale? Les relations politiques de l’Union soviétique avec le Vietnam de 1975 à 1991,” Outre-mers 94, no. 354 (2007): 147–71, 148. 65. Schwenkel, Building Socialism, 19. 66. Für Dich 3 (Jan. 1966): 19–21; Für Dich 10 (1968): 8. 67. Schwenkel, Building Socialism, 93. 68. “Die Helden von Ham-Rong,” Für Dich 14 (1968): 18–19. 69. Schwenkel, Building Socialism, 91. 70. Horten, “Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War,” 569. 71. Doan Trieu Nhan, “Orientations of Vietnam Coffee Industry,” Speech at International Coffee Conference, May 17–19, 2001, in London, UK, http://www.ico.org/event_pdfs/nhan.pdf, accessed 19 December 2021. 72. Maja Wallengren, “The ‘Mr. Coffee’ of Vietnam,” interview with Doan Trieu Nhan, Tea & Coffee Trade Journal (Apr. 2013): 68–74, here 72. 73. BStU MfS HA XVIII, Nr. 8641, Vietnam—Ökonomische Einschätzung zu den Beziehungen der SR Vietnam zur UdSSR und den anderen sozialistischen Ländern, den kapitalistischen Industrieländern und Entwicklungsländern, 1979. 74. BArchB, DC 20/I/4/3998, Beschluß über die Entwicklung der Wirtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen der DDR und Vietnam (Anlage: Konzeption für die Koordinierung der Volkswirtschaftspläne der DDR und der SRV für den Zeitraum 1981–1985), 9. Feb. 1978, 182–99, 187. 75. BArchB, DL 2 6113, Wirtschaftsinformationen zur SR Vietnam, 24.03.1980, 123. 76. Ibid.

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77. Owen, Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia, 484–85. 78. BArchB, DL 2 MF 2790, Einschätzung der Importbeziehungen der sozialistischen Länder zur sozialistischen Republic Vietnam, 1979, 6. 79. Brown, Rise and Fall of Communism, 349. 80. BArchB, DN1/23079, Entwurf der Beschluß zum Ersuchen der Regierung der SR Vietnam zur Kreditierung des Passivsaldos der SR Vietnam im gegenseitigen Warenaustausch 1980 und zur Stundung der in den Jahren 1979 und 1980 fälligen Rückzahlungen für in Anspruch genommene Kredite, 7.5.1979, 1. The document uses the term “Mark” to discuss these amounts but fails to indicate whether the authors meant Ostmark, Deutsche Mark, or Valutamark. 81. BArchB, DL 2 MF 2790, Einschätzung der Importbeziehungen der sozialistischen Länder zur sozialistischen Republik Vietnam, 1979, 6. 82. BArchB, DC 20 I/4/4615 Bd. 5, Beschluß über den Entwurf des Abkommens zwischen der Regierung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und der Regierung der Sozialistischen Republik Vietnam über die Lieferung von Rohkaffee aus der Sozialistischen Republik Vietnam in die Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 26. August 1980, 69. 83. BArchB DE 1 56153, Lietz an Schürer, 10.03.1980, Abkommen zwischen der Regierung der DDR und der Regierung der SRV über die Zusammenarbeit bei der Produktion von Rohkaffee (Entwurf ), 1. 84. Ibid., 2. 85. Siegfried Kaulfuss, “Die Entwicklung des Kaffeeanbaus in Vietnam,” in Die DDR und Vietnam: Berichte, Erinnerungen, Fakten, ed. Ilona Schleicher (Berlin: Verband für Internationale Politik und Völkerrecht e.V., 2011), 2:43. 86. Jacqueline Desbarats, “Population Relocation Programs in Socialist Vietnam: Economic Rationale or Class Struggle?,” Indochina Report 11 (Apr.–June 1987), cited in Grant Evans, “Internal Colonialism in the Central Highlands of Vietnam,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 7, no. 2 (Aug. 1992): 274–304, 278. 87. Kaulfuss, “Entwicklung des Kaffeeanbaus in Vietnam,” 43. 88. Schaefer, “Socialist Modernization in Vietnam,” 108. 89. BArchB, DC 20 I/4/4615 Bd. 5, Beschluß über den Entwurf des Abkommens zwischen der Regierung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und der Regierung der Sozialistischen Republik Vietnam über die Lieferung von Rohkaffee aus der Sozialistischen Republik Vietnam in die Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 26. August 1980, 73. 90. Ibid., 69. 91. “DDR und Vietnam schlössen langfristige Abkommen ab,” Neues Deutschland, 5 Nov. 1980, 2; “Handelsabkommen DDR-SRV unterzeichnet,” Neue Zeit, 5 Nov. 1980, 2. 92. “Mehr Kaffee in Vietnam,” BZ, 20 Jan. 1981, 5. 93. Hartmut Kohlmetz, “Von der Solidarität zum beiderseitigen Vorteil der Partner,” BZ, 14 Mar. 1981, 4. Young-Sun Hong argues that the Germans used similar wording in their descriptions of construction projects in Zanzibar during the 1960s. Hong, Cold War Germany, 304. 94. BArchB, DQ 4/3100, Staatssekretariat für Berufsbildung, Information über die Ausbildung 10.000 Bürger der SRV, März 1983, 1. 95. Ibid. 96. BArchB, DL 2/6405, Dokument 30976 MJ 490/84 (untitled report), 122–39, here 126. 97. Kaulfuss, “Entwicklung des Kaffeeanbaus in Vietnam,” 45. 98. This language also resembles the recollections of East Germans assigned to projects elsewhere in Vietnam. In her investigation of reconstruction efforts in Vinh, Christina Schwenkel observed former East German experts who recalled a more “flexible” attitude toward time and scheduling among their Vietnamese counterparts. Though these experts used careful language to avoid offending their hosts, even years later, their desire to share this detail nonetheless reveals how frustrating they found this cultural difference at the time. Schwenkel, Building Socialism, 127.

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99. BArchB, DY 3023/1003, Information über den Stand der Realisierung mit der SRV getroffener Vereinbarungen zur Zusammenarbeit auf dem Gebiet der Lebensmittelindustrie, insbesondere bei der Produktion von Rohkaffee, und Schlußfolgerungen für die weitere Arbeit, Kommission des Politbüros des ZK der SED zur Koordinierung der ökonomischen, kulturellen und wissenschaftlich-technischen Beziehungen der DDR zu Ländern Asiens, Afrikas und des arabischen Raumes, 4. Jan. 1985, 22. 100. Ibid., 21. 101. Ibid. 102. BArchB, DL2/6424, Information für den Außenhandel: SR Vietnam, Zentrum für Information und Dokumentation der Außenwirtschaft (ZIDA), Nr. 2/86. 1986, 414–29, 419. 103. As mentioned earlier, some of these dividends included some measure of domestic and international legitimacy for being “on the right side” of the Vietnam war. See Horten, “Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War,” 557–78. 104. These figures seem mostly supported by research in subsequent years, which suggested Dac Lac witnessed a population increase of 176,000 people between 1975 and 1986. See Evans, “Internal Colonialism,” 280. 105. Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 349. 106. Bernd Findeis, “Kaffee aus dem Zentralen Hochland,” BZ, 12 Dec. 1986, 4. 107. Schwenkel, Building Socialism, 156. 108. Ibid. 109. BArchB, DK1/28475, Abkommen zwischen der Regierung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik und der Regierung der Sozialistischen Republik Vietnam über die Fortführung der Zusammenarbeit bei der Produktion von Rohkaffee und die Lieferung von Rohkaffee aus der Sozialistischen Republik Vietnam in die Deutsche Demokratische Republik, 27. Februar 1986, 3. 110. BArchB, DL 2/6220, Information zur Wirtschaft der DDR im Monat April 1986, 64. See also Schaefer, “Socialist Modernization in Vietnam,” 108. 111. Owen, Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia, 477. See also Sylvie Doutriaux, Charles Geisler, and Gerald Shively, “Competing for Coffee Space: Development-Induced Displacement in the Central Highlands of Vietnam,” Rural Sociology 73, no. 4 (2008): 528–54, 536. 112. Doutriaux, Geisler, and Shively, “Competing for Coffee Space,” 536; see also BArchB, DQ 4/5303, Protokoll der 14. Tagung des Ausschußes für wirtschaftliche und wissenschaftlichtechnische Zusammenarbeit zwischen der DDR und der SRV, 24. Januar 1988, 8. 113. The International Coffee Organization, History, http://www.ico.org/icohistory_e.asp, accessed 19 Dec. 2021. 114. BArchB, DL2/14853 Bd. 3, Brief von Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski an Mittag, 14.1.1986; BArchB, DL2/14853 Bd. 3, Brief von Krolowski an Bastian, Schalck-Golodkowski, AHB Generaldirektor, DAF Naka, AHF Naka, 3. Jan. 1986. 115. Pablo Dubois, “The International Coffee Organization 1963–2013: 50 Years Serving the World Coffee Community” (London: International Coffee Organization, 2013), 13. 116. BArchB, DL 2/14853, Bd. 3, Brief von Baum an Bastian, 16. Mai 1988. 117. BArchB, DK 2/17442 Bd. 1, Fischer, Zum Beitritt der Volksdemokratischen Republik Laos zum Internationalen Kaffeeabkommen (ICA), 30.12.1988, 1–2. 118. Additionally, all stock verification procedures were also suspended until further notice, and controls on production policies were loosened. The International Coffee Organization Website, History. Naturally, East Germany monitored these developments; the Stasi intercepted a memo from VEB NaKa Halle to the MBLI, 6 July 1989, that included a clipping from the West German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung from 3 July 1989 about the ICO negotiations and the world coffee situation. In this article, SZ reported on the breakdown in negotiations

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119. 120. 121.

122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

in London and wrote that “the main problem is, from the consumers’ point of view, the division of the market: while the 24 consumer countries that are members of the International Coffee Organization, ICO, are paying raw coffee prices, as the agreement provides, consumers outside the ICO, mainly in the Eastern bloc, receive raw coffee with price discounts up to 50 percent.” “Thema des Tages: Politischer Kaffee,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 July 1989; BStU MfS HA XVIII 18093, Bd. 1. Brief von VEB NaKa Halle an MBLI, 6. Juli 1989. Tony Judt, Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 612. John Connelly, “The Price of Freedom: What Came Down with the Berlin Wall,” Commonweal—A Review of Religion, Politics and Culture 136, no. 20 (Nov. 2009): 10–16, 10. Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds, 363; Q. Luong and L.W. Tauer, “A Real Options Analysis of Coffee Planting in Vietnam,” Agricultural Economics 35, no. 49 (Nov. 2006): 57, cited in Doutriaux, Geisler, and Shively, “Competing for Coffee Space,” 528. See also Ilona Schleicher, ed., Die DDR und Vietnam: Berichte-Erinnerungen-Fakten, 2 vols. (Berlin: Verband für Internationale Politk und Völkerrecht e.V., 2011). Hartmut Brandt, The Formulation of a New International Coffee Agreement (Berlin: German Development Institute [GDI], 1991), 97. Ibid., 97. Schleicher, DDR und Vietnam, 1:7. Anne Dietrich has suggested that Genußmittel’s analysis “was very sober” and reflected the GDR’s willingness to “apply capitalist competitive principles so as to maximize its own position.” She argues that these recommendations were “very practical; ideological considerations had no place here . . . the example of coffee demonstrates that the GDR clearly prioritized the provisioning of its own population over solidarity with the global South.” Anne Dietrich, “Kaffee in der DDR—‘Ein Politikum ersten Ranges,’” in Kaffeewelten: Historische Perspektiven auf eine globale Ware im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Christiane Berth, Dorothee Wierling, and Volker Wünderich, 225–47 (Göttingen: V&R Unipress, 2015), 235.

Conclusion

THE TASTE THAT REMAINS

S Throughout the 1980s, industry officials continued to explore more ways to save money and stretch the supply of coffee. Planners adopted a new roasting method in 1982 (roasting beans in steam at temperatures of 230 to 360 degrees Celsius) that sped up the production process and saved millions of Valutamark.1 Although the 1980s saw few supply issues overall, most innovations produced poor to middling results in terms of improving the quality of East German coffee.2 Efforts to maintain supply were especially focused in Berlin, where efforts to maintain supply always carried significant political weight. In preparation for the GDR’s thirty-fifth–anniversary celebrations in 1984, for instance, the Berlin Retailer Association reported sufficient volume of roasted coffee in August.3 The expansion of specialty retail stores throughout the 1980s led to some marked increases in the volume of high-end coffee; for instance, purchases of coffee in Delikat stores rose from 1.6 percent in 1980 to 6 percent in 1988.4 However, high prices in Delikat dissuaded customers, and this expansion only continued to stoke resentment among customers who recognized an increasingly unfair segregation of retail based on wealth and privilege. Despite the disruption in coffee supply in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, little changed in the way coffee drinking was promoted or discussed in official media or parlance. The November 1986 issue of the advice magazine Guter Rat included a piece on “Coffee Specialties” that featured an image of a manual coffee grinder encased in a wooden box with decorated, porcelain drawers. This reminded readers of the first coffee houses in sixteenth-century Constantinople, nicknamed “schools of wisdom.” East Germans could create their own “schools of wisdom” in their homes by offering their Christmas guests “a special kind of coffee.” The article proceeded to list a number of international recipes, from Irish and Turkish coffees to “Kaffee Kopenhagen” and “Café hollandaise.” Yet, even in the absence of a major shortage, concerns regarding supply remained Notes from this chapter begin on page 187.

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tangible because the article still suggested that readers use “8 to 10 grams of coffee, or two good, but not excessively heaped, teaspoons.”5 The article followed a pattern quite similar to coffee portrayals of previous decades by depicting a romanticized version of the past linking it with the present day and offering options for East Germans to enjoy their coffee in new, exciting, and creative ways. By trying out these various coffee specialties, East Germans, the article suggested, were in effect inviting the world into their dining rooms. When they offered these specialties to their guests, East Germans reinforced the traditions and customs of hosting and hospitality, partaking in—indeed, perpetuating—the old customs and traditions surrounding coffee drinking, in turn continuing the process of “democratizing coffee” so apparent in GDR media during previous decades. The media was not only still promoting the same themes and rhetoric about coffee; it still encouraged East Germans to enjoy coffee as part of their everyday experience. In fact, planning officials noted that in general, coffee consumption was still increasing, and projected that it would grow by 112–15 percent by 1990.6 Given these projections, trade officials also monitored world coffee prices and sought new avenues for purchasing raw beans. After the disastrous frost of 1975, world coffee prices only dropped in 1980 and remained around 120–140 US cents per pound for the early half of the decade.7 During this period of relatively stable prices, East Germany once again established trade agreements with Brazil, Colombia, Cameroon, Uganda, Costa Rica, and other producing nations for volumes of raw coffee totaling 63,077 t. These contracts showed a clear dominance of Western trading partners. In practical terms, the return to these sources was simply an effect of reduced prices, but East Germany did not “switch” its coffee sources in 1986; it did not abandon the projects with either Laos or Vietnam, nor indeed did it reduce its planned imports from either country, when world coffee prices declined. When travel restrictions lifted in the fall of 1989, allowing East Germans to finally visit West Germany, they tended to prioritize two things: visits to friends and family and trips to Western stores, in particular, grocery stores, where they were finally free and able to obtain the consumer goods they had desired for so long.8 Eight months later, after the currency union of 1 July 1990, East Germans lined up for hours, encircling state banks, to exchange their now defunct Aluchips (the derogatory name for East German marks that were made of aluminum) for West German Deutsche Marks (DM). Armed with this new currency, East Germans felt they had full and permanent access to a world of consumer opportunity.9 In other words, a great deal of euphoria surrounded this period, and many East Germans raced to purchase goods previously inaccessible to them, coffee included. When the East and West German economies merged, East German consumer goods firms (not just the coffee roasters) found themselves at a considerable disadvantage, forced now to compete in an open market where consumer

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choice put them at odds with companies in the West with far more financial and material resources. After the currency union, Western brands appeared in East German stores at prices well below those of Rondo, Mona, and other GDR brands, making it very challenging for East German products to compete.10 Although East German products struggled to attract enough customers to survive in the years immediately following the government’s collapse, the initial dominance of Western goods did not signal the permanent disappearance of Eastern brands. In the years following German reunification, observers noted the sudden reappearance in Germany of many East German cultural artifacts, specifically consumer goods like foodstuffs, toys, and some electronics. Combined, these artifacts constitute part of a phenomenon referred to as Ostalgie, a play on the concept of nostalgia and “Ost,” the German word for East.11 Coffee is present in this phenomenon, as well. On Karl-Marx-Allee lies a café with golden yellow signage that offers, among other things, a window to the past. “Experience history firsthand alongside coffee and cake,” reads the tagline of the café’s website. “We invite you on a journey into the past, from the emergence of Karl-Marx-Allee to our present day café.”12 Opened in 1953 under the name “Milchtrinkhalle,” Café Sibylle was one of the first establishments among the newly constructed (and exclusive) apartment complexes on Stalinallee.13 Today, the café celebrates this heritage, encouraging its guests not only to take a step into the past but into the GDR; it features a small museum and even an original wall painting. Another example of this phenomenon appears in Wolfgang Becker’s 2003 film Good Bye, Lenin!, in which protagonist Alex tries to save his mother from mental shock by reproducing the GDR through consumer goods like Mocca-Fix coffee. Indeed, brands such as Mona and Rondo are still produced by the firm Rostfein and remain available at grocery store chains throughout Germany to this day.14 Whether or not present-day packages of GDR coffee labels offer an accurate approximation of the original brands, their continued presence on store shelves indicates that they attract a sufficiently frequent patronage to justify their production. These nostalgic nods to coffee by no means suggest that East German brands overcame the odds of economic pressures during reunification to emerge vindicated. What they may represent, however, is the “taste that remained”—the association between specific memories and the foods, aromas, and tastes that conjure them. Further, they represent the lingering legacy of a bygone state, a reminder of more than merely its existence but of its global reach and impact.

Coffee, East Germany, and Globalization Coffee is one of life’s little everyday pleasures, a fact that was as true for many East Germans as it was for their contemporaries in other countries. East Ger-

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mans’ strong affinity for their daily cup of coffee formed part of a much longer history of cultural and social practices stretching back to the eighteenth and, for workers especially, nineteenth centuries. The shortages of raw beans resulting from two world wars and economic strife left most Germans largely deprived of this beloved drink for three decades, heightening East Germans’ sensitivity to the benefits that access to coffee could bestow, including warmth, comfort, and social interaction. Coffee’s return to everyday life, which the government intended to coincide with its plans to overtake Western consumption through the GDR’s own “consumer turn” in 1958, was heralded as a clear and present sign that living standards were improving, and that socialism was providing a lifestyle every bit as rewarding as that found across the border. Moreover, the SED claimed to have “democratized” coffee, both at home and abroad. Consistent visual and written media surrounding coffee drinking perpetuated and validated certain cultural ideas surrounding coffee drinking (leisure, rest, tradition, and hospitality), some of which could challenge the government’s sole claims to defining what consumer socialism—or later, “real existing socialism”—could mean. Patterns of coffee drinking in the GDR still resembled those of earlier generations. Despite claims to forging a brave new world of socialism, older notions of sociability stretching as far back as coffee’s entry into Germany, including hospitality and tradition, remained visible and active in the cultural milieu of East German society. Coffee had a tangible, pre-GDR, pan-German history, a history that East German planners sought to adapt, deploy, and exploit to further their own vision of a socialist utopia. The coffee crisis was never merely (or even truly) a crisis of shortage: the roasting industry found ways to stretch the supply of raw coffee far enough to ensure it could fulfill the planned volume of coffee for the rest of 1977, and its plans would allow for a continuation of supply well into 1978. Rather, the problem was planners’ fundamental miscalculation about customers’ expectations that products’ price matched a perceived quality: the coffee crisis was equally a crisis of taste. To East German coffee drinkers, it was insufficient to merely have a cup of coffee if the beverage did not meet their taste expectations—otherwise, coffee had little to no value, as evidenced by the nationwide boycott of Kaffee-Mix. Personal taste, therefore, continued to matter to East Germans, demonstrating a certain continuity with consumer behaviors that arose long before the establishment of state socialism in Germany. These personal preferences, furthermore, also seemed tied to East Germans’ own sense of self and their relationship to one another. Offering one’s guests a satisfying cup of coffee remained entrenched in expectations surrounding hospitality; that many East Germans believed the adulteration of such a coffee threatened to tarnish the gathering and felt strongly enough about this conviction to reject a blend on that basis suggests as well that East Germans were also concerned with how they were perceived as hosts. The (in)ability to enjoy a cup of coffee—alone or with guests—was for many East

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Germans a constant reminder of the lower standard of living compared to that of West Germany. Considering the much larger economic crisis afflicting the GDR in the late 1970s, the government might have simply ignored this particular problem and abandoned its coffee industry until world prices declined. Certainly such a solution would have saved a great deal of time, effort, and financial cost. Nonetheless, state and party officials at the highest levels agreed that ignoring this problem would be perceived as belying official claims of having established “real existing socialism” and abandoning its commitment to improved living standards. The state failed to manage public expectations regarding this beloved drink and succumbed to pressure to maintain not only a basic supply of coffee but a supply that would satisfy people’s tastes. The coffee crisis revealed the widening cracks in the GDR’s welfare dictatorship and the extent to which socialism’s legitimacy rested on how well the government could meet consumer needs, convert citizens to a set of socialist consumer values, and fulfill personal taste preferences. Yet, beyond this, the coffee crisis demonstrates in part the extent to which a subjective notion of taste, personal choice, and an entitlement to one’s preferences existed in East Germany and resonated among its citizens strongly enough to spark a crisis. Citizens’ rejection of a coffee that failed to meet their personal taste preferences is another example of the “remarkable ‘patterns of individualization’” that were taking root by the late 1970s “in an otherwise highly regulated society.”15 The story of coffee in the GDR is a global story, just as coffee is a “global beverage,” and can therefore help expand Cold War narratives by examining the period as a conflict occurring within the context of increasing globalization.16 Germany’s inability to grow coffee on its own soil irrevocably tied the GDR to a system of global exchange in its efforts to ensure that East Germans could enjoy their daily cup of coffee. The global coffee market was highly regulated by the ICA after 1963, and without a convertible currency East Germany could not pay market prices. While the ICA’s quota system permitted nonquota coffee to be sold below market value, this system nonetheless placed East Germany at the mercy of producing countries, which were not obliged to sell their highest quality goods at nonquota prices. These facts tell a familiar story; indeed, scholarly attention to the GDR’s global entanglements tends to overemphasize the ways in which the GDR was irreversibly beholden to a set of disadvantageous circumstances from which it could never wrest itself. Instead of merely considering East Germany’s place within a global order, historians ought to examine the GDR’s global engagement more closely because, far from being a static entity, the GDR took an active role within that global community, at times also helping shape its contours. Certainly, East Germany’s activity in the developing world was about power: alongside the Soviet Union, the GDR sought political and military allies in the developing world to continue applying pressure to its Western capitalist

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adversaries around the world. The Third World was more than merely a stage on which the proxy wars of superpowers were fought; rather, the Cold War culture wars were fought in developing countries as both ideological camps sought to convince newly independent nations to adopt a capitalist or socialist economic system.17 East Germany’s coffee projects highlight the need to examine the GDR (and, indeed, its partner nations) in a global context, to trace not only its “global footprint” but its active role in perpetuating the processes of globalization. Relatively marginalized countries found ways to maneuver the complicated geopolitical and economic circumstances brought about by both decolonization and the global conflict. In turn, these countries fostered meaningful relationships that, without the Cold War, might not have been possible. From reluctant participation in civil wars and regional conflicts to extensive economic development projects, the GDR played an active role in shaping the process of globalization in the second half of the twentieth century, and its contributions had effects lasting well beyond the fall of state socialism in Germany. The GDR’s contributions to the development and reshaping of emerging national industries and global coffee markets can also be understood as part of what helped stabilize the GDR. Certainly, the government took pains to encourage pride in its cooperation with developing nations, and its efforts abroad created important, tangible links with the Third World movement. By exploring the links between the cultural practices and the politics surrounding a single commodity, it becomes clearer that, to the population and government officials, the GDR’s international reputation continued to matter. By emphasizing the GDR’s ability to provide large-scale and long-term assistance to newly independent developing nations, the SED hoped to convince its people that they had a vital role to play in helping developing nations improve their economic and social conditions. East Germans formed their own conceptions of the global divisions of the Cold War world, and furthermore, the GDR had its own ambitions, self-image, and approach to what constituted “socialism.” Yet in complicating this periodization by reinserting the GDR, we must take care to neither overstate German involvement nor, as Young-Sun Hong warns, “romantici[ze] East German rhetoric of anti-imperialist solidarity.”18 East German officials often relied on the fundamental assumption that the coffee-producing countries with which the GDR traded were inherently underdeveloped, primitive, and, above all, too “young” to successfully carry out their own revolutions or build socialism effectively. Politics—both domestic and international—played a key role in East Germany’s coffee endeavors.19 In each case explored here, East German traders, as well as public media portrayals of trade partners, repeatedly celebrated the deals not only as a source of coffee but as an opportunity to guide these “underdeveloped” countries toward “socialist development.” The resulting relationships did not establish inherently exploitative power dynamics between East Germany and its coffee-producing partners. In fact, all of the GDR’s coffee

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partners pursued their own agendas vis-à-vis the East Germans and often frustrated East German officials with their ability to influence and control the parameters of the coffee projects. Nonetheless, the initial assumptions guiding the GDR’s negotiations and its public promotion of the coffee projects tended to be grounded in an understanding that European approaches to socialism were more “ideologically pure” than others, and that there were “correct” ways to achieve socialism.20 This set of assumptions also bore many of the very trappings of colonialism—notably, Eurocentric paternalism—from which the GDR claimed to distance itself.21 These attitudes stemmed from the East Germans’ preconceptions of what Hong has called “civilizational difference”: a set of cultural attitudes that the East Germans felt set them apart from the developing world.22 While this book has not been primarily concerned with race in the GDR, the coffee projects highlight the need to further explore the ways in which race and racial hierarchies factored in to East Germans’ preconceptions of their relationship with the developing world. As Gregory Witkowski has argued, “while East Germany officially rejected the colonial past of Imperial Germany, the government and its people continued to define themselves in a national and racial hierarchy in juxtaposition to the developing world.”23 So, too, did such hierarchies play into the conceptualization of the GDR’s efforts in securing and growing coffee in overexploited regions. Studying these global coffee concerns demonstrates that East Germany’s foreign activities, far from being ineffective or a mere footnote of history, in fact left a legacy within the countries with which it cooperated and affected trends in the globalization of a world coffee trade. These partnerships cannot be understood as mere trade agreements arranged for the sake of political or economic efficiency; they also came about because of the SED’s political choice to uphold a set of domestic cultural values and traditions associated with coffee drinking and must be understood as the culmination of these considerations. The coffee crisis was never truly a problem of supply, either in terms of the government’s conceptualization of its causes or solutions nor in practical terms, as access to a form of coffee remained throughout 1977–1978. Rather, cultural understandings of coffee’s place in German and European history tied East Germans to a broader European past that wove together traditions and values associated with coffee drinking, such as pleasure, enjoyment, stimulation, and relaxation. It was the population’s cultural affinity for the beverage and the widespread expectations of taste and aroma—perpetuated by the government’s own rhetoric—that caused the backlash ultimately necessitating the search for coffee in the developing world. Government messaging attempted to recast the colonial legacies associated with coffee through its claims of an ethically superior form of socialist trade, one that was mutually beneficial to all participants: East German consumers and coffee farmers in Africa and Asia alike. In the end, while the cultural practices of coffee drinking, the marketing surrounding these practices, and the general attitudes

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with which the GDR pursued its trade agreements bore many similarities to the capitalist system from which the SED sought to distance itself, East Germany succeeded in fostering meaningful relationships that introduced changes to a globalizing world coffee economy that lasted well beyond the GDR’s forty-year existence.

Notes 1. Monika Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum: Kaffeekonsum in beiden deutschen Staaten (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2014), 283. 2. Internal reports from the early 1980s indicate planned production and supply of coffee managed to meet its target levels. See, for instance, Hans Joachim Rüscher’s remark that production for the first quarter of 1981 had met 105 percent of planned fulfillment, though he urged increases to materials in order to meet the demand during the season of Jugendweihe and Easter. BArchB, DY 30/25066, Brief von Rüscher an Mittag, btrf. Kaffee, 14.5.1982. 3. BArchB, DY 30/17956, Verband der Konsumgenossenschaften, Wesentliche Ergebnisse der Konsumgenossenschaften bei der Durchsetzung der Beschlüsse der 7. Tagung des ZK der SED in Vorbereitung des 35. Jahrestages der Gründung der DDR, 10. August 1984. 4. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 274. 5. Renate Wahlich, “Kaffeespezialitäten,” Guter Rat (Aug. 1986): 24–25. 6. SAPMO-BArchB, DY 30/17956, Verband der Konsumgenossenschaften, Die Aufgaben der Konsumgenossenschaften der DDR im nächsten Perspektivzeitraum, Berlin, 1. Nov. 1984. 7. Pablo Dubois, “The International Coffee Organization 1963–2013: 50 Years Serving the World Coffee Community,” (London: International Coffee Organization, 2013), 12, available at http://www.ico.org/icohistory_e.asp, accessed 19 Dec. 2021. 8. See Konrad Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Annette Kaminsky, Wohlstand, Schönheit, Glück: Kleine Konsumgeschichte der DDR (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001); Ina Merkel, Utopie und Bedürfnis. Die Geschichte der Konsumkultur in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999); Mark Landsman, Dictatorship and Demand: East Germany Between Productivism and Consumerism, 1948–1961 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Milena Veenis, Material Fantasies: Expectations of the Western Consumer World among East Germans (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012). 9. Milena Veenis notes that for many East Germans, “the DM was their entrance ticket to the western world. . . . With the arrival of the DM, the East German material landscape changed at lightning speed.” Veenis, Material Fantasies, 191. 10. Sigmund, Genuss als Politikum, 286. 11. Scholars from multiple disciplines have been fascinated by this occurrence and, in general, have come to understand the return of these products as a response to widespread feelings of political disenchantment and social isolation in the new Federal Republic—an emotional longing for identifying markers of a life many former East Germans now feel was stripped away. Ulrich Becker, Horst Becker, and Walter Ruhland, Zwischen Angst und Aufbruch: Das Lebensgefühl der Deutschen in Ost und West nach der Wiedervereinigung (Düsseldorf: Econ, 1992); Christian von Ditfurth, Ostalgie oder linke Alternative: Meine Reise durch die PDS (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998); Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 228–30; Daphne Berdahl, Where the World Ended:

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12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21.

Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Veenis, Material Fantasies. As Paul Betts notes however, these consumer goods act as “historical markers of socialist experience and identity” that point to “a new nostalgia among ex-GDR citizens for the relics of their lost socialist world, be they everyday utensils, home furnishings, or pop culture memorabilia.” Ostalgie, he argues, is “more than simply an escapist defense mechanism against the chaos and disenchantment of Reunification itself.” Rather, he sees it as “part and parcel of the changing nature of East German historical consciousness since that revolutionary autumn.” In other words, Ostaglie is less a longing for a specific past, less a misremembered reality, and has more to do with understanding a postsocialist world. For many, Ostalgie also acts as a defense against the condescending view of many West Germans that “Ossies” were poor or needed rescuing from a form of imprisonment. Paul Betts, “The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 3 (Sep. 2000): 731–65, 734. Tagline, Homepage, Café-Sibylle, http://www.café-sibylle.de/, accessed 19 December 2021. It was also located close to Espresso Hungaria, mentioned in chapter one. Roger Cook, “25 August 1992: Ostalgie Provides Pushback against Western Views on the East German Collapse,” in A New History of German Cinema, ed. Jennifer M. Kapczynski and Michael D. Richardson, 524–29 (Rochester: Camden House, 2014), 525. Also, see Rostfein’s product listings on its website: https://www.roestfein.de/unsere-produkte/#3, accessed 19 December 2021. Betts, Within Walls, 174. Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2019), 7. Young-Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 47. Ibid., 320. Hong also reminds us that humanitarian projects in both East and West Germany were inherently political, the goals of which were often “to shape long-term postcolonial state-building projects in accordance with the ideology of one party or another.” Ibid., 3. Indeed, many developing countries exercised a great deal of control over the activities in their own lands, as well as over the aid entering their countries. See David C. Engerman, “The Second World’s Third World,” Kritika 12, no. 1 (Winter 2011): 183–211, 198. James Scott has argued that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a “civilizing mission”: “The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.” See James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 83. A number of Soviet historians, notably, Michael David-Fox and Tracy McDonald, have applied Scott’s concept of a “civilizing mission” to the Bolsheviks’ attempts to Sovietize the various peoples within the borders over which they claimed authority, calling this process one of “internal colonization.” See Michael David-Fox, “What Is Cultural Revolution?” The Russian Review 58, no. 2 (Apr. 1999): 181–201, 183; Tracy McDonald, Face to the Village: The Riazan Countryside under Soviet Rule, 1921–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 13. See also Stephen P. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict, and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). This phenomenon was by no means limited to the GDR. As David Engerman writes, “fraternal socialist aid bore much in common with aid from capitalist countries: an emphasis on industrialization and large showcase projects, a determination to integrate the Third World into global

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trade networks, and the application of technical expertise.” Engerman, “The Second World’s Third World,” 199. 22. Young-Sun Hong makes this argument as well regarding Soviet humanitarian aid practices compared with those of the capitalist West. She argues that “[European socialist] assistance was beneficial to the developing countries to which it was offered. However, socialist bloc aid programs also reflected—in a postcolonial context—many of the parasitic, exploitive features of neocolonial rule that the socialist countries had considered characteristic of their capitalist foe. Last, Soviet bloc aid, including that provided by East Germany, was, like that of its western counterparts, based on a narrative of specious notions of civilizational difference, and . . . it unwittingly reproduced many of the problematic features of the western-dominated humanitarian regime and thereby blunted its appeal to its would-be recipients.” Hong, Cold War Germany, 48. 23. Gregory Witkowski, “Between Fighters and Beggars: Socialist Philanthropy and the Imagery of Solidarity in East Germany,” in Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World, ed. Quinn Slobodian, 73–94 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 73.

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INDEX

Angola, 2, 9–11, 13, 80 coffee agreement with East Germany, 87–89, 107, 118, 120, 123, 125–28, 130, 132–33, 137, 140 coffee industry, 80, 123 domestic wars, 119, 132–33, 171–72 East Germans in, 128, 130, 136 ideal trade partner, 122, 132, 140, 171 military aid for, 125–27 payment imbalances with, 132 portrayal in East German media, 11, 136 Soviet involvement in, 119, 123, 127, 133 Axen, Hermann, 91 Basic Treaty, 8–9, 120 Betts, Paul, 12 Brazil American activity in, 30–31 coffee industry, 29 East German purchases from, 45, 137, 181 frost (see under Black Frost of 1975) and International Coffee Agreement (see International Coffee Agreement) world’s largest coffee producer, 29–30, 149, 168–69 black market and coffee, 20, 22 during occupation years, 21–22 in East Germany, 67, 149 efforts to combat, 22–23 (see also Handelsorganisationen (HO)). and political legitimacy, 12, 22, 26 in Third Reich, 20–21 Bulgaria, 88 Buschmann, Werner, 89–90 consumption rational consumption, 43

Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (C.A.R.E.), 21 coffee advertising, 18, 44, 52–57, 62–64 Arabica, 30, 80, 151, 168 as a colonial good, 2, 42, 55, 121–22 complaints about, 18 (see also Kaffee-Mix) consumption, 48–51, 98, 138–139, 181 cultivation, 80 and enjoyment (see relaxation) and everyday life, 2, 24, 26, 42, 57, 60–62, 180–81 expansion through Europe, 4–5 imports (see trade) international markets (see trade) Kaffee-Mix (see Kaffee-Mix) Kosta, 2, 44–45, 47, 50, 55–56, 66, 78, 85–86, 89–90, 93, 96–98, 102, 131 Malzkaffee, 5, Mocca-Fix-Gold, 1, 91–92, 95, 131, 182 and modernity, 41–42, 59–66 Mona, 44–46, 50, 55–56, 66, 78, 85, 89–90, 92, 98, 102, 104, 107, 131–32, 182 packaging (see advertising) politicization, 3, 6–7, 12, 19, 21, 25–26, 28–29, 33, 44, 87, 90 prices, 30, 44, 50, 80–81, 85, 88–89, 92, 97, 106, 131, 147 production, 2, 27, 47–49, 89–92, 180 and relaxation, 4–6, 59–65 Robusta, 2, 30, 32, 80, 149, 151, 154, 161, 163, 169 Rondo, 45, 50, 55–56, 66, 78, 85–86, 89–90, 92, 97, 102, 104, 107, 131–32, 182 shortages (see supply) and sociability, 51, 65–67 (see also social stratification)

Index | 203

as socialist good, 6–7, 43–44, 58–62, 68 social stimulant, 43, 57–59 stimulant, 2, 23, 43 supply, 19–20, 24–26, 78–79, 80–82, 84–87 taste, 46, 97, 105–07 trade, 12, 28, 33, 79, 81–82 from/in West, 26–27, 49, 66–68, 181–82 Coffee Cantata, 52 Cold War bipolarity, 9, 184–85 complexity, 11, 140, 173 as cultural war, 28, 185 and developing world, 185, 171 and East Germany, 6, 8, 19, 34, 46, 78 and globalization, 9, 184 and historiography, 9–11 political division, 8–9, 32 and trade, 19, 29, 31 Council for Mutual Economic Aid (COMECON or CMEA), 83–84, 160 Czechoslovakia (CSSR), 88, 91, 128 Delikat, 8, 67–68, 98, 180–181 de Nascimento, Lopo, 123 Department of Commercial Coordination (Bereich Kommerzielle Koordinierung, KOKO), 67, 123, 132 Eigensinn, 59–60 Eingaben, 92–99 Erasmus, Herbert, 56 Ethiopia, 2, 9 coffee agreement with East Germany, 10–11, 13, 87–89, 107–8, 118–20, 123–30, 134–40, 147, 171 coffee industry, 30, 80, 119, 123–26, 128–29, 134–36 domestic wars, 88, 119, 133 East German colonialism towards, 124–25, 135 East Germans in, 128 ideal trade partner, 10, 30, 122, 132, 140 military aid for, 125–26, 128–29 payment imbalances with, 129, 132, 134

portrayal in East German media, 11, 136 Provisional Military Committee (Derg), 123 Soviet involvement in, 119, 123–24, 133 Exquisit, 8, 98 Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) (FRG), 6, 8, 170 everyday life, 62 Hallstein Doctrine, 8–9, 34, 120 and Vietnam, 170 Fischer, Oskar, 123 food colonial origins of, 3, 45 consumption (including shortage), 12, 18, 21–24, 34, 49, 85 culture, 2–3, 13, 42–43, 52, 57, 63, 98, 121, 161, 182 diet and health, 62 as fuel, 18, 20 as leisure, 4, 7, 78 production, 152, 163 rationing, 3, 6, 12, 19–21, 23, 27, 46, 52, 85, 87, 118 foreign policy (GDR) autonomy in, 120 (see also Soviet Union; Hallstein Doctrine) colonialism and (see also paternalism) development, 122 (see also trade, not aid). as domestic policy, 11 goods for goods trade (Ware gegen Ware), 132, 136–37, 147 ideology and, 10, 118, 120, 150 military goods and, 125–26 paternalism, 150, 152–54, 165–66, 185–86 pragmatism, 11, 122 and secrecy, 127 Solidarity, 119, 126–27, 150, 161–62 (see also ideology) trade, not aid (Handel statt Hilfe), 121, 124, 132, 149 Free German Trade Union (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, FDGB), 24 Free German Youth (freie Deutsche Jugend, FDJ), 128

204 | Index

frost of 1975, 2, 12, 79–80 effects of, 148 Gemütlichkeit, 42 Genussmittel consistency with socialism, 34, 68 as luxury good, 4, 43, 48, 52 supply of, 23 German Democratic Republic (East Germany) Berlin Wall, 46 competition with West Germany, 2, 6, 45–46, 107 currency, 11, 118 debt, 83–84, 149 everyday life, 62 Ostalgie (nostalgia), 182 political collapse, 169, 170 republikflucht (fleeing to West), 25, 45–46 Geschenkdienst und Kleinexport GmbH (GENEX), 67 globalization and Cold War (see Cold War) East German role in, 3, 9, 184–86 processes of, 79 structure of, 11 Gömann, Hans, 47–48 Gratzik, Paul, 58 Gronberg, Tag, 53 Haile Mariam, Mengistu, 124–25, 135 Handelsorganisationen (HO), as price-controlling mechanism; 23 black market trade, 23 and memory, 90 Honecker, Erich, 7, 105, 107, 128–29 and foreign debt, 83–84 and foreign relations, 125, 135, 161 and Intershops, 67 and political nature of coffee crisis, 84, 87, 90–91, 95, 102–03 Hong, Young-Sun, 150, 185 Horten, Gerd, 121, 161 Hüttner, Hannes, 58 International Coffee Agreement (ICA) – 1963

as a cold war construct, 31–32, 122 collapse of, 167–70 formation of International Coffee Organization, 31 quota system, 137, 167–68 renewals of, 82–83, 167–69 signing of, 31–33 structure of, 32 International Coffee Organization as Cold War enterprise, 9 formation of, 32 membership of, 148 Intershop, 8, 67–68, 85–87, 98 Jankus, Alfred, 153–54 Johann Sebastian Bach, 4, 51 Kaffeeklatsch (“coffee gossip”), 5 Kaffee-Mix, 78–79 and ‘false choice’, 97–99, 131 improvements to, 100–01 production of, 89–92, 131 public reaction to, 92–99, 102–04, 131 Kaulfuss, Siegfried, 159, 164 Kopstein, Jeffrey, 82 Krolokowski, Werner, 89 Khrushchev, Nikita, 28, 46 Krauß, Paul, 63 Kwon, Hoenik, 10 Lamberz, Werner in Angola, 87–88, 123, 125–26 death, 134 in Ethiopia, 87–88, 123, 125–26 and the coffee crisis, 89, 91, 128–29 Laos, 2, 147 and China, 148 climate, 151 coffee agreement with East Germany, 153–55 coffee industry and production, 148–49, 151–53, 159 colonialism, 148 criticism of East German policies, 157–58 East Germans in, 151, 154 education and worker exchanges, 154

Index | 205

foreign debt, 158 interest in international coffee agreement, 168 payment imbalances with, 155, 157 portrayal in East German media, 173 national development, 152, 156–58 relations with socialist bloc, 156 State Farm 08, 152–53 Le Duan, 148 Lewizky, Hans, 63 Lüdtke, Alf, 59 main economic task, 6, 27, 34, 48, 82 Michel, Horst, 62–63 Ministry of District-Led Industry and Foodstuffs Industry (Ministerium der Bezirksgeleitete Industrie und Lebensmittelindustrie, MBL), 85, 89–93, 130 Ministry for State Security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS (Stasi)), 95, 103–104, 126, 130–31 Ministry for Trade and Supply (Ministerium für Handel und Versorgung, MHV), 25, 102 Mintz, Sidney, 78 Mittag, Günter, 83–85, 91, 105, 128–129, 131, 137 People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola, MPLA), 123, 126, 132–33, 136, 140 National Socialism economic policies, 20 and memory, 22, 52, 120, 160 racism (in advertising), 55 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola, UNITA), 123, 126 New Course, 25, 34, 52, 99 New Economic System (Neues Ökonomisches System, NÖS), 47 Nixon, Richard, 28 Norden, Albert, 90,

oil crisis, 2, 80–83 ornamentalism, 3 Ostpolitik, 120 Pathet Lao, 148 Pence, Katherine, 12, 59 Poland, 83, 91, 128 principal task, 7 race tropes in advertising and media, 53–55 Rauchfuß, Wolfgang, 132–33 real existing socialism as policy, 7, 12 and public credibility, 79, 84, 86, 183–84 Rüscher, Hans-Joachim, 81, 84–87, 89, 93, 99–101, 105, 147 Schalck-Golodkowski, Alexander, 86–87, 89–90, 131, 147 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 53 Schleicher, Ilona, 171 Scholz, Michael, 120 Schürer, Gerhard, 84, 131 Schwenkel, Christina, 148, 150, 166 Scott, James, 94 Seven Year Plan, 6 Sigmund, Monika, 27, 49 social contract, 12 Socialism and advertising (including branding), 44–46, 52, 55–56 consumer socialism, 7, 12, 79, 106, 183 as ideology, 6, 10, 55, 118–19, 122, 140, 173 and money, 106 productivist labor, 6, 97 socialist living culture, 7, 61–63 Socialist Unity Party (SED), 6, 11–12, 21–25, 28, 43, 49, 68, 81–82, 84, 89, 94, 100–102, 105–7, 120–22, 128, 134, 136, 165, 169, 183, 185–87 social stratification, 42, 66–68, 99–100 Souphanouvong, Khamsai, 157–58 Soviet Union, 8, 24, 30, 83, 118–20, 123–24, 127, 133, 148, 156, 184

206 | Index

Soviet Zone of Occupation (Sowjetische Besatzungszone, SBZ), 11, 22 State Planning Commission (Staatliche Plankommission, SPK), 25, 27, 85, 130 Stege, Bernd, 153–54 surrogates (including Ersatz), 1, 5, 20, 48, 61, 86, 89–90, 92, 96, 101 Ulbricht, Walter, 6, 24, 27, 46 United States, 8, 29–30, 32, 34, 123, 148, 160, 162 Unity of Economic and Social Policy (UESP), 82 Valutamark, 81, 125, 180 Vietnam, 2, 147 and China, 148, 160, 162 climate, 160 coffee agreement with East Germany, 162–64, 166 coffee industry and production, 148–49, 161, 163, 165, 170 colonialism, 148, 165 Dac Lac, 161, 163–66 East Germans in, 162, 164–65

ideal trade partner, 160 payment imbalances with, 162 portrayal in East German media, 160–61, 164–65, 172 reconstruction and national development, 148, 161 relations with socialist bloc, 161 Soviet involvement in, 148 Vietnam War, 120–21, 160 Voigt, Jutta, 58, 98 Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), 123, 133 Wilk, Richard, 45 Witkowski, Gregory, 186 World War Two, 7, 30 memory of, 150 post war occupation, 22–23 post-war reconstruction and scarcity, 18, 27 Wünderich, Volker, 107 Yugoslavia, 88 Zatlin, Jonathan, 106 Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum, 4, 51