I thought this was very clear already? Your link is "yet another cruel thing the gdr did" tho and is much appreciated.
ValentineC 17 hours ago [-]
I was just in Hanoi, and some of their roasters are incredible value for money.
Lots of co-fermented specialty Vietnam-grown Robusta and Liberica at incredible prices, far cheaper than what people would find from roasters that import their beans from Colombia or any of the other big coffee-growing countries.
Kirby64 16 hours ago [-]
> Lots of co-fermented specialty Vietnam-grown Robusta and Liberica at incredible prices, far cheaper than what people would find from roasters that import their beans from Colombia or any of the other big coffee-growing countries.
Robusta at least is substantially cheaper, because yields are better and it’s less affected by disease. I don’t know enough about Liberica to know how it yields.
Also, “co-fermented coffee” generally is just code for flavored pre-roast flavored these days, especially out of Colombia. Not sure if that’s made it to Vietnam, but I’m always going to raise an eyebrow with co ferments these days. Not that they can’t be tasty, but they shouldn’t command a price premium if it’s essentially just flavored coffee in my view.
sersi 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, co-fermented coffee tends to be lower quality coffee that is co-fermented with flavouring juice to cover the lack of quality. That's not the case of all co-ferments but it's a significant enough number of them that it's usually something to avoid unless you really trust the roaster and farm.
esperent 14 hours ago [-]
Any co fermented coffee I've had in Vietnam has been anaerobic fermented with something else like strawberry.
Kirby64 13 hours ago [-]
If your Vietnamese coffee is co fermented with “strawberry” and actually tastes like strawberry, it’s essentially just using flavoring, not real strawberry (or, not only real strawberry).
esperent 12 hours ago [-]
Yes I know, it doesn't taste like strawberry, it's fermented with strawberry (or I've also seen orange, jackfruit, etc.). This is what I clearly stated, and the person above you also stated. There's no artificial flavors being added to the coffee at any decent specialty coffee shop in Vietnam, unless you specifically order some sweet flavored drink from the menu.
D_Alex 14 hours ago [-]
I was just in Hanoi! A thing I learned is that Vietnam is today the second largest producer and exporter of coffee, behind Brazil of course. And per capita, Vietnam produces and exports more than Brazil.
And as for taste - I love the rough and tough flavours of Vietnamese Robusta coffees! The Australian roasted Arabicas are mild and gentle, almost to the point of blandness in comparison.
latchkey 4 hours ago [-]
Large amounts of clothing exports too.
enaaem 7 hours ago [-]
Fine robusta is legit. Very full bodied, fruity and chocolatey.
holgerschurig 13 hours ago [-]
> West Germany attempted to isolate East Germany with the so-called Hallstein Doctrine, which amounted to a pretty solid trade embargo.
The first sentence is true, and is what I know. The second economical leg of this sentence is new to me.
Basically, Hallstein Doctrine was what "One China" politics is. The BRD assume that is is the sole legitimate (since democratically elected) government. For example, someone from east germany fleeing to west german already had the (west) germanship citizenship, no paperwork needed to get it.
However, Hallstein doctrine had --- to the best knowledge ... very unspecified reactions. Germany e.g. stop diplomatic relationships with Cuba. But not economical ties, I know that my father continued to smoke Havanna cigars (eeeek!). They stopped diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia ... but all the Winnetou Films were recorded there, and it even became a holiday destination for west germans. Also all payments continued, it was not an economical embargo.
In the case of Egypt it could be seen like that. When Egypt accepted the state-hood of east-germany, then West-Germany broke it's diplomatic ties AND stopped its economical aid. I'm not aware of it stopping buying oil from Egypt, thought.
Fan fact: there is also two inverses of the Hallstein doctrine. The first one is the Ulbricht Doctrine. That doctrine mandated that socialist countries mustn't normalize their diplimatic ties to west-germany until it recognized east-germany.
And the second inverse is that other countries only saw west-germany as the legal succession of the 3rd Reich and even the german empire. So it was West-Germany had hat to fulfill contracts of that time. Except for the reparations. The USSR took (or stole) more stuff from East Germany than the western allied forces took from West Germany. About 30% of the industrial infrastructure was removed, e.g. 11800 km of railway tracks. And even after they stopped removing the infrastructure itself, they still demanded a percentage of the production.
johannes1234321 10 hours ago [-]
> For example, someone from east germany fleeing to west german already had the (west) germanship citizenship, no paperwork needed to get it.
Mind that that didn't only matter for GDR, but also East Prussia etc. which was important for all the displaced people from now-Poland, Sudeten Germans etc.
dmurray 8 hours ago [-]
How does that work, are people from East Prussia today entitled to come and live and work in Germany? Or was that right dropped at some point? Or only ever available to those of German descent (which seems uncomfortably close to the values of the previous German regime, and surely would require some paperwork to establish)?
The region that was once East Prussia has now mostly been ruled by Russia since longer than almost anyone there has been alive.
johannes1234321 7 hours ago [-]
This became stricter with a big reform in 1999 and then further changes.
Till then (West) Germany had quite inflspecific wordi g. The constitution says "German citizen is, who is German" and they kept the old Empire's citizen law to have continuity.
That's one of the reasons why reunification between East and West bad go be done so quickly (from falling Wall No. 9th 1989 to reunification October 3rd 1990) as East Germans could migrate to West easily as soon as the Wall fell and promise of quick unification was a key promise to prevent even bigger migration.
21asdffdsa12 11 hours ago [-]
The west had a ton of products manufactured in the GDR. Check your Privileg washing machine - it was made in the DDR! Same goes for IKEA furniture. That was the bitter end of the utopia, that it was basically a capitalist labour camp at the end to survive.
ErroneousBosh 10 hours ago [-]
As recently as the late 90s (which, yes was 30 years ago, not all that recent) in the UK we were getting tractor tyres coming in stamped "MADE IN DDR".
Although I don't know if that was more a case of "we really ought to take the grinder to that mould and stick something else on", or what.
flohofwoe 9 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure it would have been "Made in GDR" ;) Must have been leftovers from before 1991, or maybe Pneumant (the former GDR tyre company) indeed never cared to update the original molds until Goodyear bought them in 1999.
expedition32 11 hours ago [-]
The economy of the DDR was a basket case. It was the USSR that did them in when the Soviets stopped selling them oil and gas for cheap in the 1970s.
Moscow was surprisingly capitalist. They noticed they could sell their resources to the West for dollars or give them away to their communist "allies".
flohofwoe 9 hours ago [-]
Might have to do with the fact that East Germany's Uranium deposits dried up sometime between the late 60s and early 70s (but of course there was also the global oil crisis around that time). In the early days the GDR provided most of the Uranium for the Soviet nukes, and there was constant haggling about who pays what (usually the GDR) and how much profit the GDR was allowed to take (usually not much). Cheap oil and gas might have been a part of the deal, until West Germany also discovered that the Soviets were willing to sell cheap to the "class enemy" during the 1970s (e.g. that problem of (the whole of) Germany becoming dependent on Russian oil and gas started much earlier than most people realize today.
Also related fun fact: the GDR started to refurbish and use old steam locomotives again as a result of the oil crisis. I remembered seeing those regularly as a child, and then later wondered what caused this anachronism.
maharajatever 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
shoo 9 hours ago [-]
Excellent article. I am a fan of approximation, but this is a great moment to pause & be thankful for access to non-ersatz coffee.
rurban 15 hours ago [-]
The 1977 GDR coffee dilemma is wellknown. Everyone had a different name for the cheap fake coffee then. Even in West Germany the prizes made people try the fake one.
But what is not wellknown to me, why both parties forbid cross partnerships, where they agreed to a longterm economic partnership.
flohofwoe 9 hours ago [-]
Muggefug! :D
rurban 8 hours ago [-]
Exactly. My mother is East German, and she called it so
And the latest name is decaf. Coffee without coffee.
curmudgeon22 19 hours ago [-]
A fun read. It's interesting to think about the trade limitations imposed on East Germany and how those impacted daily things we take for granted.
boxed 11 hours ago [-]
Heh, it's funny how the article calls it an "embargo" when the west didn't sell coffee to the GDR, but when the Soviet Union didn't do it, it's just "decided".
j4k0bfr 9 hours ago [-]
That got a chuckle out of me too. When state secrecy and systematic incompetence get in bed together, a lot of things end up being 'decided' lol.
Edit: as a massive fan of industrial and engineering history, the spotty nature of good Soviet documentation does my head in!
forinti 5 hours ago [-]
Neither the West nor the USSR grew coffee, though.
The West wouldn't trade (or let developing countries under its influence do it) and I bet the USSR couldn't procure enough for itself and the DDR.
the_gipsy 7 hours ago [-]
Seems pretty clear that "embargo" means "could/would sell for a profit" but doesn't for fear of WG's reaction, which is not the case for the USSR.
It's not explicit in the article, but I would guess the USSR didn't have a strong enough coffee industry to be helping anymore.
refurb 8 hours ago [-]
Little known fact - Vietnam modernized their Public Security apparatus in the late 1950s with help from GDR’s Stasi.
Vietnams surveillance system, population database and use of biometrics were all adopted from the GDR.
nsonha 5 hours ago [-]
As a Vietnamese, that sounds meaningless because Vietnam never had much of a "surveillance system" nor an effective population database well into the 2000s. I have no doubt the effort was there for them to control people, but a complete lack of competency invalidated it.
deadmutex 19 hours ago [-]
The article never defines GDR, but I looked it up in case you were also unfamiliar:
The German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly known as East Germany, was a socialist state in Central Europe that existed from October 7, 1949, to October 3, 1990
frantathefranta 19 hours ago [-]
The German acronym (DDR) is much better known among Eastern Europeans. My parents (Czech) would almost never call it East Germany.
spankibalt 15 hours ago [-]
East German here. I have never met East Germans who called their home country Ostdeutschland before the Wende; that was very much a West German thing, and even then not as widespread as one might think (i. e. "DDR" was the much more common name amongst them). After the Wende it became (more of) a thing for Easterners as well, especially in context with the identity: Ostdeutsche(r).
mobilio 14 hours ago [-]
Bulgarian here - for me DDR/GDR is well known. Also FRG.
paganel 12 hours ago [-]
Romanian here, the same applied here on all counts. Back in the '80s and going into the '90s we also used to name an infamous and poor Bucharest area as RFG (FRG in English), which was the capital letters of those three neighborhoods taken together as an acronym.
holgerschurig 13 hours ago [-]
In West-Germany we used a plethora of names:
* "SBZ" -> Sowjetisch besetzte Zone -> sowjet occupied zone
* "Ost-Zone"
* "DDR"
* "Ost-Deutschland"
Almost no one spelled out "DDR" with "Deutsche Demokratische Republik", since that was a lie. There was little democracy there.
People that fled from east-germany early (e.g. before the wall) usually used "SBZ "or "Zone". And it was usually meant in a derogatory sense. "DDR" was more neutral, although few people in west-germany had a neutral view on the eastern regime.
rob74 10 hours ago [-]
The funniest thing about the GDR was that its railways were still called "Deutsche Reichsbahn" ("German Imperial Railways" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Reichsbahn_(East_Germ...). Apparently they needed to keep the name in order to be able to still operate trains in West Berlin.
i_am_a_peasant 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah I never heard of "GDR", and I've visited the DDR museum in Berlin. My grandfather went to work in the DDR and when I was a kid in the 90s I still had all sorts of toys and things like casette recorders from the DDR. Oh man what a blast from the past that museum was.
shellac 10 hours ago [-]
> The German acronym (DDR) is much better known among Eastern Europeans.
And in the UK. Presumably because it was used in athletic meetings and on cars. Never seen 'GDR', we'd just use 'East Germany'.
nephihaha 7 hours ago [-]
I have seen GDR used in the UK. But then again not many people refer to North Korea by its official name here.
holgerschurig 13 hours ago [-]
Fun thing: some people here in Germany act like there is no East Germany. For them it is "Middle Germany". As if we still had Schlesien and Pommern ...
Look at radio stations. We have SWR: Süd-West Rundfunk (south west) in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz. We have WDR: Westdeutscher Rundfunk (west) in Nordrhein-Westfalen. We have NDR: Norddeutscher Rundfunk (north). In Niedersachsen, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Hamburg (not Bremen).
... and then we have Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (middle) in Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen.
And no one is in the east ...
johannes1234321 7 hours ago [-]
It's not 100% exact.
There was the ORB - Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg. Which later (2003) merged with SFB - Sender Freies Berlin to RBB - Rundfunk Berlin Brandeburg.
Thus the middle serves the middle. And while Saxonia (Part of MDR) indeed goes to the east most point of Germany it's at least middle in North-South. But the most middle point (depending a little on exact definition) is in Thuringa (also part of MDR)
flohofwoe 9 hours ago [-]
It's the "historical" pre-WW2 name of the region. But as "Ossi" I must say the name never sat well with me and the name MDR is one of the bigger fuckups of the reunification, it's essentially revisionist bullshit
avhception 12 hours ago [-]
Oh wow, that never occurred to me! TIL.
pestatije 13 hours ago [-]
don't forget Königsberg, next east german state after russian defeat in 2027
flohofwoe 9 hours ago [-]
Nobody wants that shithole back. Unless of course the Czechs want a harbour, in that case they can have it ;)
rob74 10 hours ago [-]
The explanation for that (according to Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitteldeutscher_Rundfunk#Histo...) is tradition: there was a Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk from 1924 to 1934, when the geographic designation was correct, and the post-1990 MDR just continues that name.
Actually, if you look at the map of German regional public broadcasters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARD_(broadcaster)#/media/File:...) and squint a bit, the MDR is more or less in the middle: more on the north-south axis and less on the east-west axis (with only the RBB partly more east), but still...
flohofwoe 9 hours ago [-]
I guess its mostly known through the "Made in GDR" label (some GDR products were actually pretty good bang for the buck, and good enough for "non-socialist" markets too).
ngc248 8 hours ago [-]
I collect stamps and DDR is what I know of. The warsaw pact countries used to produce amazing stamps.
mrweasel 8 hours ago [-]
I'm always confused when someone uses GDR, because to me East Germany is DDR, so GDR must be West Germany, which is it not. West Germany didn't like using BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) and almost no one ever used the English version FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) so using the English version of DDR always seems confusing.
Side note: I find it amusing that countries that have a need to put "Democratic" in their official name are never democratic. DR Congo, Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Why even bother, it's not like anyone is looking at the name and go: Yup, that's a democracy.
criemen 7 hours ago [-]
It's even funnier: Having both "democratic" and "republic" is redundant - by definition, a republic is democratic. Only non-democracies feel the need to double down on the democratic part.
akoboldfrying 20 hours ago [-]
What an interesting slice of history.
pestatije 14 hours ago [-]
GDR - german democratic republic
latchkey 16 hours ago [-]
I've driven motorbikes through Dak Lak a few times. Really beautiful area. Just south of there is Da Lat and close by, there is one tiny coffeeshop run by some kids that live there that was my favorite... https://maps.app.goo.gl/PPy3c3T1oreRrDDR6
wdutch 13 hours ago [-]
One aspect of the story that is glossed over here is that there were very few Vietnamese people in Dak Lak prior to 1975. The OP is a story of forced displacement against the Ede and Mnong people.
nsonha 5 hours ago [-]
There is a film called "Thung Lũng Hoang Vắng" (Desolated Valley) about teachers who got posted at one of these minor communities, set in Northern Vietnam. There were programs that aimed to improve literacy and integration of these communities into modern society and it's all good in intents but the film raised questions (at least to me) on how the communist government implemented them.
You brought up the people being displaced by settlements, but the film focuses on school teachers who get sent there against their will which completely changed the course of their lives. Back then almost everyone worked for the government and teachers, like soldiers, can be assigned to such outpost if they didn't have connections.
ggm 19 hours ago [-]
Coffee with Chicory? Tres Frenchy. Coffee with Chicory, Oats, and christ knows what? Not chic.
Rendered at 19:12:35 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
The GDR imported workers from Vietnam and even now there are sizeable Vietnamese communities e.g. in Leipzig.
I interviewed a few old men who fought in the Vietnam war as child soldier, for a school project I did as a kid.
Turned out: GDR did not treat this people well e.g. heavily encouraging abortion in case of a pregnancy, which was traumatic for the women.
https://www.projekte.hu-berlin.de/de/migrationddr/migration-...
I thought this was very clear already? Your link is "yet another cruel thing the gdr did" tho and is much appreciated.
Lots of co-fermented specialty Vietnam-grown Robusta and Liberica at incredible prices, far cheaper than what people would find from roasters that import their beans from Colombia or any of the other big coffee-growing countries.
Robusta at least is substantially cheaper, because yields are better and it’s less affected by disease. I don’t know enough about Liberica to know how it yields.
Also, “co-fermented coffee” generally is just code for flavored pre-roast flavored these days, especially out of Colombia. Not sure if that’s made it to Vietnam, but I’m always going to raise an eyebrow with co ferments these days. Not that they can’t be tasty, but they shouldn’t command a price premium if it’s essentially just flavored coffee in my view.
And as for taste - I love the rough and tough flavours of Vietnamese Robusta coffees! The Australian roasted Arabicas are mild and gentle, almost to the point of blandness in comparison.
The first sentence is true, and is what I know. The second economical leg of this sentence is new to me.
Basically, Hallstein Doctrine was what "One China" politics is. The BRD assume that is is the sole legitimate (since democratically elected) government. For example, someone from east germany fleeing to west german already had the (west) germanship citizenship, no paperwork needed to get it.
However, Hallstein doctrine had --- to the best knowledge ... very unspecified reactions. Germany e.g. stop diplomatic relationships with Cuba. But not economical ties, I know that my father continued to smoke Havanna cigars (eeeek!). They stopped diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia ... but all the Winnetou Films were recorded there, and it even became a holiday destination for west germans. Also all payments continued, it was not an economical embargo.
In the case of Egypt it could be seen like that. When Egypt accepted the state-hood of east-germany, then West-Germany broke it's diplomatic ties AND stopped its economical aid. I'm not aware of it stopping buying oil from Egypt, thought.
Fan fact: there is also two inverses of the Hallstein doctrine. The first one is the Ulbricht Doctrine. That doctrine mandated that socialist countries mustn't normalize their diplimatic ties to west-germany until it recognized east-germany.
And the second inverse is that other countries only saw west-germany as the legal succession of the 3rd Reich and even the german empire. So it was West-Germany had hat to fulfill contracts of that time. Except for the reparations. The USSR took (or stole) more stuff from East Germany than the western allied forces took from West Germany. About 30% of the industrial infrastructure was removed, e.g. 11800 km of railway tracks. And even after they stopped removing the infrastructure itself, they still demanded a percentage of the production.
Mind that that didn't only matter for GDR, but also East Prussia etc. which was important for all the displaced people from now-Poland, Sudeten Germans etc.
The region that was once East Prussia has now mostly been ruled by Russia since longer than almost anyone there has been alive.
Till then (West) Germany had quite inflspecific wordi g. The constitution says "German citizen is, who is German" and they kept the old Empire's citizen law to have continuity.
That's one of the reasons why reunification between East and West bad go be done so quickly (from falling Wall No. 9th 1989 to reunification October 3rd 1990) as East Germans could migrate to West easily as soon as the Wall fell and promise of quick unification was a key promise to prevent even bigger migration.
Although I don't know if that was more a case of "we really ought to take the grinder to that mould and stick something else on", or what.
Moscow was surprisingly capitalist. They noticed they could sell their resources to the West for dollars or give them away to their communist "allies".
Also related fun fact: the GDR started to refurbish and use old steam locomotives again as a result of the oil crisis. I remembered seeing those regularly as a child, and then later wondered what caused this anachronism.
But what is not wellknown to me, why both parties forbid cross partnerships, where they agreed to a longterm economic partnership.
Edit: as a massive fan of industrial and engineering history, the spotty nature of good Soviet documentation does my head in!
The West wouldn't trade (or let developing countries under its influence do it) and I bet the USSR couldn't procure enough for itself and the DDR.
It's not explicit in the article, but I would guess the USSR didn't have a strong enough coffee industry to be helping anymore.
Vietnams surveillance system, population database and use of biometrics were all adopted from the GDR.
The German Democratic Republic (GDR), commonly known as East Germany, was a socialist state in Central Europe that existed from October 7, 1949, to October 3, 1990
* "SBZ" -> Sowjetisch besetzte Zone -> sowjet occupied zone
* "Ost-Zone"
* "DDR"
* "Ost-Deutschland"
Almost no one spelled out "DDR" with "Deutsche Demokratische Republik", since that was a lie. There was little democracy there.
People that fled from east-germany early (e.g. before the wall) usually used "SBZ "or "Zone". And it was usually meant in a derogatory sense. "DDR" was more neutral, although few people in west-germany had a neutral view on the eastern regime.
And in the UK. Presumably because it was used in athletic meetings and on cars. Never seen 'GDR', we'd just use 'East Germany'.
Look at radio stations. We have SWR: Süd-West Rundfunk (south west) in Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz. We have WDR: Westdeutscher Rundfunk (west) in Nordrhein-Westfalen. We have NDR: Norddeutscher Rundfunk (north). In Niedersachsen, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Hamburg (not Bremen).
... and then we have Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (middle) in Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen.
And no one is in the east ...
There was the ORB - Ostdeutscher Rundfunk Brandenburg. Which later (2003) merged with SFB - Sender Freies Berlin to RBB - Rundfunk Berlin Brandeburg.
Thus the middle serves the middle. And while Saxonia (Part of MDR) indeed goes to the east most point of Germany it's at least middle in North-South. But the most middle point (depending a little on exact definition) is in Thuringa (also part of MDR)
Actually, if you look at the map of German regional public broadcasters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARD_(broadcaster)#/media/File:...) and squint a bit, the MDR is more or less in the middle: more on the north-south axis and less on the east-west axis (with only the RBB partly more east), but still...
Side note: I find it amusing that countries that have a need to put "Democratic" in their official name are never democratic. DR Congo, Democratic People's Republic of Korea and Deutsche Demokratische Republik. Why even bother, it's not like anyone is looking at the name and go: Yup, that's a democracy.
You brought up the people being displaced by settlements, but the film focuses on school teachers who get sent there against their will which completely changed the course of their lives. Back then almost everyone worked for the government and teachers, like soldiers, can be assigned to such outpost if they didn't have connections.