Smashing idea: how East Germany invented ‘unbreakable’ drinking glasses

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The glass is narrow at the bottom but bulges out a third of the way to the top. As with the classic British “nonik” pint, the bulge makes the glass easier to stack and gives your thumb and index finger somewhere to rest. The name is spelled in fading letters near the rim and means “super tight” or “super strong” in German, which one might assume to be a reference to the drinker’s solid grip. In fact, it hails the glass’s extraordinary durability. This is Superfest, East Germany’s “unbreakable” drinking glass. Invented in the industry-rich but resource-poor socialist German Democratic Republic, Superfest glasses were designed with the aim of making them last five times longer than ordinary drinking glasses. They were soon found to be 10 times more durable. Glass retailers depend on their products breaking – this new idea was a threat to profits The company that made them went bankrupt after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as contemporary designers are exploring more eco-friendly and sustainable production methods, the 120m Superfest glasses produced between 1980 and 1990 are more in demand than ever, fetching about €35 (£30) a pop on online marketplaces such as eBay and Etsy. Some designers even dream of bringing the technology behind them back into production. As objects mostly made to be seen through rather than seen, drinking glasses are an oddly overlooked category of homeware design. Even when they are recognised as works of art, their value tends to be set by what goes in them. A Kurt Zalto wine glass or a Tom Dixon whisky tumbler will fetch good money at auctions; the humble water glass usually doesn’t. In the case of the Superfest glass, the anonymity of the makers was also politically desired. The GDR’s regime preached solidarity and unity. The prevailing ideology regarded the collective more highly than the talents and abilities of the individual. Even though Superfest glasses were ubiquitous in every bar, canteen and household in the Soviet satellite state, few people had heard of Paul Bittner, Fritz Keuchel and Tilo Poitz, the design collective who gave them their shape. “Not a living soul had any idea who actually designed Superfest,” says Günter Höhne, who from 1984-1989, in the GDR’s twilight years, worked as editor-in-chief for the country’s leading journal for industrial design, Form und Zweck. For their range of glasses – which included variants for champagne, schnapps and cognac as well as three different sizes for beer – the designer trio were inspired by the equally beautiful so-called Wirteglas, which the East German designers Margarete Jahny and Erich Müller created in the early 1970s. The groundbreaking technology they deployed was developed in the 1970s at the Department for Glass Structure Research at the Central Institute for Inorganic Chemistry near Dresden. The material scientists there knew that when glass breaks, it is typically due to microscopic cracks in the material’s surface which form during the production process. Dramatically increasing the toughness of the glass surface was possible, they found, by replacing the smaller sodium ions in the glass with electronically charged potassium ions. Potassium ions need more space, pressing harder against neighbouring atoms and building up more tension that needs to be overcome for the microscopic cracks to get bigger. “A huge amount of technical groundwork was done to produce a glass like that,” says Höhne, who is the author of several books about industrial design in the GDR. Nonetheless, the state-owned company that specialised in this technology, VEB Sachsenglas Schwepnitz, ceased production in 1990, a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Hundreds of employees received redundancy notices, and scrap dealers came to pick up melting moulds, plant components and machines. View image in fullscreen ‘There’s only one disadvantage’ … Paul Kupfer, the Soulbottles co-founder bringing shatter-resistant glass back to market. Photograph: Courtesy: Soulbottles One factor that may have hindered Superfest’s competitiveness in a unified Germany was its functionalist, austere look. Especially in southern parts of the country, drinkers like to swig their beer from glasses decorated with gold edging or engraved coats of arms. “Baroque decoration on a Superfest glass wouldn’t work,” says Höhne. “It would violate the design itself.” But the main reason for its decline, paradoxically, was its strength. Glass retailers who play by the rules of the market live off the fact that their products break, so they can sell more. A glass that didn’t break was a threat to profits. “It turned out that Superfest is not suited for the market,” says Höhne. “The glasses are too good for pure market thinking.” Today, the highly durable glasses can only be bought secondhand – but a Berlin startup is trying to change that. As sustainability has risen up the agenda, the company Soulbottles believes customers are prepared to pay higher prices for high quality and durable products. Its founders, Paul Kupfer and Steve Köhler, have crowdfunded €251,139 (£215,400) for a production facility that partially draws on Superfest’s old GDR-era ion technology. “Compared to plastic, glass is a material that can be recycled almost as often as you like,” says Köhler. “It is tasteless and transparent, and it has only one disadvantage: it breaks.” The problem with the original Superfest glass is that its manufacturers worked with modified alumino or borosilicate glass, which is not as easy to recycle as the more common soda-lime glass. So Soulbottles’ challenge is to produce glass that is both durable and recyclable. Initial tests were promising, and delivery of the first bottles is expected next year. How strong are they? Well the prototypes were dropped from a height of two metres – and didn’t smash.