It’s my favourite party trick: I ask a friend to check out my rather expensive antique glass. It looks like a beer glass, but thinner. Then I drop it onto the wood floor. Everyone can see it smashing into a million pieces – yet it bounces off the ground unharmed. They pick it up, assuming it’s plastic, but nope: it’s definitely glass.
an unbreakable product has a tough time under capitalism
This gravity-defying feat of product design is known as Superfest Glas, and it was produced in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) from 1980 to 1990. Legend has it that in the 1970s, the Minister for the Glass and Ceramics Industry, Werner Greiner-Petter, ordered a beer at a restaurant and was served one in a paper cup. Recognising there was a drastic shortage of beer glasses, the East German government decided to get to the root of the problem: a new process to harden glass and make it last longer.
After some experimentation, a patent was registered in Bad Muskau in Saxony, and by 1980, a huge industrial complex was erected in Schwepnitz not too far away called VEB Sachsenglas. The engineer put in charge was then-27-year-old Peter Sonntag. He recalls “big power lines and warehouses” and “even an on-site daycare” for the kids of the 700 workers.
There, the glasses were heated up to 300 degrees and sprinkled with potassium nitrate, which triggered a chemical process that switched out ions and filled in micro-cracks – the method that reportedly makes them unbreakable. Then they were cooled and washed. The leftover potassium nitrate – basically fertiliser – was fed into a big pond. (The DDR was not famous for its environmental protections.) The very first glass presented to Greiner-Petter shattered, but after that one case of bad luck, the results exceeded expectations.
In just ten years, the factory made more than 100 million glasses, with different shapes for beer, juice, cognac, champagne and even flowers. Every beer glass was identical – East German design tended to be modern, efficient and also quite monotonous. It wasn’t even possible to paint logos on the glasses after they hardened, though engineers eventually figured out how to apply markings before the glasses were heated. Still, the market was quickly saturated, and there were palettes of extra glass vessels sitting on the side of the road in Schwepnitz.
Yet this miracle product was never successful as an export. West German retailers had no use for glasses that wouldn’t break. “Things need to break in order to sell them,” Sonntag recalls hearing at the time. Or, as the TV show Galileo put it last year, “an unbreakable product has a tough time under capitalism”. After the DDR was swallowed up in the early 1990s, the massive factory was sold for scrap.
The DDR’s planned economy was famous for its inefficiencies – yet without a profit motive, there was no need for planned obsolescence. To maximize the use of scarce resources, products were designed to last for at least a decade. (You can still find East German refrigerators from the 1960s happily humming along.) And Superfest glasses don’t just last longer, they also need less material. But Superfest is more difficult to produce than normal glass, and since they were never sold on an open market, it’s hard to say how much they cost. Today, they are expensive for glasses; a small one on eBay or from a flea market is around €10.
You can still find East German refrigerators from the 1960s happily humming along
It may be possible to bring the shatter-proof glassware back, but it would be just about as tough as breaking one. Sonntag recalls that the original factory cost 25 million East German marks to build; a new factory could set you back at least €70 or €80 million. There are companies trying to perfect the old technique – it’s more or less the same process used to harden the displays of our phones. The patent was never renewed, so anyone could try. But there’s the old problem of marketability.
As a post-reunification immigrant to Berlin, these glasses feel like a gift from the future. My friends who grew up in East Germany are less impressed – in fact, they are impressed that I am impressed. To them, these were just the standard, boring glasses. And though I still love them, I am sorry to report that the Superfest are ultimately falsely described as “unbreakable”. In fact, they are only “nigh invulnerable” – or, to be scientific, about 15 times harder than conventional glass. This means: drop it 15 times, and you can smash it too. My kid has been testing this extensively, and has already managed to break three.
- Follow @theberlinermag on IG for our experiments with the strength of Superfest glasses
