Flutterby™! : Look East, Young Man

From the website of Der Spiegel, via Little Green Footballs, is an intriguing photo gallery of East German industrial design. It's all from the 60's, so it has that bright, plasticky sheen of the era. Some of the stuff, like the Jena glassware, is very handsome, while the power lawnmower looks like it was designed by the same guy who built the T-38 tank. What is interesting are the notes about how the products were marketed or used. The "Erika' portable typewriter is a similar to the ones we had back in college, but you had to submit typing samples each year to the Stasi so they could track samizdat writings.