In the 1960s, many East Germans ate their soft-boiled eggs out of colorful plastic eggcups shaped like chickens. Manufactured in Wolkenstein, a tiny town in Saxony, the popular Huhn eggcup came in cheerful shades of blue, green, yellow, red, and orange, allowing consumers to mix-and-match at breakfast according to their fancy. In all likelihood, the neighbors down the hall in the Plattenbau—a type of prefabricated apartment block still found throughout the former German Democratic Republic—were using the same eggcups, and perhaps sitting in the same molded polystyrene chairs at the…
