This watering can for flowers was very popular in the GDR. GDR is short for: German Democratic Republic. Until the year 1990, the GDR was an independent state in eastern Germany. If you wanted to be trendy in the GDR, you had a watering can made of plastic. It came in different colours. Its shape looked like a ship.

In the GDR, plastic was a sign of progress. It was also a sign that the political idea of socialism was successful. In socialism, all people should be equal and money should be distributed in a fair way.

People in the GDR used plastic objects for a long time. They did not throw them away. This way, the GDR wanted to be different from West Germany.

But in the GDR, they did not have a lot of material to produce everyday objects in large quantities. That is why they used artificial materials. The GDR was the country who traded the most with plastic objects. A very popular brand at that time was for example Sonja Plaste.

From the year 1990 on, West Germany and East Germany were one single country again. This is called: German re-unification. After that, the nice memories of the GDR were called Ostalgie. That is a made-up word of 2 German words: Osten and Nostalgie. Osten means East. Nostalgie means nostalgia. Nostalgia means that you long for the past. The watering can by the designer Klaus Kunis is an example of Ostalgie.