Vietnam War – Lantern Light breaks on the Mekong …

Certainly there are still some former GDR citizens owned by these “relics”: silver shiny combs and letter openers, punched out of the tin in the sky over Vietnam. Gifts of gratitude for proven solidarity. From the war device that the Americans left in Vietnam during their cruel, devastating war – grenades, bombs, guns, steel helmets – the Vietnamese knew how to produce useful everyday objects: pots and spoons, sheet metal cups and jugs … and also combs and letter openers.

A young woman can be seen on the entrance poster of the exhibition in Berlin, which is designed from a river, on the entrance poster of the Vietnamese people’s victory over a Tyrannical regime in Saigon and its mighty weapon agents from overseas from an overseas exhibition in Berlin. In addition, a quote from Ho Chi Ming: »Our rivers, our mountains, our people will always stay. If the Yankee is beaten, we build the country ten times more beautiful than ever. ”It was not just his dream. And he fulfilled.

Well, the today’s situation in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam does not address the exhibition. The fact that there is a lot of lack and not in all social areas is also the best thing to do with the over 150-year-old colonial yoke and the inheritance of a 30-year war with which the colonial power of France and subsequently exceeded the US invaders.

The exhibition, which is designed by the children’s book author Claudia Opitz and the graphic artist Sebastian Köpcke, an experienced team of curator together with the “ND” editor Peter Steiniger, begins with the hybris of a large power. “We should explain the war North Vietnam. Then we could level the whole country until noon and would be back home for dinner, «the western hero Ronald Reagan sounded in 1965 when he was still in full employment in Hollywood (in 1981 he moved to the White House). The man, whose name is primarily connected to the dirty war of the United States in Vietnam, “Minister of Defense” Robert McNamara, later admitted: “We underestimated the strength of the national consciousness to fight and die for their convictions and values.” And not even today we are taking this fact into account in many parts of the world. ”

But back to the exhibition that will open in Berlin this week. It offers a review of the history, the conquest and integration of Indochina, now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, to the French colonial kingdom in the 19th century. As so often, Catholic missionaries had prepared their way. In 1883 the Empire Vietnam was completely subject. »The local elite collaborates with the colonial administration, which ruthlessly exploits the country. Coal, rubber and rice are the most important export goods of the crown colony, «you can read on a board. However, it is also informed that France’s ideas of freedom and equality penetrate to Vietnam and inspired the freedom fighters there. In 1930, a first major uprising of the young national independence movement was bloody. She formed politically sensitized in France and the Soviet Union under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, son of a Confucian scholar, the founder of KP Vietnam.

During the Second World War, the country was occupied by Hitler’s allied Japan. “With the promise of independence, the United States is calling the Vietnamese to fight the Japanese occupiers,” one reads in the exhibition. In 1941 Ho Chi Minh formed the VIêt Minh, the “League for the independence of Vietnam,” a kind of folk front. After the surrender of the axis power Japan on September 2, 1945, it was believed in Paris to be able to bring Indochina back under the fox. The grandeur of Franco-German journalism Peter Scholl-Latour, who had escaped the anti-Semitic delusion of the Nazis as-in the sense of the Nuremberg breed laws-“Mischling’s first degree”, had voluntarily reported to the French army after the liberation from fascism and had ended up in Indochina with a parachute hunter. He is quoted in the exhibition: »In winter 45/46 I went ashore with the French troops in Saigon. What strapped me back then was the presence of red flags with the yellow star. And at that point I felt that the communist revolution overturned the Asian continent and Southeast Asia. A huge historical phenomenon. ”According to Scholl-Latour 1987. He was not proud of his legionnaire.

On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh excluded the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. France did not want to tolerate this self -authorization, but suffered the decisive defeat in the Battle of ðiên Biên Phu in May 1954. At the Geneva Indochina Conference in July of the year, the country was shared, the 17th latitude was considered a provisional border up to elections throughout Vietnam. The military dictatorship in the south supported by the US administration refused to do so. “Washington and Saigon know that the winner Hô Chí Minh would mean the leader of the liberation struggle against Japanese and French,” the exhibition said.

Of all things, a civil war was founded under the US President John F. Kennedy, celebrated as a relaxation politician, which was expanded to become a geopolitical war of deputy. The USA intervened in Vietnam in 1964. The so -called incident in the Gulf of Tonking on August 2: North Vietnamese fast boats are said to have attacked the USS “Maddox”. “The attack is faked,” said the exhibition. President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the green light for direct intervention. By 1968, the number of US soldiers in Vietnam rose to over half a million.

The war grabbed the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, through which the “Hô-Chí-MinH path” meandered, the survival squad from North Vietnam for the South Vietnamese freedom fighters, called “Vietcong”, in the east under the abbreviation FNL (Front National de Libération du Sud Viêt Nam), in the exhibition in English Transcription of the NFL (National Liberation Front of South Vietnam). The guerrilla tactics of the South Vietnamese freedom fighter performed. Johnson ordered increased air strikes. “Rolling Thunder” was supposed to bomb back into the Stone Age.

On January 31, 1968, completely surprising for the Americans and their vassals, the TET offensive of the FNL. Liberation fighter was advised until the US embassy in Saigon. The offensive to the Buddhist New Year is rightly emphasized in the exhibition as a turning point in the Vietnam War. Also “because it brings real pictures of the war and the situation in front of the cameras for the first time”. Title pages of “Times”, “Newsweek”, “The Guardian” and also the Hamburg News Magazine “Der Spiegel” testify to this in the exhibition. US war crimes are denounced. Photos of massacre, executions, mutilated and burned human authorities, including children, go around the world.

Thankfully, Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann are also reminded of the GDR documentary filmmakers. Her four-part documentary “Pilots in Pyjama”, which was turned on site, caused a stir internationally, exposed American propaganda. Thomas Billhardt is also present with his iconographic recordings from the Vietnam War, “which burn into the collective image memory of the world”. “With his photos he is not looking for the effective horror of the war. Rather, he strives to read the faces of the people and to give them an expression of dignity even in the greatest suffering, «the GDR photographer, who died in January this year, is recognized.

The protest against the Vietnam War is increasing worldwide. At the Woodstock Festival in the summer of 1969, Jimi Hendrix undertook his version of the US national anthem with war noise. He follows Joan Baez, who traveled to Hanoi for her album »Where are you Now, my son«. And Pete Seeger demands: “Bring Them Home.” More and more young Americans are burning their convening commands. The United States is shaken by powerful anti -war demonstrations. The morality of the group in Vietnam sinks. GIS refuse commands. Che Guevara demands in 1966: “Create one or two, many Vietnams …” The West German songwriter Dieter Sükrüp predicts in the same year: “If this morning comes and this day/ there will be a laugh,/ a big laugh … If this morning comes.”

The resistance of the Vietnamese people inspires the liberation movements everywhere and shapes the Western European youth culture and student revolts. The pictures are unforgettable from the people undermined, the concentrating power against the hunting of West Berlin students, led by Rudi Dutschke, who joyfully call “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!”. In the GDR, the world champion may have been with regard to her expressions of solidarity, the October Club intones a song by the American folk singer Jack Mitchell: »On the Mekong lantern light/ where the river was otherwise in the dark. Freudenag. “

There are still several bloody years. And of course it is above all the self -sacrificing struggle of the Vietnamese people, who finally forces the United States to the negotiating table. On May 12, 1968, the talks between Washington and Hanoi begin in Paris. Regardless of this, US President Richard Nixon arranged the most massive attacks on Nordvietnam, especially Hanoi and Haiphong, with the “Christmas bombings” at the end of 1972. On January 27, 1973, the French capital was signed by “Agreement on the end of the war and the restoration of peace in Vietnam”, but another two years before the victory can be celebrated. The Spring Office of the Vietnamese Liberation Army in 1975 forced the surrender of the vassal regime in Saigon on April 30th. On July 2, 1976, the country was reunited as a socialist Republic of Vietnam.

The exhibition organizers finally present “bitter balance sheets”: 1.3 million Vietnamese soldiers, around two million civilians killed and countless victims who died years later from the consequences of the use of biochemical ordnance, Napalm and Agent Orange. The US military recorded more than 58,000 fallen, tens of thousands of the 2.7 million US vietnam veterans remained traumatized, became drug-dependent and homeless. According to the curators, the number of suicides exceeded the GIS who died in Vietnam.

It was half a century ago. And yet present. Stay wounds. And it repeats itself again and again. The pictures of the crowds urgent in Saigon in 1975 in the last April days of 1975, which hope to be able to fly out with one of the US helicopters in the ten-minute bar and started, are similar to those from the airport in Kabul four years ago when the Afghanistan adventure of the USA and its allies ended in a shameful defeat.

“Vietnam 19 1975”, opening of the exhibition on April 30, 6.30 p.m., Babylon cinema in Berlin.