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Dieu Ly Hoang, left and Kien Nghi Ha, right, hail from different Vietnamese backgrounds and today live in the same Berlin neighbourhood [Giulio Ferracuti/Al Jazeera]
Episode 3061 of the Vietnam Veteran News Podcast will feature a story about the Vietnamese Diaspora in Germany. The featured story is titled: ‘We are all Vietnamese and came to Germany to build a better life’ and it appeared in Aljazeera. It was submitted by Gouri Sharma. She is a freelance journalist based in Berlin. Previously, she spent five years working on the production desk for Al Jazeera‘s media critique show, the Listening Post.
In her story, Sharma reported that an estimated 35,000 refugees arrived in West Germany in 1979, while 70,000 contract workers began to arrive in the GDR in 1980. The fractures in Vietnam mirrored divisions in Germany, with North Vietnam backed by the USSR-aligned East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and the capitalist West Germany supporting South Vietnam.
Within months of the war’s end in 1975, Vietnam established diplomatic relations with the GDR(communist East Germany), paving a different kind of path for Northern North Vietnamese immigrants to fly overseas a few years later to the communist paradise in East Germany.
“In the GDR, people were proud to show international solidarity, and this went hand in hand with hatred of the capitalist West, while the West German government saw the Vietnam War as part of the global struggle against communism,” explained German historian Andreas Margara.
On April 30, Vietnam marked 50 years since the end of the war. For the large Vietnamese-German diaspora, who arrived as refugees and contract workers, this year’s milestones have stirred a sense of reflection.
Today most Vietnamese in Germany feel that “Even though Vietnam has been damaged a lot, we are all Vietnamese and came to Germany to build a better life for ourselves.”
Listen to Episode 3061 and discover more about the Vietnamese Diaspora in Germany.
