Vietnam War | Lantern light breaks on the Mekong...

Certainly, many former GDR citizens still possess these "relics": shiny silver combs and letter openers, stamped from the tin of US bombers shot down in the skies over Vietnam. Gifts of gratitude for demonstrated solidarity. From the military equipment the Americans left behind during their cruel, devastating war in Vietnam—grenades, bombs, gun carriages, steel helmets—the Vietnamese were able to craft useful everyday objects: cooking pots and spoons, tin cups and jugs... And also combs and letter openers.

The opening poster of the Berlin exhibition, designed to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Vietnamese people's victory over a tyrannical regime in Saigon and its powerful overseas allies, depicts a young woman pulling the wing of a US Air Force plane out of a river. Next to it is a quote from Ho Chi Minh: "Our rivers, our mountains, our people will always remain. Once the Yankee is defeated, we will rebuild the country ten times more beautiful than ever." It wasn't just his dream. And it came true.

Admittedly, the exhibition doesn't address the current situation in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The fact that there are many shortcomings and not all areas of society are in the best shape still has something to do with the more than 150 years of colonial rule and the legacy of a 30-year war that the colonial power France, and subsequently the US invaders, wreaked on the country and its people.

The exhibition, designed by children's book author Claudia Opitz and graphic designer Sebastian Köpke, an experienced curatorial team , together with "nd" editor Peter Steiniger, begins with the hubris of a superpower. "We should declare war on North Vietnam. Then we could level the entire country by noon and be home by dinner," trumpeted Western hero Ronald Reagan in 1965, when he was still working full-time in Hollywood (he moved into the White House in 1981). The man whose name is primarily associated with the US's dirty war in Vietnam, "Secretary of Defense" Robert McNamara, later confessed: "We underestimated the power that national consciousness gives a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values." His addition is particularly interesting: "And even today, in many parts of the world, we don't take this fact into account."

But back to the exhibition, which opens this week in Berlin. It offers a look back at the prehistory, the conquest and incorporation of Indochina, now Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, into the French colonial empire in the 19th century. Catholic missionaries, as so often, paved the way. By 1883, the Vietnamese Empire was completely subjugated. "The local elite collaborates with the colonial administration, which ruthlessly exploits the country. Coal, rubber, and rice are the most important exports of the crown colony," reads a panel. It also explains how ideas of freedom and equality penetrated Vietnam from France and inspired the freedom fighters there. In 1930, the first major uprising of the young national independence movement was bloodily suppressed. It reformed under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the son of a Confucian scholar, politically sensitized in France and the Soviet Union, and co-founder of the Communist Party of Vietnam.

During World War II, the country was occupied by Hitler's ally Japan. "With the promise of independence, the USA calls on the Vietnamese to fight against the Japanese occupiers," the exhibition reads. In 1941, Ho Chi Minh formed the Viet Minh, the "League for the Independence of Vietnam," a kind of popular front. After the surrender of Axis power Japan on September 2, 1945, Paris believed it could once again bring Indochina under its control. The grande seigneur of German-French journalism, Peter Scholl-Latour, who had escaped the Nazis' anti-Semitic frenzy as a "half-breed of the first degree"—as defined by the Nuremberg Race Laws—volunteered for the French army after the liberation from fascism and landed in Indochina with a paratrooper unit. He is quoted in the exhibition: "In the winter of 45/46, I landed in Saigon with the French troops. What struck me at the time was the presence of red flags with the yellow star. And at that moment, I sensed that the communist revolution was spreading to the Asian continent and Southeast Asia. A massive historical phenomenon." Scholl-Latour said this in 1987. He wasn't proud of his time as a Legionnaire.

On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi. France refused to tolerate this arbitrary action, but suffered a decisive defeat in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. At the Geneva Indochina Conference in July of that year, the country was divided, with the 17th parallel serving as a provisional border until elections were held throughout Vietnam. The US-backed military dictatorship in the south refused to accept these. "Washington and Saigon know that the victor would be Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the liberation struggle against the Japanese and French," the exhibition states.

Under US President John F. Kennedy, celebrated as a champion of détente, a civil war was instigated that escalated into a geopolitical proxy war. The US intervened directly in Vietnam in 1964. The pretext was the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident on August 2: North Vietnamese speedboats allegedly attacked the USS Maddox. "The attack was faked," according to the exhibition. President Lyndon B. Johnson gave the green light for direct intervention. By 1968, the number of US soldiers in Vietnam had risen to over half a million.

The war spread to the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, through which the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" also wound its way, the artery of survival from North Vietnam for the South Vietnamese freedom fighters, known in the West as the "Viet Cong," in the East by the acronym FNL (Front national de libération du Sud Viêt Nam), and in the exhibition, transcribed in English as the NFL (National Liberation Front of South Vietnam). The guerrilla tactics of the South Vietnamese freedom fighters were successful. Johnson ordered intensified air strikes. "Rolling Thunder" was intended to bomb Vietnam back to the Stone Age.

On January 31, 1968, the FNL's Tet Offensive began, completely surprising the Americans and their allies. Liberation fighters advanced as far as the US Embassy in Saigon. The offensive, marking the Buddhist New Year, is rightly highlighted in the exhibition as a turning point in the Vietnam War. "Because it brought real images of the war and the situation to the cameras for the first time." Cover pages of the Times, Newsweek, The Guardian, and even the Hamburg news magazine Der Spiegel attest to this in the exhibition. US war crimes are denounced. Photos of massacres, executions, and mutilated and burned bodies, including children, are circulated around the world.

Thankfully, the GDR documentary filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann are also remembered here. Their four-part, on-location documentary "Pilots in Pyjamas" caused an international sensation, exposing US propaganda lies. Thomas Billhardt is also present with his iconic images from the Vietnam War , "which are burned into the world's collective visual memory." "With his photos, he doesn't seek the dramatic horror of war. Rather, he strives to read people's faces and give them an expression of dignity, even in the midst of greatest suffering," the tribute pays tribute to the GDR photographer, who died in January of this year.

Protests against the Vietnam War are growing worldwide. At the Woodstock Festival in the summer of 1969, Jimi Hendrix accompanied his version of the US national anthem with war noises. He was followed by Joan Baez, who traveled to Hanoi especially for her album "Where Are You Now, My Son." And Pete Seeger demanded: "Bring them home." More and more young Americans were burning their draft notices. The USA was shaken by powerful anti-war demonstrations. Troop morale in Vietnam was sinking. GIs were disobeying orders. In 1966, Che Guevara demanded: "Create one, two, many Vietnams..." The West German singer-songwriter Dieter Süverkrüp prophesied in the same year: "When this morning comes and this day/ There will be laughter,/ great laughter... When this morning comes and this victory." Also sung by the great Brecht interpreter Gisela May.

The resistance of the Vietnamese people inspired liberation movements everywhere and shaped Western European youth culture and student revolts . The images of West Berlin students, led by Rudi Dutschke, linking arms and leaping toward the concentrated forces of law and order, joyfully shouting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!" are unforgettable. In the GDR, which may have been the world champion in its expressions of solidarity, the October Club intoned a song by the American folk singer Jack Mitchell: "Lantern light breaks on the Mekong/ Where the river once lay in darkness./ Fireworks over the cities/ Turn night into day./ It will be like May 8th and/ New Year's Eve all at once./ The heroes celebrate their victory/ On this joyous day."

Several more bloody years passed. And, of course, it was primarily the self-sacrificing struggle of the Vietnamese people that finally forced the United States to the negotiating table. On May 12, 1968, talks between Washington and Hanoi began in Paris. Despite this, at the end of 1972, US President Richard Nixon ordered the most massive attacks on North Vietnam, especially Hanoi and Haiphong, with the "Christmas bombings." Although the "Agreement on the End of the War and the Restoration of Peace in Vietnam" was signed in the French capital on January 27, 1973, another two years passed before victory could be celebrated. The spring offensive of the Vietnamese Liberation Armies in 1975 forced the surrender of the vassal regime in Saigon on April 30. On July 2, 1976, the country was reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

The exhibition organizers conclude with a "Bitter Balance Sheet": 1.3 million Vietnamese soldiers killed, approximately two million civilians killed, and countless victims who died years later from the effects of the use of chemical weapons, napalm, and Agent Orange. The US military recorded more than 58,000 casualties, and tens of thousands of the 2.7 million US Vietnam veterans were left traumatized, became drug addicts, and became homeless. According to the curators, the number of suicides exceeded the number of GIs who died in Vietnam.

It's been half a century. And yet it's still present. Wounds remain. And it repeats itself again and again. The images of the crowds thronging the US Embassy in Saigon in the last days of April 1975, hoping to board one of the US helicopters that landed and took off every ten minutes, resemble those from Kabul airport four years earlier, when the Afghanistan adventure of the US and its allies ended in a humiliating defeat.

“Vietnam 1975,” exhibition opening on April 30, 6:30 p.m., Kino Babylon in Berlin.