{Book Introduction} “Vietnam: Myth and Reality”

In German, the term “Mythos” is associated with quite different ideas and meanings: On the one hand, we place it on the supernatural level, a level that transcends everyday life: on the other hand, however, we also find the word in everyday language: “I think it’s a myth”, is a common saying, at least in everyday German. Between these two extremes, there are many different grey areas in understanding the term.

In general, we understand myths as stories, or, to use a new German keyword, as “narratives.” In our book, we understand myths and narratives in a very particular way, and this understanding can be described in the following passage:

“This book is about stories and their relationship to reality and how we perceive them. The term ‘story’ has a very broad connotation: from stories that are detached from real experience and take us into a fantastical world of imagination, to stories that are intimately connected to and attempt to shape reality. These stories are often called narratives. They can be very different: long stories, sometimes structured like epics, as opposed to stories that are encapsulated in a maxim, or even a code word.

When we use the term ‘narratives’, we mean stories that have the potential to create meaning and identity, both at the collective and individual levels. They convey values, emotions, and promote civic engagement. They can help undermine or neutralize authoritarian forms of governance, but they can also support and even reinforce them. They contain both truth and fiction, and can even be both fact and fiction.

Dr. Jörg Wischermann

These narratives shape the image of a country, its society, economy, politics and culture. They help create realities. People are almost knowledgeable and capable of believing in the ability of narratives to describe reality.

Therefore, at least what we call reality is always shaped by narratives, and always contains narratives, and narratives always contain realities. Narratives and reality are interdependent, mutually influencing each other, inseparable, and can deeply contradict each other.”

The above excerpt from the book makes it clear that, in our understanding, myths are complex, even clearly contradictory. However, they also prove attractive because of those contradictions, because they can dissolve opposites and knead different meanings into a seemingly unified whole. Accordingly, myths dissolve seemingly mysterious things and combine them into a solid narrative framework.

The book introduction "Vietnam: myth and reality" took place at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities on March 21 with the participation of German and Vietnamese scientists.

Myths are ambiguous, and because they have many different functions, we can describe them with the sociological term “polyvalent”. This is especially true of “political myths”. All the analyses of political myths that we have seen in Vietnam, as well as those that many other authors have examined, are very much in line with the following definition by Claus Leggewie:

“A political myth is a narrative through which a common identity is created, a “sense of belonging” is formed and implicitly recognized among different social classes and cultures within the group.

From a sociological perspective, myths create a collective consciousness and memory in large social groups, including nations, through which they create internal solidarity and historical continuity beyond territorial and spatial boundaries.

Professor, Principal Pham Quang Minh talks with scientists at the book introduction

Political myths are not about theisbut to theshould bewithin a community, thus creating credibility and, in turn, legitimacy. Political myths always contain elements of fiction and reality, history and prediction, past and present. Accordingly, they are both true and false.”

In European intellectual history, from Plato to the Enlightenment to the period of “Critical Theory” in the 1930s, 1940s and later, people were extremely interested in exposing and dissolving myths to find the truth and reality behind them.

In our book, we do not rely on such a deep philosophical foundation. For, as Claus Leggewie puts it, we consider political myths to be both true and false, since we believe that it is counterproductive to separate processes that are inherently interdependent. We focus on a thorough analysis of the content of important myths and on examining their functions. We therefore believe that all researchers should address the following questions about political myths:

- What does the related myth consist of, what is its core content?

- How did that legend come about?

- What is the contradiction between the verifiable data and the claims about that myth?

- How does that political myth contribute to consolidating and legitimizing the rule of the ruling class?

- Can legends react to domination?

- Why is that legend so attractive?

We examine such political myths in Vietnam, a country geographically distant from Germany, with a history and culture that have little in common with Germany and other European countries.

But despite these geographical and historical factors, Vietnam-Germany relations have developed to an all-time high since the middle of the last century. Perhaps no country in East (South) Asia is as important to Germany as Vietnam. This has led us to explore even the most extreme possibilities, to break down stereotypes, and thereby to create an image of “Vietnam and the Vietnamese” that is richer but also more contradictory than that of the past few years, if not the past decades. Our collection will emphasize a more special perspective.

However, with this book, if we only build a new perspective, or at least a different perspective on Vietnam, it is still modest. Through analyzing the political myths of this country in the fields of history, culture, politics and economics, we want to reveal the nature and function of political myths in other countries, including Germany. It is the comparison between these two worlds that, at first glance, are very different that will help us analyze everything more clearly and sharply.

In the conclusion of the book, we attempt to draw some conclusions and point out corresponding issues in the German political and cultural environment.

In this context, we do not want to focus on parallels, but rather encourage the search for similarities and differences, for example when we compare the German “Economic Miracle” (1947/48) with the Vietnamese economic miracle after the “Doi Moi” reform policy was introduced (1986). If we look more closely, both of these miracles have something in common.

If we take Adam Forde’s analysis of the “Myth of the 1986 Party Congress” as the starting point for this collection; consider his thesis of a form of “self-modernization” of the Vietnamese economy and society in the 1980s; and finally his conclusion that political strategies and measures had relatively little to do with the success of the “Vietnamese economic miracle” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, then it becomes clear that we need to immediately compare Vietnam’s most recent economic miracle, which seems to have been initiated by and at the 6th Communist Party Congress, with the myth of Germany’s currency reform of 1947–48 as the origin of the German economic miracle.

We agree with Forde, according to which, in order to find the “causes” of the miraculous economic and social development in Germany and Vietnam, you need not only look at some political events and measures such as a currency reform or a party congress. You must turn to the economic and social structures and the interactions of many actors with them and within them, as the “causes” of the “miracle”.

In this context, we would like to emphasize that in the Federal Republic of Germany, it seems that through the myth of monetary reform as the cause of the economic miracle, fundamental political, economic and social change is being prevented for the existing economic and political order as well as for the old and new elites. The myth of monetary reform prevents the emergence of a fundamentally new, even socialist, order. For Vietnam, it can be said that the myth of the 6th Party Congress helped to consolidate the socialist republic and thus the current political order. In addition, the myth also helps economic and political managers to maintain their positions to a certain extent.

In the book, we also explore a very popular political myth that was mentioned only last year, in the series of events commemorating the 50th anniversary of the “incidents” of 1968. Here I want to talk about the myth of “solidarity with the Vietnamese” in Germany in the period 1965-1975. When analyzing this myth, I advise us not to see it, nor the internationalism of that time, as a ‘revolutionary’, unanimous and voluntary solidarity between the strong and the weak.without any personal gain. 

In my opinion, the students and those who paid tribute to Ho Chi Minh in the 60s and 70s, chanted his name and expressed solidarity with the “Vietnamese resistance” were all pursuing their own interests. Initially, internationalism and solidarity were mainly oriented towards social change in Germany and were therefore derivative.

The view that Vietnamese solidarity is only a derivative was also put forward by some former students who took to the streets to protest in the 1960s and 1970s. In a dialogue between former German parliamentarian Dietrich Wetzel representing the Green Party, Daniel Cohn-Bendit (former French and German student leader, later member of the European Parliament for the Green Party and currently advisor to French President Macron) and Joschla Fischer (later member of the Green Party, Minister of the Environment of Hesse and Federal Foreign Minister, later visiting professor in the US), Dietrich Wetzel commented in 1979:

“Internationalism […] has a guiding and therefore derivative function. If there are struggles in other countries, then sympathy with those struggles has a broader meaning for us. It means and implies that we are fighting against a statecertain,which at that time supported and opposed imperialism (the United States), that was the Federal Republic of Germany; and at least for my generation, in that context, fascism played a very important role…

Joschka Fischer agrees:

“We chose myths based on our own needs, and we also created and framed them in our minds.” Internationalism, socialism and the dream of another German republic, Fischer said, “were all ‘wishful thinking’, in which we were ‘caught up’.” It was clearly a “sympathy for communism,” or rather: “sympathy […] for the successful struggle, and ultimately for the socialist state.”

More notably, the same is true of the solidarity within the “Vietnam International Solidarity Initiative” and its sister organizations, which later became extremely popular in West Germany in the 1970s and later (e.g., the “Association for Action to Help Vietnam”). Here, the myth of the victorious struggle of the Vietnamese people and solidarity with them served the interests of the political parties and ultimately served the goal of reforming the Federal Republic of Germany, after North Vietnam, the German Democratic Republic and the Soviet Union had done so. We do not dare to go into the extent of the dogmatism of the above-mentioned thinking, but only want to use it to stimulate social activities.

In any case, I would like to summarize the thesis of my book as follows: Vietnam was a myth for the majority of people in the Federal Republic of Germany who promoted the so-called “Solidarity with Vietnam” in the period 1965-1975; and like many other myths it had many functions. Perhaps the most important was that it brought about more or less fundamental political, economic and cultural changes in our Federal Republic of Germany. That is not surprising, because such fundamental political, economic and cultural changes are the very nature of social movements, and “Solidarity with Vietnam” was an essential part of the so-called Third World Movement in the Federal Republic of Germany.

Finally, I would like to ask whether the efforts to exploit the uniqueness of Vietnamese history and culture, and to assemble stories of the struggle against foreign invaders into a coherent Vietnamese national narrative – are they not similar to Germany's more fragmented and less enthusiastic efforts to build and shape the core values ​​of a “German Model Culture”?

We also know that the above viewpoint of going beyond national borders may be a bit arbitrary and will cause contradictions. But that is why we want the book to be able to provoke thinking, not to repeat old truths in a new bottle.