Hồ Chi Minh

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Hồ Chí Minh in 1946

Hồ Chí Minh (pronunciation: [hò̤wcǐmɪɲ] ; listen ? / I ; Hán Nôm : 胡志明 ; born May 19, 1890 in Kim Liên , Nghệ An ; † September 2, 1969 in Hanoi ) was a Vietnamese revolutionary and communist politician , Prime Minister ( 1945–1955) and President (1945–1969) of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam . Audio file / audio sample

After several positions abroad, including Paris and Moscow , Hồ Chí Minh was one of the founders of the Communist Party of Indochina in Hong Kong in 1930 , from which the Communist Party of Vietnam later emerged. In 1941 he became the leader of the newly founded Việt Minh in Vietnam , which fought against the Japanese occupiers and the Vichy-French colonial power that collaborated with the Japanese in World War II . After independence was proclaimed on September 2, 1945, the struggle for Vietnam continued: first in the Indochina War against France (1946–1954), then in the Vietnam War (1955–1975), the end of which Hồ Chí Minh never saw.

After the reunification of Vietnam , Saigon, the former capital of South Vietnam , was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honor.

Surname

"Hồ Chí Minh" was originally just one of his numerous aliases. He pretended to be a Chinese journalist at the time, but later kept the name.

Since Hồ Chí Minh worked a lot underground until his presidency and was persecuted by the French Sûreté (the security police) and other secret services since his first departure from Vietnam , he constantly used new names. It is believed that up to 50 pseudonyms can be assigned to him. Research is made more difficult by the fact that Hồ Chí Minh dealt with his names and his past in an extremely mysterious manner throughout his life: for years he did not even want to use the code name Nguyễn Ái Quốc , under which he was a well-known Comintern member in Moscow and Paris confess.

The best known and most important are: his child name Nguyễn Sinh Cung ( 阮生恭 ); the name during his school days and his first voyages around the world: (tự, 字 ) Nguyễn Tất Thành ( 阮必成 , Nguyễn must reach [his destination] ). After the First World War , when he became politically active in France, he did so under the name: Nguyễn Ái Quốc ( 阮愛國 , Nguyễn loves his [father] country or: "Nguyễn the patriot"); and finally since 1942 Hồ Chí Minh ( 胡志明 , Hồ clear will ). In Vietnam he is still called Bác Hồ ( 伯 胡 , Uncle Hồ ) today. Other pseudonyms included Lý Thụy ( 李瑞 ), Hồ Quang ( 胡光 ) and Tống Văn Sơ and Sòng Wénchū ( 宋文 初 ).

Life

birth

Nguyễn Sinh Cung was probably born on May 19, 1890 in the small village of Kim Liên in the central Vietnamese province of Nghệ An . Later in his life, H gab Chí Minh repeatedly gave different dates of birth, ranging from 1894 to 1903. The year 1890 is now considered to be the "official" version, which is still doubted by some researchers, but based on some well-known events from childhood, can be considered plausible.

Researchers also disagree about the day of his birth. It is quite possible that May 19th purposely coincides with the date on which Việt Minh was founded in 1941 . Since birthdays were often not recorded in rural Vietnam, it is also conceivable that Hồ Chí Minh did not know his birthday himself.

Childhood and Adolescence in Vietnam

Hồ's father, Nguyễn Sinh Sắc, was a Confucian scholar who made it up to the equivalent of a doctoral examination, which was unusual for members of the rural population. For a long time, however, Nguyễn Sinh Sắc deliberately avoided a bureaucratic career, but remained a teacher in his home region for a modest salary. For Nguyễn Sinh Sắc this was also a form of protest against the French colonial administration . Since he was strongly influenced by Confucianism, Nguyễn Sinh Sắc vehemently rejected a rebellion against the actual Vietnamese royal authorities or even a revolution. He later fell out with his son because of it.

Nguyễn Sinh Cung (Hồ Chí Minh) was described by contemporaries as an inquisitive, docile student who showed an aversion to the French occupation at a young age, but who remained largely apolitical. When he started school he was given the name "Nguyễn Tất Thành" by his parents.

At a peasant demonstration against taxes and the living conditions under the colonial regime in the royal city of Huế , to which the father and sons finally moved in 1906, Nguyễn Tất Thành joined the farmers to interpret between the Vietnamese and the French. Thanh was attending a French school at the time. Since neither the peasants nor the authorities were willing to make concessions, the demonstration ended in a hail of bullets from French soldiers. Nguyễn Tất Thành was expelled from school the following day as a "rebel".

Travels in Europe and the United States

Probably even more politicized by this event, Nguyễn Tất Thành first moved to Sàigón and finally hired on a French steamer to see France . He still had no concrete idea how and in what way one could act against colonial rule. Even then, isolated Vietnamese intellectuals were arguing about a “violent” and a “reformist” path. At the time, Nguyễn Tất Thành told companions that he wanted to understand the occupiers better and that he had to get to know France. In 1911, at the age of 21, Nguyễn Tất Thành left Vietnam.

Much is in the dark about his travel time. In addition to several brief positions in France, he lived for some time in New York and Boston as well as in England. In London he worked as a kitchen assistant in the Carlton Hotel under the chef Auguste Escoffier . Presumably in 1917 he returned to France. From 1919, his life is better documented again because the French secret police had taken up his trail.

Political socialization in France

Hồ Chí Minh, 1921. During his time in Paris he was known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc.

In Paris, Nguyễn Tất Thành joined the French Socialist Party and the Association des Patriotes Annamites (Community of Annamite Patriots), an association aimed at Vietnamese living in France.

The association was founded at a time when, in the wake of US President Woodrow Wilson's proposals, numerous colonial organizations joined forces in the hope of better political participation. On June 18, 1918, the Association published a petition in which Nguyễn Tất Thành demanded that Wilson's ideas also have to be implemented for the French colonies in Indochina. The tone of the petition was moderate; the term “ independence ” did not appear. Nguyễn Tất Thành probably did not write the text alone, but would become known for the next three decades as the “Nguyễn Ái Quốc” (“Nguyễn, the Patriot ”) whose name appeared on the petition. - The text caused a sensation, but had no consequences either nationally or during the Versailles peace negotiations .

When the socialists split into a moderate wing around Léon Blum and a radical wing with Marcel Cachin , Nguyễn Ái Quốc sympathized with the radicals . His contemporaries later noticed that Nguyễn Ái Quốc at that time knew practically nothing about Marxism or the difference between the Second and Third International . His sympathy for social democracy and Marxism was fed by his antipathy towards the European colonial rulers, whose rule, in his view, was based on capitalism and imperialism. It was only through contact with Lenin's writings at this time that Nguyễn Ái Quốc became a supporter of the Marxist revolution. At the Second Comintern Congress in 1920, Lenin declared that in the struggle against capitalism, the communist parties had to ally themselves with the democratic-anti-colonial currents in the colonies: the power of the capitalist states was based on the economic advantage of their colonies. He hit a nerve with Nguyễn Ái Quốc.

In the newspaper L'Humanité , Nguyễn Ái Quốc published several articles critical of the results of the French colonial rule in Indochina and from then on strongly campaigned among the French socialists to push the issue of the colonies. When the radical faction under the leadership of Cachin finally merged to form the first French Communist Party in 1920, Nguyễn Ái Quốc was one of the founding members. In 1922 he founded the "Union Intercoloniale", a union that was supposed to unite members from the colonies . The union proved ineffective because of the diverse interests of its worldwide members.

In 1922 he also founded the newspaper Le Paria , in which he wanted to draw attention to the atrocities of colonialism in French. At times he himself took care of the distribution of the publication on the street. The newspaper continued for three years after he left Paris.

As a revolutionary in Moscow, Canton and Hong Kong

In the USSR he continued to pursue his approach of defending the peasant population in the colonies as the central building block of a world revolution . He was elected to several committees and began his training at the Communist University for the workers of the east . At the fifth Comintern Congress in June 1924 he publicly underlined his point of view and compared the colonies with the “head of the serpent of capitalism”: The “poison” and “life energy” of the western countries were in their colonies, not in the mother countries. At the same time, the local farmers are too weak and disorganized and urgently need the help of the Communist International, according to Hồ Chí Minh.

Nguyễn Ái Quốc's speech was not reflected in a change in Moscow's policy, but at least led to the communist leaders paying more attention to the colony question and increasingly bringing Asian students to the Stalin School. Nguyễn Ái Quốc himself finally became a well-known figure in the USSR. During this time he met Nikolai I. Bukharin , Ernst Thälmann , Zhou Enlai , Chiang Kai-shek and the Indian MN Roy .

Memorial House for Ho Chi Minh in Ban Nachok, Nakhon Phanom , Thailand

In 1925 and 1926 he organized political classes for Vietnamese youth at the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton , which had been opened by the Kuomintang in 1924 . He also gave courses in socialist politics for the young Vietnamese who a few years later helped found the communist movement in Vietnam.

In October 1926, at the age of 36, he married a Catholic Chinese woman, the 21-year-old midwife Tăng Tuyết Minh (Céng Xuěmíng 曾 雪 明). They lived together for half a year until he left China in April 1927. The marriage was later kept secret by the Vietnamese communists, as it did not fit well into the idealized image of their “father of the nation”.

According to the former German communist and later Social Democrat Erich Wollenberg , Hồ Chí Minh was instrumental in the production of a manual for communist uprisings, which was printed in Moscow in 1928 (The armed uprising. An attempt at a theoretical representation) , but in the imprint Zurich had to to have the work appear as legal print. The author's title "A. Neuberg ”also stands for Hồ, but also for Hans Kippenberger and Michail N. Tuchatschewski .

In February 1930, Hồ Chí Minh founded the Communist Party of Indochina, from which today's Communist Party of Vietnam emerged . In June 1930, Ho Chi Minh was arrested by the British authorities in Hong Kong, but was released under previously unexplained circumstances and then worked for the Comintern. The French colonial authorities had sentenced Ho Chi Minh to death in absentia in the interwar period . His home village was destroyed in the same year in response to a local uprising by the French colonial authorities.

Second world war, independence of Vietnam

Hồ Chí Minh's home in Hanoi

In 1941, Ho Chi Minh returned to Vietnam. He was involved in the founding of the Việt Minh and became its leader. During the Second World War he directed its military operations against the Japanese occupation forces and against the colonial administration of Indochina, which was collaborating with the Japanese and was subordinate to the Vichy regime . During the five-month battle against the Japanese occupation from March to August 15, 1945, the Việt Minh were official allies of the Allies and were logistically supported by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Hồ Chí Minh was accepted into the service of the OSS under the code name "Lucius".

After the capitulation of Japan, Hồ Chí Minh led the August Revolution , which ended with the proclamation of Vietnam's independence from France on September 2, 1945. At the same time, Hồ Chí Minh became Prime Minister (until 1955) and President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam .

According to the Potsdam Conference of July 1945, British and subsequently French troops occupied South Vietnam from September 1945, with violent battles with the Việt Minh. Although the French Major General Leclerc announced the victory five months later , the Việt Minh continued to control large parts of the south, especially in the countryside. Meanwhile, Vietnam was being exploited north of the 17th parallel by the occupying power National China. After France had reached an agreement with China, the occupation of North Vietnam by French troops was imminent. To avoid a simultaneous fight against the French and national Chinese, Hồ negotiated a compromise with de Gaulle's envoy , Jean Sainteny , on March 6, 1946 . After that, France recognized Vietnam as a “free” state within the French Union , while Hồ Chí Minh promised to recognize French control of North Vietnam for the next five years. He justified this with the words:

"As for me, I prefer to smell French crap for five years than to eat Chinese for the rest of my life."

Indochina War

Hồ Chí Minh in 1957 on a state visit to the GDR with sailors from the GDR People's Navy in Stralsund

In 1946 the French tried to reoccupy Vietnam. On November 23, they bombed Hải Phong , killing 6,000 civilians. Thereupon Hồ gave in to pressure from the hardliners within the Việt Minh, and the nationwide struggle against French colonial rule began. The Indochina War lasted until 1954.

Vietnam War

After the Indochina War, the struggle for the unification and liberation of Vietnam continued uninterrupted. During the Vietnam War (1955 to 1975), Ho Chi Minh was one of the driving forces behind the attempts to reunite North and South Vietnam . In 1965 the USA intervened in the war and supported the regime in South Vietnam. Hồ Chí Minh set up the Trường Sơn Road for the secret transport of materials from north to south Vietnam. This network of military supply routes became known in the west as the Ho Chi Minh Trail .

Hồ Chí Minh died of heart failure on September 2, 1969 in Ba Vì , now the Hanoi Administrative Region , at the age of 79. Since this is Vietnam's Independence Day, the communist leadership moved the date of death to September 3, which was not corrected until the 1980s.

effect

meaning

Postage stamp of the GDR from 1970

With his commitment to the liberation of Vietnam, Hồ Chí Minh gained worldwide recognition beyond Vietnam and Asia. Together with Mao Zedong and the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara , he is still considered one of the most important practitioners of modern guerrilla struggle . As for many international liberation movements , he was also considered an important symbolic figure and revolutionary model for the rebellious students of western industrial societies in the mid to late 1960s (see Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO) and West German student movement of the 1960s ). The " battle cry " Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh! was a hallmark of many demonstrations by the 1968 movement .

Through his modest lifestyle , which translated Marxist-Leninist theory into his own daily practice (he lived in a hut next to the government building), the demand for political participation of the peasants and for equal rights for women and men , he became a personified revolution and a credible national father figure .

The US magazine Time named him in 1998 among the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.

Personality cult

A group of war veterans in front of the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum

Known for a simple lifestyle, humility, and integrity, Hồ Chí Minh was the center of a great personality cult both during his presidency and after his death . A mausoleum in the style of the Lenin Mausoleum was built in Hanoi , where his embalmed body rests against his will (he wanted his body to be cremated and the ashes buried in north, central, and south Vietnam). The mausoleum was inaugurated in 1975 and is located near the place where Hồ Chí Minh publicly read the Declaration of Independence on September 2, 1945.

In 1976, the city of Saigon named him Ho Chi Minh City in honor of him.

Reception in art

The composer Günter Kochan composed the cantata Das Testament von Ho chi Minh (1970) for speaker, chamber orchestra and nine instruments.

Dieter Salbert composed "... but the spirit escapes" - freedom cantata based on the prison diary of Ho Chi Minh for soprano, speaker, speaking choir, 6 wind instruments, 4 strings, 3 keyboard instruments and percussion (1970/71), premiered on June 8, 1971 as part of the Ars Nova days of Bavarian Radio / Studio Nuremberg, translation from English by Arnfried Astel, music publisher Zahoransky.

Works

  • Nhật ký trong tù / Yù zhōng rìjì 獄中日記 (poems, written 1942–1943 in classical Chinese).

literature

  • Jules Archer: Ho Chi Minh. Legend of Hanoi. Bailey Bros. & Swinfen, New York 1971, ISBN 0-561-00153-7 .
  • Pierre Brocheux: Ho Chi Minh. A biography. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 0-521-85062-2 .
  • Pham van Dong: Ho Chi Minh. One person, one nation, one epoch, one thing. Foreign Language Publishing House, Hanoi 1980.
  • William J. Duiker : Ho Chi Minh. A life. Hyperion, New York 2001, ISBN 0-7868-8701-X .
  • Martin Grossheim: Ho Chi Minh. The mysterious revolutionary. Life and legend. Beck, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-406-62208-3 . limited preview in Google Book search
  • Hellmut Kapfenberger: Ho Chi Minh. A chronicle. New life, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-355-01758-9 .
  • Jean Lacouture: Ho Chi Minh. A Political Biography. Random House, New York 1968, ISBN 0-394-42899-4 .
  • Virginia Morris, Clive A. Hills: Ho Chi Minh's Blueprint for Revolution: In the Words of Vietnamese Strategists and Operatives. McFarland, Jefferson 2018, ISBN 978-1-4766-6563-4 .
  • Reinhold Neumann-Hoditz: Ho Tschi Minh. In self-testimonials and picture documents. Rowohlt, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1971, ISBN 3-499-50182-1 .
  • Sophie Quinn-Judge: Ho Chi Minh. The Missing Years 1919-1941. University of California Press, Berkeley 2002, ISBN 0-520-23533-9 .
  • Horst Szeponik: Ho Chi Minh - A life for Vietnam. Biography. New life, Berlin 1981.
  • Tran dan Tien: Ho Chi Minh: The founder of independent Vietnam . Laufersweiler, Gießen-Wieseck 2000, ISBN 3-89687-295-8 .

Web links

Commons : Ho Chi Minh  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Ho Chi Minh  Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Some authors assume up to 75 names. See e.g. B. "His Many Names and Travels" in Vietnam Courier (May 1981).
  2. ↑ On the one hand, the biographies have to struggle with the scant information from their youth and, on the other hand, they suffer from the mythical exaggeration that is common in Vietnam and complicates research. A well-founded biography is William J. Duiker : Hồ Chí Minh. A Life , New York 2000. David Halberstam's best-known popular science works include: Ho , New York 1971.
  3. ↑ The autobiography under the fictional name Trần Dân Tiên: Những mẩu chuyện về đời hoạt động của Hồ Chủ tịch is one of the most important sources for Ho's youth. There is an English edition under the name: Glimpses of the Life of Hồ Chí Minh .
  4. ↑ Hồ Chí Minh mentions this event in his autobiography, written under a pseudonym and in the third person (see above).
  5. ↑ A detailed analysis of the files of the French secret police at Duiker: Ho Chi Minh. A life. See also Thu Trang Gaspard: Ho Chi Minh à Paris , Paris 1992, and Jean Lacouture: Ho Chi Minh , Paris 1967.
  6. ^ Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis , pp. 155-158.
  7. ^ Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis , pp. 155-158.
  8. ↑ See Gaspard: Ho Chi Minh , pp. 64 f. and Daniel Hémery: De l'Indochine à Vietnam. Paris, 1990 , p. 44. Thanh signed the petition with “Quac”, but later changed this to the more common “Quoc”.
  9. ^ For example, in his speech at the Congress in Tours.
  10. ^ Founding manifesto of the "Intercolonial Union".
  11. ↑ Bruce Lockhart, William J. Duiker: Historical Dictionary of Vietnam. Lanham, 2006, p. 296.
  12. ↑ In a 1924 text on “The Russian Revolution and the Colonial Peoples”, Nguyễn Ái Quốc describes the school in his dry, listing style.
  13. ↑ Excerpt from the shorthand transcript of Nguyễn Ái Quốc's speech.
  14. ↑ Brocheux, Pierre (2007). Ho Chi Minh: A Biography , Cambridge University Press , p. 39 f. ISBN 0-521-85062-2 .
  15. ^ Rolf Steininger : The Vietnam War . 3. Edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 978-3-596-16129-4 , pp. 66 .
  16. ^ Stein Tønnesson: The Vietnamese Revoluion of 1945 , London 1991, p. 99.
  17. ^ Eckard Michels : Germans in the Foreign Legion 1870-1965 , 5th edition. Munich 2006, p. 171.
  18. ↑ Marc Frey : History of the Vietnam War , CH Beck, Munich 1999, p. 16.
  19. ↑ Marc Frey: History of the Vietnam War , p. 18 f.
  20. ↑ Marc Frey: History of the Vietnam War , p. 19 f.
  21. ↑ Marc Frey: History of the Vietnam War , p. 20.
  22. ↑ Marc Frey: History of the Vietnam War , p. 44.
  23. ↑ Time 100: Ho Chi Minh , Time Magazine , April 13, 1998.
  24. ^ Arnold Schölzel : Iron in verse. Poems Ho Chi Mins in a new volume. In: RotFuchs Vol. 23 No. 270–271 (July – August 2020) p. 34.
personal data
SURNAME Hồ Chi Minh
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bác Hồ; Ho Chi Minh; Nguyễn Sinh Cung; Nguyễn Tất Thành; Nguyễn Ái Quốc; Lý Thụy; Hồ Quang; Tống Văn Sơ; Sing Wénchū
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Vietnamese revolutionary and statesman
DATE OF BIRTH May 19, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Kim Lien , Nghệ An
DATE OF DEATH 2nd September 1969
Place of death Hanoi