In a column published on September 30, commentator Carl Robinson argues that contemporary Vietnam shares a profound psychological parallel with the twilight years of East Germany.
Reflecting on a recent reading of Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos, Robinson explores why citizens and romantic partners alike remain fiercely loyal to systems and relationships they have long stopped believing in.
The novel, set in East Berlin during the mid-to-late 1980s, chronicles the suffocating relationship between a young woman named Katharina and an older writer named Hans against the backdrop of a decaying German Democratic Republic.
Robinson writes that while East Germany’s official state institutions and slogans remained functional, the founding narrative had grown entirely detached from everyday life.
He says that the hardest part of systemic decay is not recognising that a structure is broken, but rather imagining an existence independent of it.
Drawing on his own experiences, Robinson compares this psychological entrenchment to observations in Vietnam. Many Vietnamese citizens voice bitter complaints regarding bureaucracy, corruption, and the arbitrary exercise of power in private discussions, yet maintain a deep emotional attachment to the governing institutions that shape their lives.
The attachment, Robinson points out, is rooted more in emotion than in strict ideology.
Just as Katharina finds the prospect of life without Hans more frightening than her suffering within the relationship, citizens often find the total disappearance of familiar political structures far more unsettling than the systemic problems they regularly criticize.
Robinson clarifies that Vietnam is not a direct replica of East Germany, emphasizing that distinct historical trajectories and political realities separate the two contexts.
Instead, the comparison illuminates a universal state of mind where habit supersedes belief, and loyalty outlives conviction.
