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The scent of home

August 25, 2017

Berlin’s Dong Xuan Center is a taste of home for Vietnamese expats but loved by Germans alike. Founded by the Vietnamese community after the reunification, it’s now the city’s largest Asian market. DW explores the wonders it has to offer.

https://p.dw.com/p/2irkC

The Dong Xuan market is where Germany is exotic and different. There we meet people who came from abroad to East or West Germany before the fall of the Wall. It's a place that vibrates with optimism and smells of home - a symbol of those who had to struggle with all their strength and courage to find a place in the new, reunited Germany. One of them is Mai-Phuong Kollath, who came from Vietnam to East Germany as a contract worker in 1981. Another is Suat Bakir, a Turkish businessman. The fall of the Wall moved him deeply, but he also says that German unity was a "wedding to which the immigrants were not invited." Things didn’t work out for everyone. Elisa Dosse was brought to the GDR from Mozambique as a contract worker. After reunification, she stayed in the East German city of Dessau, where neo-Nazis murdered one of her best friends, another Mozambican, in 2000.