[KS] Re: Asians in East Germany

[Charles Rd K Armstrong]

I'm no expert in this, but I wanted to point out that the Korean diaspora
in the former USSR is very different from the Koreans living in East
Germany. The latter came to the DDR, as Dr. Frank points out, during and
after the Korean War, mostly as students and technical trainees. Although
many North Koreans went to the USSR to study as well between 1948 and
1991, most  of the Koreans in the former USSR are
descendants of migrants from Korea who came before 1937, when Stalin
had the bulk of the Korean community in the Russian Far East moved 
to Soviet Central Asia. There are a number of pieces in English on this,
including Suh Dae-sook's edited volume on the Koreans in the Soviet Union
published by U of Hawaii, and a several recent Ph.D. dissertations also
discuss the Korean community in the USSR.

I'd like to ask Dr. Frank if he knows of any information on North Korean
students, workers, and orphans who were in other East European countries
in the 1950s. Hungary and Romania, I believe, took in North Korean
children as well - whether they were all orphans or children of the elite
sent for safekeeping I don't know. The subject of East European (not just
Soviet and Chinese) assistance in the Korean War and postwar North Korean
reconstruction seems to be a rather neglected subject, with the exception
of Dr. Frank's own work on the DDR.

						Charles Armstrong

 On Mon, 21 Jun 1999, Carl Webb wrote:

> Thanks for responding.  I've seen a web page with information about the korean diaspora in the former Soviet Union.  
> So I'm assuming there must have been korean migrants in East Germany also.
> 
> > Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999 10:30:38 -0400 (EDT)
> > To: korean-studies at mailbase.ac.uk
> > From: etdyke at shiva.hunter.cuny.edu
> >
> > I don't have specific numbers, but I can say that in general Africans and
> > Asians came to the GDR for one of two purposes--education or work.  on the
> > work front, just as the FRG rebuilt itself after the war in part through
> > the extensive use of foreign (turkish) labor, the GDR employed significant
> > numbers of immigrant labor from East Asia (I think Vietnam in particular).
> > Africans came to the GDR primarily to study--the GDR's engineering and
> > technology programs far surpassed those of the  Africans' home countries.
> > Of course the Asian and African countries that participated in these
> > exchanges were those in the post-war global socialist bloc.  
> > 
> > If I can locate a couple specific references (to the countries of origin
> > of the students and workers, and the numbers of individuals) I will post
> > them.
> > 
> > Liz Ten Dyke
> > Kingston, NY
> > 
> > On Wed, 16 Jun 1999, Carl Webb wrote:
> > 
> > > Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1999 14:59:08 -0700
> > > From: Carl Webb <carlwebb at asiafind.com>
> > > Reply-To: korean-studies at mailbase.ac.uk
> > > To: h0727cej at rz.hu-berlin.de, korean-studies at mailbase.ac.uk
> > > Subject: RE: American Culture in Korea
> > > 
> > > Rudiger Frank,
> > > 
> > > I was a US soldier in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down.  When I had the chance to trave to East Berlin I was shocked to see many asian and african people living there.  What is the history of asians in East Germany?
> > > 
> > > Carl Webb
> > > 
> > > 
> > > 
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> > 
> > 
> 
> 
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