The Middle Distance

The back building on Bizetstrasse in Weissensee, Berlin, still bears the imprint of the Berlin I have known for three decades—improvised, subsidized, and now slowly disappearing. Built around the turn of the last century, the long red-brick factory later housed an East German lightbulb plant, and, after the Wall fell, was purchased and converted with state support into affordable live-work spaces for artists. When I first visited Claudia Borchers nearly thirty years ago, Weissensee still felt peripheral; a non-German face could draw open curiosity or a hostile stare, depending on the block. Today, the district is as international as the rest of the capital. And like much of Berlin, the collective around Claudia—many of them still working well past retirement age—now faces rising rents and uncertain futures, as the subsidy that sustained them expires.

I climb the wide industrial stairs and find her door ajar, welcoming me inside. Despite its small footprint, her apartment has high ceilings, the narrow hallway a gallery of her past—exhibition posters, colleagues’ paintings, portraits others have made of her—arranged with the casual density of a life in art. We sit in her kitchen, bright and filled with leafy plants: her own “private jungle.” The generous new windows, an anomaly among old Berlin buildings, save her from the long gray winter days her childhood never prepared her for.

Over cups of green tea, we sit as two half-Vietnamese women, both mothers, with German last names, a generation apart. When we first met, I was in my mid-twenties, looking for other half-Vietnamese faces like mine in a city that had almost none. Claudia was then in her mid-forties. Now she is a youthful seventy-five; for me, she is more chị than cô. When I visit today, I am less looking to find myself than for a conversation across what a painter might call the “middle distance”—that zone between the intimate foreground and the far horizon.

Claudia is warm, composed, and keenly observant, with a knowledge of world affairs that surfaces naturally. To understand her, you have to go back to a continental war, a jungle resistance, a father who renamed his daughter to carry on his legacy.

A Life of Border Crossing

Claudia’s origins trace back, in part, to her father, Erwin Borchers, whose life was marked by defiant breaks. Born to an Alsatian mother—from the region straddling France and Germany—and a Prussian officer turned pacifist after the First World War, he grew up in a family already shaped by border crossing. A Marxist educated across Germany, Austria, and France, he fled Nazi Germany in 1933, only to face a choice in France: internment as an enemy alien or enlistment in the Foreign Legion. He chose the latter, a strategic alliance against fascism. But upon deployment to Indochina, sickened by colonial violence, he deserted in 1945 to join Hồ Chí Minh’s resistance. He became Nguyễn Chiến Sĩ—“Comrade Fighter.” As propaganda chief, he co-founded the Viet Minh’s first French-language newspaper and broadcast appeals urging fellow Legionnaires to desert.

In the resistance, he met Claudia’s mother, Lê Thị Bình. She was a skilled seamstress, embroidering linens for French colonial households. Having grown up in a village near Haiphong—the oldest of three fatherless children—she had only four years of formal schooling but possessed, Claudia says, “a natural intelligence—she was very wise.” Bình had served as the unofficial village scribe, reading and writing letters for her illiterate neighbors. She was a woman of practical strength: a single mother whose first husband, a French Legionnaire, had vanished during the First Indochina War. Erwin adopted her young son, and they built a family in the midst of the struggle.

Claudia, the fourth child in the family patchwork, was born in the Việt Bắc jungle in 1950. Her mother named her “Mai.” But in 1954, on the eve of the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, Erwin, fearing he might not return, gave her a heroic name: Việt-Đức. Vietnam-Germany.

“I thought that name was horrible,” Claudia admits. “In school, I was always mistaken for a boy.”

Childhood in Hanoi

After the French defeat, the family moved to Hanoi. Erwin worked for the Ministry of Information and later as a correspondent for ADN, the East German news agency. At home, her parents spoke French to each other—a colonial inheritance repurposed as a private code. “It was a strange childhood,” Claudia reflects. “We were always somehow not there when they talked.”

Outside, the European features of the Borchers children made them targets. “On the first day of school, I was teased because I looked different.” The taunts crystallized in a cruel children’s rhyme about Tây lai—mixed-race children:

Tây lai, ăn khoai cả vỏ
ăn chó cả lông,
ăn hồng cả hột

(The mixed-breed eats potatoes with the skin / eats dog with the fur / swallows persimmons whole.)

The ostracism turned physical one afternoon, when someone hurled a piece of iron at Claudia and one of her older sisters, striking her sister on the lip. Claudia adopted the survival tactic of the outsider: “I became very careful—trying not to stand out in class.” Yet in her teens, a shift occurred. “I noticed the boys were looking at me,” she says. “Then I thought—well, maybe it’s not so bad after all.”

“I Don’t Want Another War”

By the early 1960s, the Americans had arrived. Like many families in Hanoi, they had a narrow bomb shelter—hố tránh bom cá nhân—dug into the garden. “I had such claustrophobia,” Claudia remembers. “I never wanted to be the first one in.”

One afternoon, a US reconnaissance drone flew low overhead to evade radar. “The bamboo trees bent double,” she remembers. In the stunned silence that followed, she found her father sitting on the back steps, his face “chalk-white.”

“He said: ‘I don’t want to go through another war.’”

A Second Homeland

In 1966, the family embarked on an eleven-day journey through China and Siberia to the German Democratic Republic. For the children, it was an adventure. During a two-day stop in Beijing, Claudia’s four-year-old brother, seeing snow for the first time, asked: “Why did they sprinkle flour all over the street?” For Claudia, already alert to the forces of history, what stuck were the slogans and spectacle of the Cultural Revolution. For their father, it was a tactical retreat. Erwin, who himself had for years only been known by his Vietnamese moniker, knew his children needed German names as a layer of protection in their new homeland. This time, Claudia had a choice: “My father wanted to name me Martha, but the caretaker’s wife at the East German embassy said it sounded too old-fashioned. She suggested Claudia—and I decided I liked the name too.”

The GDR welcomed Erwin as an antifascist hero and provided the large family with a house in Fredersdorf, a small town east of Berlin. For Claudia, now fifteen and speaking no German, it meant starting over in a classroom with younger children. She found refuge in mathematics (“the only subject where you didn’t need the language”) and taught herself German at night. Her younger siblings assimilated with fluid ease; her youngest brother would eventually forget his Vietnamese entirely.

The family found their footing in the GDR: one sister became a nurse, another a dancer and choreographer, the brothers engineers. Claudia’s talent earned her a place in the selective oil painting program at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts—a continuation of the classical training she had begun at an arts school for talented youth in Hanoi. In divided Germany, aesthetics had become a proxy for the Cold War. While the West actively promoted abstract art as a counterweight to socialist realism, the East maintained fidelity to classical representation. With only thirteen students in her department, it was, Claudia notes, “a luxury to study that way.”

The GDR provided structure, but cracks soon appeared. Erwin, disillusioned by the state after the Prague Spring of 1968, and having met another woman, defected to West Germany in 1981. For the children, now grown and busy with their own lives, it was a shock. They would never see or speak to their father again. He died in West Berlin in 1985, the Wall still intact. Claudia learned later from her aunt, Erwin’s sister, that he died “sad and bitter,” cut off from his family.

“I regret not having been more concerned about his pain—both political and personal, not having asked enough about it,” she said in a eulogy the siblings held 40 years after his death. “I wonder sometimes what would have become of him—teacher, philosopher, bookshop owner, or perhaps a monk? Who knows what might have happened, if it hadn’t been for that horrible war.”

Mothers of Resilience

When Erwin left the family, Bình’s response was clear-eyed. “She bought herself a new handbag and a pair of white shoes,” Claudia recounts, “boarded a train, and moved to Dresden to live with my little brother.” She had already come through poverty, abandonment, and displacement; her anchor was the family she had built.

For the last two years of her life, when Bình developed dementia, Claudia became her primary caregiver—the only sibling whose freelance life made it possible. She moved her paintings to an external studio. With Bình nearly blind and largely lost to herself, the roles of mother and daughter reversed. German friends reacted with quiet horror: “How can you manage?” Vietnamese friends saw it differently: “What a privilege to be able to care for your mother.” For Claudia, it was both.

The Artist as a “Foreign Body”

Claudia’s career as a visual artist took shape within the GDR’s ecosystem, where she secured a freelance position teaching painting to factory workers at a synthetic fiber plant in Premnitz, west of Berlin. It was stable work, but she felt like a Fremdkörper—a foreign body in the industrial town with its pervasive chemical smell. “I always felt a bit alien there, as an artist, and also as a woman,” she says. A social contradiction presented itself: as part of the GDR’s “Bitterfeld Path” cultural policy to “bridge the gap between art and life,” the factory organized high-quality classical concerts for its staff, but the workers rarely attended. It was the engineers, doctors, and managers who filled the seats. “The workers, for whom it was actually intended, didn’t come.”

When her two-year contract ended, she moved back to the capital, where her career flourished. Her clients ranged widely—students and professionals, public commissions and private businesses. Among the latter was a large-scale silk mural for the Japanese restaurant of the luxury Palasthotel in East Berlin, a work she still regrets not having properly documented before the building was demolished after reunification. But politics and art were never far apart. The wife of a foreign government minister saw the mural and wanted to commission one for her private residence. GDR officials, eager to cultivate a trade relationship, were glad to help facilitate. But when the potential client discovered Claudia was traveling to Vietnam for an extended stay, they withdrew—unwilling to be associated with anything connected to Vietnam. “The hatred, everywhere,” Claudia says.

Through the GDR’s regular cultural exchanges with Vietnam, Claudia also came into frequent contact with visiting artists from Hanoi. When she had time, she interpreted, helped them shop, or accompanied them around the city—a role she fell into naturally, translating not just language but context. Before long, her apartment had become one of their stopping points. Her then-partner, who spoke no Vietnamese, grew jealous, she says, “of everything.” In the interest of domestic peace, she never taught their son her mother tongue. “I deeply regret not having pushed through with it,” she says now.

The Rupture and the Bridge

Before he left, Erwin shared a prediction. “He told me: ‘I’ll give the GDR ten years. A state that cannot tolerate criticism will go under.’”

He was right. The fall of the Wall in 1989 was less a liberation than a blow. “Everything collapsed,” Claudia says. “For a year, we were hanging in limbo.” Her galleries closed, her clients disappeared.

To make ends meet, Claudia took additional freelance teaching jobs, often teaching fashion students figure drawing. She also worked for several years as an interpreter for the police, assisting Vietnamese former contract workers whose legal status dissolved after reunification, and later those who had arrived without papers.

Vietnam, for her, was never simply past. She made her first return in 1981, after two years of bureaucratic waiting, even though Vietnam was officially a fraternal socialist state. She and her then-partner, also a painter, traveled from Hanoi south to what was then newly called Ho Chi Minh City: studio visits, colleagues, a different light. She went back a few times after that. In 2004, she returned with her son for a Goethe-Institut event in Hanoi. Watching him absorb the tones and phonetics of Vietnamese with an ease that surprised them both, she felt an old regret return. “You have to start as a baby,” she says. “I knew, and I didn’t do it.”

Through it all, she kept making art, moving from painting into etching, especially vernis mou. “In classical Chinese painting,” she tells me, “a few lines can carry an entire story. European painting works differently—through form, light, and shadow.” Her prints, and her recent painted landscapes too, seem to move between those logics without needing to choose.

For decades, the female nude was her central subject, rendered with a grounded sensuality and a keen awareness of physicality. She is wary of over-interpretation and notes that she belongs to a different generation than younger artists who foreground diaspora more directly. Still, she says, “People see something melancholic in my works—and of course there’s always a bit of the artist’s person in their work.” When I ask her why she was drawn to painting female nudes, she laughs. “Male painters aren’t asked why they paint women!” Then she adds, more thoughtfully: “The female body is the bearer of life. Women give birth to life—and in that moment also to death.”

In recent years, however, her gaze has turned outward. “The physicality of the body is simply no longer what interests me.” Now she finds her subject in nature, translating her field studies into oil paintings. It is a turn away from the transient interiority of the human form, perhaps, toward the enduring world beyond it.

But if her art has turned toward the natural world, her cultural life has remained oriented toward connection. In 2015, Claudia helped reissue Das Mädchen Kiều, the German translation of the Vietnamese national epic by Nguyễn Du. The translation, first published in the GDR in 1964, was the life’s work of Irene and Franz Faber, close family friends from their Hanoi years. For Claudia, the project was also a private tribute: to the nanny who sang her verses from Kiều to the children, setting the rhythms of the poem inside her long before she understood the words. For the cover, she created a condensed symbolic image—Kiều chained to a boat, a sword beside her, a lotus flower rising from the mud—encapsulating the epic’s famous theme of beauty and fate inextricably entwined.

Full Circle

The woman who moved from Mai to Việt-Đức to Claudia—a name she chose for herself—speaks without visible conflict about belonging. She has never quite fit a single category: always seen as Tây lai, in Vietnam and in Germany. It stopped bothering her a long time ago.

What stayed is something subtler: language as an interior country. “When I hear Vietnamese, it is a feeling of home—in the soul. It is familiar to me,” she says. But she often thinks in German. To speak Vietnamese, she has to switch, and the shift is not only linguistic. Her family is spread across Germany, Vietnam, and even Russia; her oldest sister still lives in Hanoi.

Still, for her, belonging is less about a place than a practice. “If I haven’t painted for a while,” she says, “I miss it—the mixing on the palette. The brush, the oil.” In her studio, colors rarely remain pure. They meet, resist, and alter one another. She works them together until the surface becomes something entirely its own.

For more information, see the artist’s website: claudiaborchers.de