When Kim Jong Un attended the school in the late 1990s, it had only two hundred students and nine classes. The education department liked to have many small schools so that no student would have to travel too far each day.
School started at seven thirty each morning but stopped at noon for a two-hour lunch break so the children could go home to eat. Even in the 1990s, there was an expectation that mothers would be waiting at home for their children.
At 2:00 p.m., the children would return for three more hours of lessons, except on Wednesdays, when there was no school in the afternoon. Wednesday afternoons is the time that Swiss kids go to the doctor or the dentist or—probably in Kim Jong Un’s case—the basketball court.
The school is a cluster of two- and three-story functionally designed buildings. There’s a garden out front where students grow corn, runner beans, and strawberries. In the school library, there are books about Picasso and Peter the Great in German and also books in English on display. Tools and vises are lined up neatly in the woodworking room, and artworks by students decorate the main foyer and the noticeboards. It is essentially an ordinary school.
Next to the school buildings is a large Astroturf field. On the day I visited, a group of kids from various immigrant backgrounds were playing soccer together. On the side, two boys speaking Arabic were racing a remote-control car, one chasing after it while the other tried to make a getaway.
When the news that Kim Jong Un would succeed his father broke in 2009, journalists flocked to the school for insights into the dictator-in-waiting. They inundated the school and tried to interview his former teachers.
A Japanese journalist took a photo of Kim Jong Un’s class picture in a gallery in a hallway and then published it in his newspaper in July 2009. Thereafter, it was removed from the wall and stored somewhere private, and journalists were banned from the campus.
The photo still exists on the internet. The class, decked out in an array of 1990s fashion, with chambray shirts and oversized sweatshirts, is assembled under a tree in the schoolyard. Kim Jong Un stands in the center of the back row wearing a tracksuit, gray and black with red piping and big red letters reading “NIKE” down the sleeve. He’s staring unsmiling at the camera.
Another photo taken around this time shows Kim with a smile, wearing a silver necklace over his black T-shirt and looking like a typical teenager. Another reveals some fuzz on his top lip and a smattering of pimples on his cheek.
Despite the school’s efforts to get rid of the journalists, interest was so huge that the authorities organized a press conference in a classroom. Ueli Studer, the education administrator in the municipality of Köniz, which incorporates Liebefeld, confirmed that a boy from North Korea attended school from August 1998 to the fall of 2000. He was enrolled as the son of an employee of the embassy, Studer said, adding that this was not unusual given that some other foreign diplomats also sent their children to the school.
“The pupil was considered to be well integrated, diligent and ambitious,” Studer continued. “His hobby was basketball.” Along the bottom of the statement were boldfaced words saying that this was their final comment. To this day, these are the only details that the school has given.
Teachers there never met the boy’s parents. Instead, various North Koreans would attend parents’ nights in their place, apologizing and explaining that this was because the boy’s parents couldn’t speak German, recalled the school’s principal at the time, Peter Burri.4
When he first enrolled at the school in Liebefeld, Kim Jong Un started in a “reception” class for children who did not speak German, spending several months learning his lessons in German but at a slower pace with simpler instruction.
At the time the boy enrolled, about a quarter of the students were not Swiss, so the authorities were used to dealing with children who arrived without being able to speak the local language. Kim Jong Un also had private German language tuition outside of school.
To find out more about what the young North Korean learned in school, I took the bus to Köniz one day and visited the municipality office. Marisa Vifian, head of the Köniz education department, pulled out a big white binder containing the school curriculum from the 1990s. There was the usual lineup of classes—German, math, science, health, foreign languages, music, art, and sports—as well as units like “The World Around Us,” which taught world religions and cultures. The school authorities assess the children based on ability rather than age. They’d rather play it safe and hold a child back a year and have him or her do well in a lower grade, Vifian told me.
Once he finished in the preparatory reception class, Kim Jong Un joined the regular sixth-grade class.
João Micaelo, then the fourteen-year-old son of Portuguese immigrants, clearly remembers the Asian boy in a tracksuit and Nike shoes walking into 6A, a class of twenty-two students. The kids were already seated at their desks when the new boy was brought in and introduced as Pak Un, the son of North Korean diplomats. There was a spare seat next to Micaelo, so the new boy, who simply went by the name of Un, sat in it.
The pair soon became close, bonding because of their seat placement but also because neither was particularly academic. In sixth grade, classes were split into two streams, and both Kim Jong Un and Micaelo were sent to the group of academically weaker students.5 Kim Jong Un was embarrassed when he was called to answer questions in front of the class—not because he didn’t know the answers necessarily but because he couldn’t express himself. So Micaelo helped him with his German homework, while the newcomer helped his new friend with math.
Micaelo remembers Kim as quiet but said that he was very decisive and capable of making his point. “He was ambitious but not aggressive,” he said.6
But other students remember the new kid being forceful because he had trouble communicating. While lessons were in High German, the more formal variety of the language spoken in official situations in Switzerland, families and friends spoke to each other in Swiss German, former classmates recalled. This is technically a dialect, but to an outsider, it sounds so different that it may as well be Dutch. It was frustrating to Kim Jong Un, who resented his inability to understand. “He kicked us in the shins and even spat at us,” said one former classmate.7
In addition to the communication problems, the other students tended to think of Kim Jong Un as a weird outsider, his school friends recall, not least because the North Korean always wore tracksuits, never jeans, the standard uniform of teenagers the world over. In North Korea, jeans are a symbol of the despised capitalists.
One classmate remembered him wearing Adidas tracksuits with three stripes down the side and the newest pair of Nike Air Jordans. The other kids in the school could only dream of having such shoes, said Nikola Kovacevic, another former classmate who often played basketball with Kim after school, estimating a pair cost more than $200 in Switzerland at the time.8
As he moved into the upper years at school, Kim Jong Un improved his German enough that he was able to get by in class. Even the girl who got kicked and spat at conceded that he “thawed” over time as he became more sociable.
Still, he remained introverted. More complicated thoughts were beyond his German, so he tended to keep them to himself, Micaelo said.9
Kim Jong Un went on to pass the seventh and eighth grades and was there for a part of the ninth grade at the high school, the Köniz education authorities confirmed. His grades were never great. It surely didn’t help that he was absent so often: 75 times in the first year, 105 in the second.10
Parts of the curriculum focused on social matters and would have presented a very different worldview to the one that Kim experienced in North Korea.
“Generally, people here are taught to respect each other,” Godi Huber, who also works for the Köniz municipality, told me as I thumbed through the curriculum folders. “They learn about solving conflicts peacefully and how to live together harmoniously. These are our values.”
In the days he attended school,
Kim Jong Un’s lessons included human rights, women’s rights, and the development of democracy. One unit was even called “Happiness, Suffering, Life and Death.”
Students learned about Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mahatma Gandhi. There was a strong emphasis on “intercultural education,” Huber said, learning about cultural diversity; religious, ethnic, and social groups; the rights of human beings; and standing in solidarity with the disadvantaged.
It’s hard to know what Kim Jong Un thought during these lessons. No such rights existed in North Korea. But this may not have been as jarring to Kim as it sounds because he had encountered very few North Koreans and almost none in situations outside of those that were carefully choreographed to show smiling citizens who beamed contentment at him. Kim could have told himself that his people didn’t need all those fine ideals because they were evidently very happy under his father’s leadership.
The teenaged Kim would also have learned about how the French populace rose up and stormed the Bastille, leading to the eventual execution of the king and queen. All students in Switzerland learned about the French Revolution as an example of how a society can change.
Kim Jong Un’s class learned that the French Revolution began in no small part because of the population’s unhappiness that living standards, having started to improve, did not continue to rise. Political scientists still talk today about the potentially destabilizing effect of rising expectations going unmet.
Does the Great Successor remember these lessons? Life has been improving for many North Koreans since Kim Jong Un came to power in 2011. They have more freedom to make money through their own enterprise, and those who make enough can buy cappuccinos, Rollerblades, and smartphones.
As a result, there are now obvious disparities between the way people live in the supposed socialist paradise. There’s a 1 percent. Are the 99 percent, the North Korean equivalent of the bourgeoisie and peasantry, going to start resenting the gap between them and the elite and, more importantly, do something about it? Are they going to vent their anger if the small improvements in their standard of living do not continue?
The lessons on the French Revolution and the fate of Louis XVI don’t augur well for Kim and his circle.
But back then, the student wasn’t worrying about historical omens. He was busy playing basketball.
Every day at 5:00 p.m., when the school bell rang, Kim Jong Un would head to the basketball courts at his school or at the Lerbermatt high school, less than a ten-minute walk away. He was often with his older brother Kim Jong Chol and with an older North Korean boy who acted as their bodyguard.
Simon Lutstorf, a student at the Lerbermatt high school at the time, played basketball with the group several times a week between 1998 and 2001, often until eight o’clock at night. He just assumed that the Asian kid was associated with the Thai embassy, which was a short walk from the high school.
Kim Jong Un always wore the same outfit for basketball: an authentic Chicago Bulls top with Michael Jordan’s number—23—and Bulls shorts, and his Air Jordan shoes. His ball was also top of the line: a Spalding with the official mark of the NBA.
Kim’s competitive side came out on the basketball court. He could be aggressive and often indulged in trash talk.11 He was serious on the court, hardly ever laughing or even talking, just focused on the game. When things went badly for him, he would curse or even pound his head against the wall.
Sometimes, in addition to the other Asian teenagers Kim Jong Un arrived with, a couple of adults came along and set up small camping chairs beside the court, keeping score on a little board and clapping when Kim landed a basket. Lutstorf described the scene as “really bizarre.” “It was obvious that this guy, who we now know was Kim, was something special,” he said.
Off the court, Kim Jong Un played basketball on his PlayStation. “The whole world for him was just basketball all the time,” Micaelo said.12 He had even been to Paris to see an NBA exhibition game and had photos of himself standing with Toni Kukoc of the Chicago Bulls and Kobe Bryant of the Los Angeles Lakers.13
A few of Kim Jong Un’s closest friends in Bern went back to his home, which they described as spare, with no pictures on the walls. It did have a basketball hoop outside, however, and the teenagers would play out there often, sometimes making more noise than the neighbors would have preferred.
At the apartment, Micaelo met Kim Jong Un’s “parents,” his older brother, and his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, who was known in Switzerland as Pak Mi Hyang. They didn’t have much to say to each other since the Koreans couldn’t speak German and Micaelo couldn’t speak English or Korean.
Still, Micaelo often went around for lunch, where a cook made “boiled chicken with strange sweet and sour sauces” that were not to the Portuguese student’s liking.
Sometimes they would go to a local swimming pool in the North Koreans’ darkened minivan, laughing the whole way. Another classmate, Marco Imhof, also went to Kim’s apartment from time to time and noticed how the boy’s personality changed to reveal flashes of temper. Once the boys were given spaghetti, but it was cold. He spoke “sharply” to the cook at the apartment, Imhof said, in a way that surprised him.14
Kim Jong Un had gadgets his friends could only dream of: a minidisc player, which was the cutting-edge way to store music in the years before iPods; a Sony PlayStation; and lots of movies that hadn’t yet been released in theaters. They loved watching action films, especially those featuring Jackie Chan or the latest James Bond.
But at a time when teenagers are usually pushing boundaries, Kim Jong Un was no party animal or playboy in training. He didn’t go to school camp, parties, or discos, and he didn’t touch a drop of alcohol.
Kim Jong Un “absolutely avoided contact with girls,” a former classmate said, adding that she never had a substantial conversation with him. “He was a loner and didn’t share anything about his private life.… When he was with somebody, it was Marco Imhof and Joao Micaelo.”15
With these friends, he would talk about North Korea and what he’d done there during his summer break. He showed them photos of the beach at Wonsan and pictures of him jet-skiing. One day, while Kim and Micaelo were hanging out in the living room, the North Korean went off to his bedroom and came back with a photo of him and an older man. The man in the apartment was not his dad, Kim revealed. Instead, he introduced the man in the photo as his real father: Kim Jong Il, the leader of North Korea.
Micaelo thought his friend was talking nonsense and responded sarcastically, “Sure, your father is the president.” Kim Jong Un just laughed but insisted that he really was the son of the North Korean leader. They dropped it.
But then one day, around Easter 2001, with only a couple of months to go until he completed ninth grade, Kim told Micaelo that his father had ordered him back to North Korea and that he would leave soon.16 He offered no explanation for his sudden recall.
Kim’s other friends received no such notice. The boy just stopped coming to school one day. Their teachers said they had no idea what happened to him either.
Just like that, Pak Un was gone.
CHAPTER 4
DICTATORSHIP 101
“I express my firm resolve to study harder and become a faithful man who relieve burden from the General who is so much concerned about the army’s combat readiness.”
—Kim Jong Un in 2006, from Anecdotes of Kim Jong Un’s Life
BACK HOME, KIM JONG UN PREPARED TO JOIN HIS OLDER brother at Kim Il Sung Military University, North Korea’s equivalent of West Point. It was their mother’s idea to send them to the military academy, a way to bolster her sons’ claims to succession.
His mother’s ambitions were evident. One of the few photos of them together shows her leaning over the boy she called the Morning Star King as he colored. He is about six years old and dressed in a general’s uniform with four stars on his shoulders.
Kim Jong Un had entered the university named after his grandfather in 2002 and began s
tudying juche-oriented military leadership, the idea that North Korea could act alone to defend itself. It was an important ideological lesson even if it had no basis in reality. North Korea was entirely dependent on China for its stability.
That year was pivotal both for the heir apparent and for the regime.
First, it marked a new chapter for relations between North Korea and the United States—for the worse. At the start of 2002, President George W. Bush labeled North Korea part of an “axis of evil.” Bush declared that, together with Iran and Iraq, North Korea was “arming to threaten the peace of the world.… All nations should know: America will do what is necessary to ensure our nation’s security.”
Just a couple of weeks after that speech, Kim Jong Il officially turned sixty. His birthday was always celebrated with great fanfare in North Korea, but this one was even more important than usual. In Korean culture, a man’s sixtieth is a major milestone. It marks the completion of one sixty-year cycle of the lunar calendar and the beginning of the next.
In the meantime, Kim Jong Il’s one-time consort, and the mother of Kim Jong Nam, died in Moscow that year. Between that and his milestone birthday, Kim Jong Il’s mortality was clearly on his mind. There were signs of nascent preparation for succession.
For starters, there was a new “mother of the nation,” a name previously reserved for Kim Jong Il’s mother, in the propaganda. The Korean People’s Army issued a sixteen-page pamphlet that year called “Our Respected Mother Who Is Loyal to Our Beloved Supreme Commander Is the Most Loyal among Loyalists.” Songs about “Our Respected Mother” soon began to echo across the North Korean airwaves.1
These did not explicitly name Ko Yong Hui, but the cadres could read between the lines and see it was her. She elevated to become the next mother of the nation, an early indication that one of her sons was next in line for the leadership.
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