The Prisoner

by Hwang Sok-Yong

  ~

  West Berlin in 1985 was like a desert island in the middle of East Germany. In essence, it was a city under occupation by the forces that had won World War II. No one could imagine that the wall looming over Berlin’s gloomy, peaceful cityscape would fall in a few years. Whenever I visited Berlin afterward, I would always find it odd that there was still no direct flight between Seoul and the German capital, and remember the gray walls towering above.

  I was a country bumpkin on his first overseas trip, and as the Europeans I met kept asking “Who are you?” I naturally began asking myself the same question. Who was I? I was forty-two. I had written four novellas and a volume of plays and had just published the tenth volume of my popular novel Jang Gil-san, which I had serialized since 1974. My work, however, did not exist outside of Korea. I promised myself on the plane that I wouldn’t even bother mentioning literature: I would only talk to as many people as possible about the plight of the citizens of Gwangju and our democracy movement.

  When I arrived, I was met by Korean students living in Berlin who were charged by the event planners with taking me around. These students were sponsored by the Korean Germans who had come over as coal miners and nurses in the 1960s. Some of the students had been miners and nurses themselves and had remained in Germany for school or other jobs when their contracts ran out. Some of them married Germans or became local doctors, teachers, technicians, or businesspeople. They learned about trade unions, human rights activism, and social engagement through German activists on the ground, and became aware of Gwangju and the Korean democracy movement through the Korean students studying abroad. They were well organized and in some ways more radical than the students who had to go back to Korea after their studies. And they were, from the perspective of the Korean embassy representing the military dictatorship, troublemakers all.

  The novelist Yun Heung-gil and the cultural activist Im Jin-taek were already at the hotel when I arrived. Berlin was staging a cultural event called “Horizonte,” to highlight little-known emerging nations. According to their brochure, the event before ours had dealt with Latin America, and the one before that, Africa. Asia was in focus for Horizonte ’85. I remember that the program included the Jindo sitgimgut shamanic ritual, classical and folk music, and art exhibits, as well as the three of us.

  Our event featured Im Jin-taek and Germany’s Wolf Biermann in the first act, and readings by Yun Heung-gil and me, followed by a Q and A, in the second. Im Jin-taek was a first-generation cultural activist along with Kim Chi-ha and me. For the event, Im Jin-taek repurposed Kim Chi-ha’s ballad “The story of sound” into modern pansori. The original poem was a famous satire that directly criticized the Park Chung-hee government and had led to a death sentence for Kim Chi-ha. The incident had the opposite effect to that intended by the South Korean dictatorship, inspiring instead an international campaign of writers and intellectuals to save him. Kim Chi-ha was finally released, but his poetry remained banned and he continued to be hospitalized from the aftereffects of torture.

  Wolf Biermann was born to communist activist parents, and his Jewish father had been incarcerated for years by the Nazis before being executed at Auschwitz. He became disenchanted with the failure of East Germany to achieve the real ideals of communism and wrote about these thoughts in songs and poems, which branded him as “unfriendly” in the eyes of the East German authorities. His first collection of poetry, The Wire Harp, was regarded as anti-national, and Biermann was censored and put under house arrest for eleven years. Then he won the West German Offenbach Prize in 1974. When he performed in Cologne by invitation of a metalworkers’ trade union in 1976, East Germany deprived him of his citizenship and banned him from the country. This sparked criticism against the East German government, and twelve writers signed a petition condemning the decision. I happened to meet three of those twelve: Sarah Kirsch, who had left East Germany for good, in Hamburg; Christa Wolf, whom I met the very winter the Berlin Wall came down, during my German exile days after my visit to North Korea; and Stefan Heym, at a literary event for the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway’s Tromsø. Biermann’s ban was a shock to East Germany, the effects of which lasted for a long time. Some even considered it the trigger for the fall of the Wall.

  The only East German work I had read at the time was Uwe Johnson’s Speculations about Jakob, which had been published in Korea. Christa Wolf’s Divided Heaven, published in East Germany in 1963, only appeared in South Korea in 1989. Their works made me think that South Korea was more similar to East Germany than West Germany. Much like Gwangju, the June 1953 workers’ uprising had been cruelly suppressed by Soviet tanks. And echoing South Korea’s restrictions on foreign travel, East Germany built a wall around itself and maintained tight control over its citizens while keeping them under constant Stasi surveillance. I kept remembering the strangely familiar mood in Brecht’s poetry collection, Buckow Elegies.

  If the South Korean military dictatorship seemed East German, the North Korean system was even more extreme than East Germany’s. It’s been said many times before, but North Korea’s constant state of emergency—justified by the decades-old isolation promoted by the Americans—has enabled the endurance of its political system of control and tension. I know very well that North Korean society could never produce work that criticizes the government as East Germany’s could. But my thinking was that, as long as South Korea was unable to establish a democratic society like West Germany’s, we could hardly afford to criticize North Korea or even hope to change it. My experience of visiting a Germany that was divided like Korea, and then spending several years in a Germany where the Wall fell during my exile there in 1989, would inform my worldview forever after.

  After the Horizonte event, a man who had come to Germany as a miner and ended up getting his PhD there told me there was something I needed to see. He drove me to the composer Yun I-sang’s house outside Berlin. On the street in front of his house, the city had posted a sign that read “Artist at work, please do not honk,” which left me feeling very impressed with the German authorities. I would later spend the first months of my exile in this house.

  “I am not a communist.” This was the first thing Yun I-sang said to me after shaking my hand.

  I was taken aback. “You don’t have to worry about that with me,” I replied.

  After he was arrested in 1967, someone had written about him saying how he couldn’t possibly be a communist because his music was too modern. The Soviets and the Eastern Bloc had believed any modernist music or experimental art to be reactionary.

  Yun I-sang had quit his job as a music teacher at the age of forty to study in France, and later moved to Germany. His wife, Lee Suja, had lived apart from him for five years before joining him in Germany, while their two children grew up in a relative’s home and did not get to see their father for close to ten years.

  In the 1960s, the North Korean embassy in East Germany regularly sent pamphlets and propaganda to South Korean students studying in Europe. These proved fascinating to the young intellectuals who had spent their lives in the echo chamber of the South Korean dictatorship. Yun I-sang visited the North Korean embassy, which happened to be a few subway stops away. Around this time, the painter Yi Eungro, in an incident that broke the hearts of his family and friends, had been lured from Paris to North Korea with a promise that he would be allowed to meet his son who had gone North during the Korean War. Yun I-sang was considered one of the world’s five best contemporary music composers in the West, and Yi Eungro had been famous for combining Korean ink-brush paintings with Western methods and was popular on the biennale circuit.

  There had been others in the so-called “East Berlin Spy Incident,” some of whom were implicated for merely visiting the North Korean embassy out of curiosity; others actually took up the North Koreans’ offer to host them in the country. The territory remains inaccessible under the National Security Act, and the Cold War did not make things easier at the time. In contrast, West Germany cultiv
ated a policy of engagement that encouraged its citizens to contact and interact with East Germans. If anything, it was the East Germans who were wary of contact, but they were authorizing four-day passes for those who had family living in the West—a far cry from South Korea’s policy of total separation. They even allowed single-day visas for foreign visitors.

  Yun I-sang was not really a political person to begin with. He became a pro-democracy advocate after his run-in with the South Korean government made him realize the extent of our plight. He has always said that his visit to North Korea was for two reasons. One was that he wanted to catch up with his friend, the leftist composer Kim Sun-nam, from whom he had been separated since the war. Kim went North just before the Korean War broke out and later studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where his work was lauded by Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian, famous for composing the ballet Spartacus. Khachaturian in particular urged Kim to request asylum in the USSR at the time of the state purge of the Workers’ Party of South Korea, but he refused and returned to North Korea where he was stripped of his privileges and died of an illness soon after. Yun I-sang, who was the same age as Kim, never forgot Kim’s talent and legendary social engagement following Korea’s Liberation in 1945 from Japanese occupation, which was why he wanted to see his friend one last time. Of course, once Yun I-sang arrived in Pyongyang, not only could he not see his friend, but he discovered it was forbidden to even mention Kim’s name in public.

  The other reason he went to North Korea was that he wanted to see the ancient Goguryeo murals with his own eyes; a Japanese publisher had just brought out a book of vivid color pictures of these tomb paintings. Yun I-sang understood modern Western music as a deconstruction of the past and a recombination with Eastern influences. He attempted to expand Western music by introducing into it the rhythms, improvisational character, and five-tone scale of Korean folk, classical, and court music. The photographs of the Goguryeo murals had instantly inspired new musical forms in his mind. The blue dragon, white tiger, red phoenix, and black tortoise were turned into variations on a theme, the music capturing the dance and flight of these fantastical animals.

  I completely understood what this old artist meant when he said he had only wanted to meet his friend and see the wondrous murals. Unlike now, when South Koreans are allowed to freely travel the world, anyone stepping out of the de facto island that was our peninsula back then experienced something akin to a panic attack, brought on not by homesickness but rather the overwhelming sense of freedom that we encountered on foreign soil. And yet this freedom has the effect of isolating the traveler from their normal space and time. In an intellectual, moreover, it triggers a feeling of humiliation and defeat. In your attempt to escape the consciousness of the peninsula, you suddenly begin to think you are no different from the Europeans around you. You forget, strangely enough, the virulently anti-communist country you came from. That is how a perfectly sane and worldly intellectual can take one look at a piece of North Korean propaganda and cross the border, heart aflutter, despite the threat of prison or execution back home. Those who had family in Japan or happened to have a relative who was forced into labor during the war, or those who crossed the sea border by mistake while fishing and spent time trapped in North Korea before being returned, or those who drunkenly mouthed off about politics at a bar, their tongues loosened by makgeolli, an everyman’s rice brew—all kinds of people have served time and later successfully sued the government for imprisoning them under fabricated charges. I consider myself fortunate, but nothing can compensate me or my family for the years we lost in suffering.

  The East Berlin Spy Incident came about when a South Korean youth, studying in Germany, visited North Korea and then turned himself in when he came back to Seoul. South Korean operatives trussed it up as an organized espionage effort. They carried out a secret investigation and concocted a list of people, some of whom they lured to one location only to haul them off to the South Korean embassy and others whom they called on in person to invite them to a fake Liberation event being held in the home country, going so far as to accompany them on the plane ride back to Seoul, where they were promptly arrested. Many people’s lives were destroyed in this way like so much tissue paper—just the few stories here are tragic enough. This is the net we have woven under the North–South division, a net that traps us to this day.

  Yun I-sang said to me before we parted, “Thank you for coming to see me. I’m aware that even calling me on the phone is grounds for interrogation when you get back to Korea.”

  “I couldn’t leave Berlin without seeing you. I would have been too ashamed to face my friends back home.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he replied in a low voice, “but I do intend to help North Korea … as people of the same blood. They need to open their doors and step out into the world.”

  I thought I would never see him again, but Yun I-sang called me the next day, asking to meet for lunch. He was seated with an old German couple when I got there. The woman was the novelist Luise Rinser, who would have been in her mid-seventies at the time. Her eyes sparkled with mischievous curiosity and her firm lips and high cheekbones gave her an air of formidable will and perhaps stubbornness. I knew her, of course, from reading contemporary German literature. Her novel Nina (Mitte des Lebens), published in 1950, had been translated into Korean by Jeon Hye-lin, who worked as a translator and essayist after returning to Korea from her studies in Munich but committed suicide just as she turned thirty. Many young, bookish women who read this translation ended up applying to German literature departments for college. But Rinser’s life was not as glamorous as they may have thought. Her first husband, an orchestra conductor, died on the Russian front, and she herself had been incarcerated while resisting the Nazis. Her third husband was the contemporary composer Carl Orff, but they had divorced. Orff and Yun I-sang were friends, and Rinser even published a book of her conversations with Yun I-sang, titled The Wounded Dragon.

  Rinser visited Korea for the first time in 1975. Her impressions of that trip, compared to her account of her North Korean visit in 1980, were extremely negative. Korean conservatives still call her a communist and a puppet of Kim Il-sung’s regime, but she really wasn’t a communist. If anything, she was an extreme environmentalist who once ran as the presidential candidate for the German Greens. Her Nordkoreanisches Reisetagebuch (North Korean travel diary) remains a controversial work in South Korea to this day.

  Rinser visited Korea after Park Chung-hee had abolished term limits for his presidency in 1972 and declared a state of emergency in 1974, arresting students and activists left and right for protesting these measures. Universities were closed indefinitely. Arriving in the midst of such trouble, it’s obvious that Rinser would not have derived a good impression. She managed to elude the agents trailing her and met with many activists and conscientious intellectuals. She also seems to have explored the red-light districts that operated openly in the back alleys of central Seoul and the bars where women wore traditional hanbok, places she referred to as “geisha houses.”

  Rinser visited North Korea in 1980 when South Korea was in the throes of a terrible, tragic time. The mere mention of “Gwangju” inspired anger among the world’s media and artists. Of course, we now detect all sorts of prejudice in her travel writing about North Korea, which tries to treat the socialist idealism of the dictatorship objectively, making it somewhat different in tone from, say, André Gide’s conclusions in Return from the USSR. I will say more about this later. But, whenever someone asked me what it was like visiting North Korea, I always said, “I was moved, and I despaired.” Then I would add, “I was moved by the resilience of the North Korean people who created a self-sustaining way of life out of the ashes of war, and I despaired over the viselike control of the North Korean government.”

  Rinser asked me if I was going to return to Korea, and, as I had no other plans, I said yes. She suggested I apply for asylum instead.

  I w
as adamant in my refusal. “I have to go back to where they speak my mother tongue.”

  It was not until much later that I realized how naïve and preposterous those words were. She was silent for a moment after Yun I-sang interpreted for me, and then said in a cheerful voice, “Well, if you want to spend some time overseas, you ought to learn some German or English first.”

  I met her again on the summit of Paektu Mountain during the First Pan-Korean National Conference in 1990. Even then I would never have dreamed that the world was about to grow worse. But a crueler age was headed toward us, an age of widespread and indiscriminate bloodshed brought on by ideological and religious conflicts, by imperialist desires disguised as civil wars.

  About a week into my sojourn in Berlin, I was hailed at an event by Jochen Hiltmann and his Korean wife, the painter Song Hyun-sook. They had visited me in Gwangju a year before, on their way from visiting Song’s home in Damyang. Song had read my novels and wanted to meet me.

  A professor at an art school in Hamburg, Hiltmann was also working as an editor and critic at an art magazine and had quit sculpting in favor of photography and videography. He demonstrated against the Vietnam War when he was young and had lost his job because of it, and also used to be a Maoist. He was shy when I teased him about it, and said the most he did as a Maoist was sew himself a corduroy version of their distinctive jackets. Hiltmann was his wife’s biggest supporter and promoter. He loathed the contemporary sculpture in the streets of Germany and went as far as to say, “I quit sculpture because of those horrors.” He used all sorts of amusing words to express his hatred of the random pieces of steel and stone that stood in for sculpture in front of the buildings of Seoul.