UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Divided: Four States, One Imagination - Discourses on National Division and Unification in Korea and Germany Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/84f9t3nc Author Geipel, Birgit Susanne Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Divided: Four States, One Imagination Discourses on National Division and Unification in Korea and Germany A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature by Birgit Susanne Geipel September 2017 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Kelly Y. Jeong, Chairperson Dr. John Namjun Kim Dr. Hendrik Maier Dr. Sabine Doran Copyright by Birgit Susanne Geipel 2017 The Dissertation of Birgit Susanne Geipel is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I first and foremost would like to thank my advisors Dr. Kelly Jeong, Dr. John Kim, Dr. Sabine Doran and Dr. Hendrik Maier for their support of this project: the dedication of their precious time to countless hours of discussion, their valuable feedback, their enthusiasm and their inspiring teaching. I would also like to thank the Korea Foundation for their support of my research at Seoul National University in 2010/11. There, I was kindly hosted by Dr. Chon Young-Ae, who, together with my former advisor Dr. Sebastian Donat, has sparked my interest in this topic in the first place. Additionally, I want to express my thanks to the Erasmus World Program for enabling my research at Free University of Berlin in 2016/17 and Dr. Naoki Sakai and Dr. Pedro Erber for generously inviting and hosting me as a Visiting Scholar in the East Asia Program of Cornell University in 2017. Furthermore, I am grateful to Dr. Immanuel Kim for his valuable advice on North Korean literature and to Alexandra Yan for many helpful comments. Finally, I would like to thank all friends and colleagues who have encouraged me along the way. Most importantly, I would like to thank my parents and my brother Markus, for supporting me throughout this time. Parts of Chapter 1 and 2 have appeared in an article under the title “Writing at the Ideological Frontline of the Cold War: The Individual and the Divided Nation in Choi In- Hoon’s ‘The Square’ and Uwe Johnson’s ‘Speculations about Jakob’” in SAI 11 (2011). Chapter 4 is forthcoming as a book chapter in: Germany and Korea, edited by Joanne Miyang Choi and Lee Roberts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Divided: Four States, One Imagination Discourses on National Division and Unification in Korea and Germany by Birgit Susanne Geipel Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in Comparative Literature University of California, Riverside, September 2017 Dr. Kelly Y. Jeong, Chairperson The dissertation “Divided: Four States, One Imagination” analyzes discourses on national division and unification in Korea and Germany. It investigates novels and films in Korea and Germany depicted the relation of the individual and society from the formation of new states to the heights of ideological conflict until the restructuring of the world order in the post-Cold War era. In my first and second chapter I analyze two early works of division literature, Uwe Johnson’s Mutmassungen über Jakob (Speculations about Jakob) and Ch’oe In-hun’s Kwangjang (The Square). They depict the quest for an ideal society where the tension between individual and state is resolved. I argue that in both novels the protagonists’ idealism clashes with the reality of division, which is formally represented through the attempt of a dialectic move failing to come to a synthesis due to the lack of a third option. The third chapter discusses impeded communication in the novels Somun ŭi pyŏk (Wall of Rumors) by Yi Ch’ŏng-jun and Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper) by Peter Schneider. In an oppressive environment, which Paik Nak-chung called a “division v system,” I claim, that the characters unsuccessful rejection of interpellation via ideology in protest of a coerced choice exposes the complicated relationship between individual and state. The fourth chapter discusses identity and life narratives in the post-cold war era by putting Brigitte Burmeister’s Unter dem Namen Norma (Code Name: Norma) as a post-unification novel and Kim Nam-ho’s Mannam (Meeting), a North Korean unification novel, in the context of the post-socialist world order. In my last chapter I analyze the depiction of border-space as Foucauldian “heterotopia” in the films Kongdonggyŏngbiguyŏk JSA (dir. Park Chan-wook, Joint Security Area), and Der Himmel über Berlin (dir. Wim Wenders, Wings of Desire). The action of the characters is defined by these places as they try to pass through a liminal stage to attain unity. vi Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………2 Chapter 1 The Search for Truth: Writing against Cold War Dichotomies in Uwe Johnson’s Speculations about Jakob……...........................………………..…....27 Chapter 2 The Death of an Idealist: From Rejection to Transcendence in Ch’oe In-hun’s The Square…....………...………………………………………….…47 Chapter 3 Walled Minds: The Division System in Yi Ch’ŏng-jun’s Wall of Rumor and Peter Schneider’s The Wall Jumper....................72 Chapter 4 Illusions of Unity: Brigitte Burmeister’s Code Name: Norma and Kim Nam-ho’s Meeting as Life Narratives in Unification Literature…….............................................................105 Chapter 5 The Border as a Space of Otherness: Representations of Liminality in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and Park Chan-wook’s Joint Security Area…...…..132 Conclusion………………………………………………………...……………...……160 Bibliography………………………………...……………………………………...….165 vii List of Figures Fig. 1: East Side Gallery, Berlin………………………………………1 viii Fig. 1: East Side Gallery, Berlin 1 Introduction Walking along the East Side Gallery in Germany’s capital a watchful observer might find amongst the colorful graffiti and paintings decorating the remnants of the Berlin Wall, this single line of Korean writing: “Uri ŭi sowŏnŭn t’ong’il” (Our wish is unification). The author, most probably a South Korean tourist, has mindfully subtitled in English: “Our wish is unification of North and South Korea.” The snapshot above portrays a piece of the wall that has undergone a double transformation: a material remnant of the Cold War and a symbol of division turned into a piece of art and a symbol of unification. But today it is a reminder of the enduring division in another place and the wish for future change. In one frame we find past, present and future. It shows the politics of the border space and imprinted into its very surface the artistic articulations of the emotions sparked by the political situation. The awareness of a lingering “not yet” implied by the last addition to the Wall might strike the involved observer as painful; it is what we can call, following Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, the ‘punctum’1 of the picture. National division has raised emotions reaching beyond economic and political reason, of home, family and belonging, which politics and state power quickly learned to exploit. In this respect Korea and Germany share a similar fate: they were both divided in the aftermath of World War II. Despite all cultural and historical differences Korean and German people faced a common dilemma: In the split the former putative unity of nation and state dissolved and the question of national identity in the bizarre constellation, ‘one 1 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 8. 2 nation, two states,’ acquired a new complexity. The divide was dictated by the establishment of two opposing state ideologies which forced the people to choose either side, entailing an ideological commitment. Thus, the external geopolitical division became also an internal problem of identity. The importance of the Cold War era of national division has not only been recognized in its historical and geopolitical dimension in separate studies about both nations, but it is also exactly this difference of unified Germany and not/not yet unified Korea after 1989 that has prompted comparative approaches of the German and Korean situation. Almost all of these comparisons are conducted by the social sciences. Given the suddenness of change in Germany a lot of comparative research on national division and unification issues was bound to be very target oriented. From the 1990s until now, Korean scholars writing on this topic mirrored the growing German pessimism about the achievement of unification. While the sudden change in the German situation triggered comparative research in the social sciences, such as international relations, politics, anthropology or sociology, but it has not taken place in literature studies. This lack of a comparative scholarly research on national division and unification in the literary domain seems odd, since national division and unification are prevalent topics in German, and especially Korean, literature and film. Yet, in contrast to the considerable variety of comparative approaches in other disciplines, literary scholars stayed within the borders of one nation, keeping the Korean and German literatures apart from each other and a similar comparative analysis has not yet been undertaken as a larger project. Some prefaces of translated novels and a handful of essays and 3 commentaries point to the possibility of a comparison, but most scholars stay away from the topic referring to historical and cultural differences that supposedly make direct comparison unproductive, if not impossible. Specifically the following two differences are often listed to justify the reluctance of considering German and Korean literature within one research project: the roles in World War II with Germany as the aggressor and Korea, as a colony of Japan and Germany’s unification versus Korea’s ongoing division. Sylvia Bräsel, a scholar of German literature who is also committed to German-Korean literary exchange, for example, advocates this standpoint in her essay “Erfinden und Erinnern.