The Marmot’s Hole

The widow of world-famous Korean-German composer Yun Isang would like to see her husband’s honor restored:

Lee Soo-ja, 79, widow of renowned composer Isang Yun, appeared nervous when the conference room was packed with journalists from South Korea; a place she had stayed away from for more than three decades but now wants to revisit any time soon, when her husband’s honor is restored.
“Everyday, I hope that the South Korean government would restore the honor of the artist who was so dedicated to the Korean people, so that his spirit could finally visit his hometown,” she said during the press conference.
Lee was the center of attention during a ceremony here from Friday through Sunday to pay tribute to her late husband (1917-1995). North Korean officials carried her bags around, and South Korean cameras rallied around her.

Yun, as you probably know, was abducted from Berlin by South Korean agents in 1967 for involvement in the so-called “East Berlin Spy Incident” and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was later released after Seoul bowed to widespread international condemnation. While Yun had visited the North Korean embassy in East Berlin and even went to Pyongyang in 1963, it has yet to be proven that his collaboration with North Korea went anywhere beyond that. At least until the point of his kidnapping. About Yun, Aidan Foster-Carter wrote:

Another individual’s trajectory - make that tragic story - may help cast light on what all this was like. Yun Isang was one of the luckier ones. As the only modern Korean composer of international fame, he had distinguished musicians around the world campaigning for his release. Freed after a year, his health broken by ill-treatment, he returned to exile in Germany. Now an implacable foe of the regime that had so abused him, he did become, as he had not been before, pro-North. Kim Il-sung wooed him: invited him to Pyongyang, named a music academy for him, had his works performed. (An intriguing blend of Western modernist and oriental styles, this must be a breath of fresh air amid all the Kimist kitsch.)
I met Yun Isang, and talked to him at some length. He was no communist; but he was bitter, and proud. One thing he was proud of was that his son or daughter (I forget which) had married a North Korean: “So you see,” he quipped, “at least in my family I have reunified my country.” That was in the 1980s. Later, with democracy restored, he hoped to go home; but the Southern government demanded more by way of apology than he was prepared to yield. He died in 1995, still an exile. Only recently was the ban on his music in South Korea lifted - though I don’t think it ever extended to the official anthem of Dong-A University, the leading school in Busan and Yun’s alma mater. Isn’t all this mad, bad, and sad?

Said Yun’s widow:

“From the time he was studying in Japan before coming to West Germany, my husband had very strong affection toward Korean people and was very keen on the sense of justice,” Lee said. “The [East Berlin Spy Incident] case changed his thinking, music, ideology, everything. He felt the reality and pains of the nation’s division so directly. After that, his music became heavy, he composed music that reflected Korean people’s agony.”

Frankly, this leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. Don’t get me wrong—the South should definitely apologize for kidnapping the guy and restore his honor. But I have to ask how much “honor” the guy has left. A lot of people took abuse during the 60s, 70s and 80s. Not all of them, however, responded by getting buddy-buddy with an even bigger despot. Kim Dae-jung was driven off the road in an assassination attempt, kidnapped during another assassination attempt, sentenced to die after watching his hometown stormed after an army siege and sent into exile. But he never responded by collaborating with the North. When Rep. (and Gyeonggi-do gubernatorial candidate) Kim Mun-su was arrested in 1986, he got to “feel the reality and pains of the nation’s division so directly” when police introduced him to the fine arts of water torture, electrical torture and the beating of the genitals. After that he got two-and-a-half years in the pen to reminisce about it. And who knows—perhaps he did flirt with North Korea back then; a lot of folk did, especially in the circles he ran in. But he sure as hell ain’t “pro-North Korean” now. I could see how Yun—if for nothing else than out of anger—might have snuggled up to Kim Il-sung and Co. after 1967. That would have been natural. But between then and 1995, when he died, surely he could have seen that the Workers’ Paradise wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Apparently, however, he didn’t, and his widow resides in Pyongyang to this day. Now, I know full well it’s easy to pass judgment when I myself never went through the kind of ordeal Yun was forced to suffer. But still, even if Seoul does the right thing and restores his “honor,” there will—at least to me—be something decidedly “dishonorable” about the man.