Kim Jong Il biographers appear to be conflicted about the young man’s whereabouts in the year 1960. Was the nineteen-year-old future leader traveling around the German Democratic Republic, or was he getting things rolling at the university in Pyongyang which still bears his father’s name? Or perhaps both? His official biography, in any case, has him firmly at Kim Il Sung University. I don’t have a definitive answer, but I do have a new clue, […]
Mike Madden at North Korea Leadership Watch, the premiere web resource for Pyongyang court politics, today conveys news of a new memoir which has appeared: Kim Jong-ryul, a former KPA [Korean People’s Army] Colonel and employee of Kim Il-sung’s secretariat (and perhaps KJI’s Personal Secretariat), has told his story to two Austrian journalists and released a memoir in German Im Dienst des Diktators: Leben und Flucht eines nordkoreanischen Agenten (In the Service of the Dictator:The […]
In my own archive, a very delicious sentence has crossed my palette and I simply cannot help but post it for the delectation of the Germanophones, or for those bridging into the Teutonic, or for those who may be commemorating the fall of the wall (le chute de l’mur, der Fall des verdammten Mauers), or for those who want to know that Asian historians have a righteous seat to warm in the Berlin archives. It […]
