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collapse immediately? Practically, it would be too dangerous and chaotic. I’d retain North Korea as a kind of special zone and gradually solve problems. I’m not a utopian . Here I’m very realistic. Because West Germany made a mistake: they just threw an incredible amount of money into East Germany – as I remember, around 70,000 euros per person – and the effect was zero. So now East Germany has the most modern, more than the West, phone system and trains, but the whole social structure is still much less productive.
    And another problem is that there was no shared cultural project. For example, do you know a North Korean film, which they tried to show abroad? It is a famous film, Pulgasari , directed by Kim Jong-Il. It is about a big monster who helps the people but then demands victims, and the most beautiful girl sacrifices herself for the people, to be eaten. Well, it was even available for a while in the United States, with a small distributor. It was perhaps Kim’s biggest attempt. I even have a book published in English by Kim Jong-Il – On the Art of the Cinema – and it’s wonderful because it mixes political phrases with total platitudes. I love this.
    I also saw recently a North Korean film, The Schoolgirl’s Diary , which was released in France at the end of 2007. It’s about a teenage girl who is always sad because her father is away traveling all the time for the devotion to his country. But then her father comes home and explains to her that Kim Jong-Il, the general, is also a human like us – and then the father died at the end of the film. And this teenage girl is so glad and says to the father: “Now I know that you are not here, but I didn’t lose a father, I gained another father. Now I have two fathers, you and Kim Jong-Il.” It’s crazy. If you look at university locations or apartments in the movie, you would have thought that it was an upper-middle-class standard for everyone. In the 1990s, at least 10 percent of the people died from hunger. How did they manage it without any serious rebellions? I know that they are extremely brutal and totalitarian.
    My leftist friend, a Chinese philosopher, showed me a photocopy of a textbook for an elementary school in North Korea. They are taught that their leader Kim Jong-Il is so clean that he doesn’t shit or urinate. They don’t explain how, but he just doesn’t. This phenomenon always bothers me. Of course they don’t believe it, but nonetheless, on some deeper strange level, they take them seriously. This is my big obsession: people don’t mean all these things, yet nonetheless they are crucial.
    Let me give you an example. If a rich friend invites you to a restaurant, when the bill comes, of course, it’s polite for you to say, “No, please, I will pay. Or let us split.” But you both know that you just have to insist a little bit to be polite, and what’s so interesting is that we both know this is a game. The most elementary level of symbolic exchange is a so-called “empty gesture,” an offer made or meant to be rejected. It is not hypocrisy; it works in some way. Then there are rules and meanings I am aware of, but have to act on the outside as if I am not aware of them – dirty or obscene innuendos which one passes over in silence in order to maintain the proper appearances.
    Isn’t there a beautiful young ballet dancer in North Korea? But why does North Korea allow this? Do they take her money? What is her status? Somehow they don’t criticize her as a traitor but, rather, they use her as a symbol of brotherhood. This also fascinates me.
    Is it true that, on the southern side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in Korea, there is a unique visitor’s site, which can be seen from South Korea, with a theater building with a large screen-like window in front? In front of this theater has been built a completely fake model village with beautiful houses and nicely painted walls, and the people there are even give better clothes