Jürgen Hinzpeter and Foreign Correspondents in the 1980 Kwangju Uprising

Abstract

German journalist Jürgen Hinzpeter won the 2003 Song Kun-ho Press Award for his reporting of the 1980 Kwangju Uprising. He was also the subject of documentaries and the 2017 hit movie A Taxi Driver, which credit him as the first journalist to expose the Kwangju Uprising to the world. In fact, Hinzpeter was one of many journalists who revealed what had happened at Kwangju. Since the production of the 2003 documentary Hinzpeter – the Blue-Eyed Witness to May 1980, interest in the many other foreign journalists who covered Kwangju has been elided, raising the question of why only Hinzpeter's contribution is remembered and celebrated. Using ideas about historical memory developed by Paul Cohen, I argue that a narrative about Hinzpeter's actions in Kwangju has emerged, which has little to do with who first broke the news of the Kwangju Uprising. The story of Hinzpeter's relationship with the South Korean democratization movement as well as the film he shot of the moment Kwangju citizens seized power and established an alternative government to military rule – have become important weapons for the activist generation in an ongoing struggle over the memorialization of the Kwangju Uprising.