Austrian explores ennui of war missing

By Philip Iglauer

A Korea-born Austrian writer explores the ennui of family members of war missing and their struggle to come to terms with the past in her 2008 book Frozen Time (Die gefrorene Zeit), which was recently translated into English by Ariadne Press in the United States.

In close cooperation with the Goethe Institute in Korea, the Austrian Embassy in Korea brought Kim to Seoul to promote her book, a documentary-style fictional account of the disappearance of a man’s wife, with a reading in English at Seoul Square in Seoul, Oct. 20.

Set shortly after the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the disappearance may or may not in fact be a kidnapping by an Albanian/Serbian paramilitary group.

Kim said kidnapping during the war was an instrument of ethnic cleansing used to terrorize populations and force people to flee their homes.

But Frozen Time is not about the Balkan wars of the 1990s, she said, but about a specific aspect of the war on specific people. “It is not really about the war in Kosovo but about missing people,” Kim said in an interview with The Korea Times.

She developed the story through participating in Red Cross interviews with the victims of kidnappings. “I interviewed many families whose relatives were ‘disappeared,’ and I heard similar things from them, that they could not find closure,” Kim said. “They cannot move forward. They are stuck in the past.”

Kim, 34, was born in Korea and spent some years in Germany from age 2, before moving to Austria when her professor father accepted a teaching position at a university in Vienna. Her other work includes Die Bildspur (Tray of Paintings), Kim’s first published novel, and an essay about post-colonialism in Greenland.

Her fourth work is Anatomie Einer Nacht (Anatomy of A Night), a novel based on the true story of the simultaneous but unrelated suicides of 11 Inuit in a small town in Greenland and is due out in Autumn 2012 by German publisher Suhrkamp Verlag.