E2024-G085

Tales from the Outside: Foreign Witnesses’ Accounts of the May 18 Democratic Uprising

Narrative

Several foreigners were in Gwangju at the time of the May 18 Democratic Uprising. They helped to document and spread word of the events to the outside world, despite the city itself being locked down and the government attempting to keep the incident under wraps. Among them were reporters, such as Bradley Martin of the Baltimore Sun, Jürgen Hinzpeter (1937-2016) of the German ARD, and Norman Thorpe of the Wall Street Journal. There were also members of the Peace Corps, including Paul Courtright, David Dolinger, William Amos, and Tim Warnberg, among others.

Thorpe took photos inside the interior of the provincial office after martial law forces subdued the civilian militia there and before it could be cleaned up, while Jürgen Hinzpeter's story later became the basis for the 2017 hit film, A Taxi Driver. Amos wrote a book inspired by the events, named The Seed of Joy, while Courtright and Dolinger documented the events in their memoirs, Witnessing Gwangju and Called by Another Name: A Memoir of the Gwangju Uprising, respectively.