Myou can watch North Korean TV even if you’re not there. There is a stream on the internet. “This service is for research and self-study,” it says. The provider writes that he is spreading this to draw attention to the risks posed by North Korea. For me, the stream is something else: a tunnel into the parallel world that the dictator family Kim has come up with for their country. We know practically nothing about the estimated 25 million people who live in this parallel world. You can’t just email, tweet, or make international calls. We out here just see them the way dictator Kim Jong-un wants them to be: in step at military parades, either cheering ecstatically or weeping hysterically during his speeches.

On visits to North Korea, I rarely got close to these people. I’ve seen them from afar in Pyongyang, going to work in the morning with flashlights because there aren’t streetlights everywhere. In the fields they harvest the grain with sickles because there are no machines. Ordinary people doing ordinary things but unlucky enough to be born in North Korea. There they are showered with propaganda 24 hours a day. You know nothing but this artificial reality. What’s this life like, in the tunnel?

Kim is conspicuously often given groceries on television, which he examines with a scrutinizing glance and is obviously delighted.

“Good morning! It’s Sunday, our TV program starts now,” says the announcer in the purple blazer. She bows, her hairspray cemented updo not moving an inch. Above her heart she wears a red pin with two portraits: Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, dictator generation one and two, grandpa and dad of the current Kim. The announcer announces the program. All programs from 9 a.m. in the morning to 10.30 p.m. in the evening. Nothing is sent at night, just a test image. Not that the North Koreans have much choice. There are said to be four channels in Pyongyang, but only Korean Central Television, as the state television is called in English, broadcasts reliably throughout the country.

A treat for the beasts

After the program preview, a few landscape shots are played, accompanied by marching music, then it starts. A documentation. “Animals from all over the world”. I’m eagerly awaiting a kind of North Korean David Attenborough whispering and stalking a lion. But the animals from all over the world are behind bars in the Pyongyang Zoo. This is of course practical, since no ordinary North Korean is allowed to travel abroad anyway. Why arouse desires? Kim, I learn, receives many animals as gifts from his many admirers. And the Marshal, as they call him here, is generous enough to share them with the amazed zoo visitors. Just like the two “Caucasian Ovcharka”. A Russian politician from the Amur province probably thought the dogs were just right for the dictator and gave them to him in 2017. Wikipedia describes the breed as “hardy”, with legs about the size of a human lower leg. Secure fencing is a “basic requirement” because the breed “takes guarding their property very seriously.” On the screen, while I’m contemplating what one might want to express with such a gift, a girl on her pink tricycle looks into the cage with squinted eyebrows. Her grandmother tosses a treat through the grate and waves at the beasts.