뉴스레터

From a medical student to an independence activist

Li Mi-rok(real name: Li Yi-king) was born on March 8, 1899(lunar calendar) in Seoyeongjeong, Haeju-myeon, Haeju-gun, Hwanghae-do. He was born as the youngest of 1 son and 3 daughters between his father Lee Dong-bin, who was very successful as a merchant, and the mother from the Lee clan of Cheongju. From a young age, he learned the full text of the Thousand-Character Text, Sohak, and the Four Books and the Three Classics, as well as all the books of the Tongjian and poetry of the Tang Dynasty. After graduating from Jeil Primary School in Haeju, he studied on his own and entered Gyeongseong Medical College in 1917. On March 1, 1919, when he was in the third year of Gyeongseong Medical College, he participated in the national independence movement. Afterwards, he served as the editor-in-chief of the Korea Youth Diplomatic Corps, a secret organization under the Shanghai Provisional Government established in May 1919, and was in charge of issuing diplomatic newsletters while developing an earnest independence movement.

In August 1919, the Shanghai Provisional Government planned a national independence demonstration on August 29, the anniversary of the National Humiliation Day in 1910(the year of Gyeongsul). At this time, Li Yi-king was in charge of writing, printing and distributing ‘A Warning on the National Humiliation Day.’ However, in November 1919, the secret activities of the Korea Youth Diplomatic Corps were discovered by the Japanese police, and he was chased as a wanted person. With the help of an acquaintance, he defected to Shanghai and worked as a member of the Korean Red Cross under the Provisional Government to train nurses.

Go on the road to exile in Germany!

In April 1920, with the help of Ahn Bong-geun, a cousin of Patriot An Jung-geun, and Brother Nicolas Joseph Marie Wilhelm of the Benedictine Order, who had served as a missionary in Korea, he obtained a Chinese student passport and left Shanghai. On May 26 of that year, he arrived at the Munster Schwarzaha Monastery near Wurzburg, a city in southern Germany, where he began his exile in Germany. On June 29, 1920, he was sentenced to two years in prison for violating the Publication Act in absentia. He stayed in the monastery and learn German on his own. In 1921 he entered the University of Wurzburg and began his studies at the medical school in April 1922 after a one-year audit course. In 1924 he transferred to the University of Heidelberg to continue his medical studies.

However, when he was unable to continue his medical studies due to a serious illness, he transferred to the University of Munich in 1925, changing his major to zoology and philosophy. In February 1927, when he was at the University of Munich, he met Lee Geuk-ro(1893–1978), who was majoring in economics at the University of Berlin (now Humboldt University), and Kim Beop-rin(1899–1964), who was studying philosophy at the Graduate School of Paris, France, in Brussels, Belgium. They participated in the World Oppressed Peoples’ Resolution Conference. They publicized to the world the “problem of Korea,” which is persecuted by Japan’s barbaric aggression and brutal extortion politics. Li Yi-king continued “a life-and-death struggle for ‘freedom,’ the last and only path of human life.”

The Yalu River Flows, which revives the pure rhythm of the human soul

From 1935, Li Yi-king began his life as a full-fledged writer under the pen name Li Mi-rok. His autobiographical story, which began with the short story Suam and Maitreya, was expanded to Reminiscences of a Korean’s Childhood, a story made up of several fragments in June 1942, and finally completed in 1946 with the autobiographical novel The Yalu River Flows. His novel, which was completed over 10 years, completely removed the political and social diaspora experience in Germany, which the writer personally experienced in the midst of the terrible historical scenes from the emergence of the Nazis, the provocation of war, the brutal Holocaust, and the defeat. He just conceived it as “pictures that live in his memory of his childhood, which was peaceful and cozy like a dream.” “His book, written in the language of the heart, conveyed the soul of a people and the feelings of truth with words and sentences that Germans could not find.”

The unique “concise writing style, restrained expression that awakens the soul, and humanity that encourages conviction,” convey “an impression as if unfolding a scroll of silk by a skilled artisan.” Li Mi-rok, in a question asked by Schrift Steller, a magazine of the German Writers Protection League, about the future orientation of German literature in the political, social, and cultural situation dismantled after the war, emphasized that literary people “should sense the breath of the soul that creates(human) primitive rhythm and echo.”    

His last life as an educator

Li Mi-rok, who was invited as an external professor at the University of Munich in 1947 in the Department of Oriental Studies, lectured on Korean language, Korean history, Mencius, and the history of East Asian literature. He devoted himself to education so that German youths in despair after losing the war could grow into “new people by raising the innermost values of the human soul, saving and healing their own lives”, and establishing new philosophies and beliefs. Due to poor health, however, he died as a lonely exile on March 20, 1950, and was buried in a small park cemetery near Munich.