‘The Last Class’

Korean and Japanese elderly people may remember learning a story, “The Last Class,” originally “La Derniere Classe,” in elementary school.

The story was written by French novelist Alphonse Daudet with the background of Alsace-Lorraine at the France-Germany border. I still remember when my Japanese teacher, pointing at me, the only student who had Korean parents in the class, said that students may assume Alsace as Korea and Germany as Japan to understand the text easily.

Japan was busy then invading Asian countries and attempting to teach Japanese to Koreans.

I hated my teacher and daydreamed myself to be the French boy Franz. Much later in 1996, however, I paid a visit to the retired teacher in Nagano Prefecture.

The old man said, “I hope you won’t hate Japan.”

“The Last Class” is narrated by Franz. After Germany took over Alsace and Lorraine from France, Berlin has ordered that German language instead of French be taught in schools.

It was the last day of their French teacher M. Hamel. He was full of grief, nostalgia and patriotism.

M. Hamel said to the class, “This is the last class we learn French in the Alsace-Lorraine. We must learn German instead.” After M. Hamel has emphasized how beautiful and wonderful a language French was, he wrote on the blackboard in large letters “Vive La France!” Then the French teacher silently dismissed the class.

The Alsace-Lorraine region was a territory created by the German Empire in 1871, and it annexed most of Alsace and Lorraine following its victory in the Franco-Prussian War.

The territory encompassed 93 percent of Alsace and 26 percent of Lorraine, while the rest of these regions remained part of France.

Since 2016, the historical territory is now part of the French administrative region of Grand Est.

When we learned the story from the textbook, we felt sorry for the Alsace people that the region had been alternatively occupied by the two neighboring enemy countries and had to learn French and German alternatively.

After the establishment of the European Union, however, the residents rather belatedly noticed that they were perfectly bilingual. This now makes the people of Alsace and Lorraine highly active in the business and cultural fields.

Now in Korea, there are far more Koreans fluent in English than English-speaking people who understand Korean literature. There are far more Koreans who have good command of Japanese than vice versa.

There are some 450,000 welloff Koreans who are active in the business and culture sectors in Japan.