Bonifacio, Rizal, the Kaiser and the Frankfurt Book Fair

Germany, I believe, is the perfect stage for this moment,” declared Senator Loren Legarda, speaking of the coming-of-age of Filipino writers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the biggest, oldest, and certainly the most influential publishing event in the world. The Philippines has just been named its prestigious “guest of honor” for 2025.

(In case you need to book your tickets to witness this once-in-a-lifetime event, the Frankfurt Book Fair takes place from Oct. 15 to 19 at Frankfurt am Main in Germany.)

The Philippines and Germany have had a long—though mostly imperceptible—intertwined history, beginning with the windows that gleam in the steel San Sebastian cathedral, which were created in Germany’s oldest stained glass workshop, the Dr. H. Oidtmann studio, in the 1880s.

Andres Bonifacio, like Jose Rizal, learned German, too. He worked until the outbreak of the Philippine Revolution in 1896 in the warehouse of the cement brick and tile factory of Carl Victor Fressel, a native of Hanover. The notes on Fressel & Co. indicate that Bonifacio made its bodega a sort of “library and study room” where he may have actually plotted the course of the secret society, the Katipunan.

It would be Jose Rizal, however, who would epitomize the Filipino in Germany. His novel Noli Me Tangere would see print in Berlin—but its last chapters were written in the small town of Wilhemsfeld outside Heidelberg. That book would inspire not just Bonifacio but his entire generation and would, consequently, light the fuse for Asia’s first revolution. Indeed, how many countries have charted their destiny because of the printed word?

But there were other intriguing chapters in our shared history with Germany. Documents unearthed in the 1950s, seized by the Allies in the Fall of Berlin, revealed that there was much more than meets the eye. Author and ambassador Leon Ma. Guerrero had studied these papers that shed light on the “provocative conduct of the German naval squadron” at the time of the Battle of Manila Bay, a counterweight so it seems between the American admiral Dewey and his Spanish adversary, Montojo. Amid the fog of war, the German naval force was a mysterious but important presence. Guerrero recounts, “When Dewey called on the German vice-admiral Otto Von Diederichs and ventured to ask the reason for such a large squadron, he clicked his heels and curtly replied: “I am here, sir, by order of the Kaiser.” The Kaiser’s own marginal notes on the recently revealed reports bear this out.

In fact, Von Diederichs paid a crucial visit to the Spanish governor-general Basilio Agustin y Davila and he, in turn, called on the German officer. Guerrero even reports that Aguinaldo also tried to send an emissary to the admiral’s flagship in the person of the German Prince von Lowenstein but bad weather prevented the mission.

What would have happened, indeed, if instead of the United States Asiatic Squadron, it would have been the Germans who would have triumphed in 1898?

Senator Loren Legarda posed this thought-provoking question at the recent visit of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s representatives and media delegation who, in true Germanic fashion, were eager to studiously absorb and grasp Filipino culture.

Legarda has been a relentless advocate for the Philippines to take the plum position at the Frankfurt Book Fair, working on it since she first hit upon the idea a decade ago in 2015. (She is no stranger to picking difficult challenges, having led the country back to the art world’s Olympics, the Venice Biennale, after over 50 years’ absence.)

The Senator made a pilgrimage to Wilhemsfeld in 2019, as part of her research, to the home of Karl Ullmer, the pastor who provided Rizal shelter while he completed the Noli. (Legarda admitted that she has never been afraid of dreaming of the impossible—and after discovering that the property had been placed on the market, she is now in the thick of raising funds to acquire the Ullmer’s vicarage for the Filipino people. She ‘manifests’ continuously the setting up of a Sentro Rizal on José-Rizal-Strasse, the street where Rizal once lived, and that has now been renamed for our most beloved national hero.)

The Ullmer family, in cooperation with the German Embassy, has brought home a variety of Rizal’s belongings that were once in this home: his violin and his ebony walking stick, his plates and glasses, and even the bed he slept on. (These may all be viewed at the National Historical Commission’s Rizal Shrine in Fort Santiago.)

Legarda muses out loud, “More treasures reside in the Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin which houses Philippine artifacts that Dr. Rizal gave to his friend, Dr. Adolf Bastian.” Bastian, incidentally, was the scholar who founded the museum and was its first curator. He was also the intellectual who pioneered the idea of ‘elementary ideas’ that unite all peoples with their commonality.

She continues, “When I first saw them in 2013—a handwoven piña baro and pañuelo, a Bagobo dress, a Mandaya baby basket, and a T’boli abaca skirt— did not see relics, but enduring proof of our people’s artistry and ingenuity. They remind us that diplomacy can also be woven, sung, or carved to speak across borders, embodying what I believe is our soft power in its purest form: the power to imagine together.”

Legarda wound up with a revealing personal tale, “I was born in a beautiful old house in Malabon. Mango trees planted by my grandmother, Lola Mameng, still stand in the garden, where she often shared stories about her father—Ariston Gella—who served in the Malolos Congress that drafted the first Philippine Constitution—the first republican constitution in Asia. My grandfather, Joe Bautista, was editor-in-chief of The Manila Times and naturally filled that house with books, ideas, and healthy debates. That home was built by Otto Johns Scheerer, a German ethnologist who made the Philippines his home in the late 1800s, who helped in the development of Baguio and Benguet, was appointed the first Governor of Batanes, and was professor emeritus of the German language in the University of the Philippines.” At this recollection, Legarda’s voice cracked with emotion and she became teary-eyed.

Jose Rizal was, after all, clearly a spiritual child of the German nation—not for him the political maneuverings of a Pedro Paterno or a Marcelo H. del Pilar in Madrid, nor the bright kaleidoscope of a Juan Luna in Paris. Rizal was solemn and serious and so, in all truth, is Senator Legarda who, without realizing it, began her life’s journey in a German home.