Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Second, much of B. Philippi’s written legacy has been lost, leaving his persona and intentions open to speculation and projection. Finally, B. Philippi masterfully coopted an incongruous miscellany of agendas and has, consequently, been fondly appropriated by various groups.

We know of the contents of B. Philippi’s original petition to the government indirectly, through quotes and related texts of his.¹² We may at least speculate from that scarce evidence that B. Philippi skillfully orchestrated his readers’ responses by adjusting his rhetoric to the agendas of his audiences.¹³ Playing on the interest of the decision-making Chilean government officials in the military consolidation of national territory, he proposed the initiation of a German immigration project: “I got a memorandum into the hands of the government with the help of the intendant of Valdivia at that time, Colonel García, which concerned itself with a military colony on the border”¹⁴ (G. Schwarzenberg 44; trans. Young, Germans 49). B. Philippi’s use of the word “border” is suggestive, as the border in question lay within the borders of the Republic of Chile. The territory of Chile put forth in the constitution of 1833 encompassed the area west of the Andes and as far south as Cape Horn (Parentini, “Araucanía” 67), far to the south of the “border” to which B. Philippi refers. That border was an intra-Chilean construct: La Frontera, “The Border” with a capital “B,” situated about 60 present-day miles north of the city of Valdivia, marked the boundary with the Araucanía, an area between the rivers Bíobío and Toltén that was then still defended by the Mapuche peoples.¹⁵ The Araucanía effectively divided the country until its final conquest by the Chilean military in 1883 (Guevara 441–480).

Despite this political reality—to say the least, an irksome problem of contested territorial sovereignty in the eyes of the Chilean government—a German foreign legion or paramilitary settlement along the Frontera was an unlikely proposal. For one thing, several of the seventeen original Spanish forts of Valdivia (restored in 1770 for the war with England) were still garrisoned at the time of B. Philippi’s petition. Contemporary accounts, such as that of one Dr. Mösta to his parents, seem to suggest that the forts were being actively maintained: “The next morning we were awakened by the drumming of the soldiers who had recently been transferred here”¹⁶ (B. Philippi, Nachrichten 86).