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

They were the first immigrants of B. Philippi’s colonization project, who had departed from Germany in April 1846, that is, one month before the publication of the essay by Wappäus. B. Philippi, for his part, circulated his pamphlets among German émigrés in Chile and persuaded the first individuals to settle near the town of Valdivia beginning as early as 1842.²⁷ In the meantime, several communications between the local administration and the government in Santiago resulted in a government contract for B. Philippi to survey the Valdivian hinterland, map the lake, and project the best route of a new road to Chiloé. B. Philippi started traversing the province and reporting on his findings in early 1843 (Held, Colonización 11–14).

I offer this vignette of textual permutations and the ways in which simple adjustments impacted the reception of texts in order to propose that writings about the colony of Llanquihue, and the distribution of these writings to multiple readers, were major constituents of the German colonization project in Chile. The process that gave rise to the founding of the German settlement was primarily a consolidation of disparate narrative strategies, rhetorics, and discourses that were played out in writing—that is, dispersed and received, copied and suppressed, quoted and censored, critiqued, disproved, and coopted—and I would argue hence that the colony came into being as text in a host of writings. I take Braun Menéndez’s metaphor of B. Philippi as an “author” of the national colony, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, quite literally. B. Philippi’s penmanship was decisive for his later inscription as the founder figure of the colony. Yet crediting B. Philippi with the invention of the colony, as many authors continue to do, falls short of a rigorous analysis of the inscriptive processes that created it and tends to reiterate the myths that have lent it cohesion. Rather, I argue throughout the following chapters that B. Philippi’s particular inscriptions of territory invented his own status as founder. The powerful metaphor of the founder was (and continues to be) coopted by other authors because it grounded the settlement in a myth of origin and gives cohesion to the host of texts that constitute the notion of a homogeneous national colony.