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

The series contained thousands of pages of mimeographed documents related to German immigration into Southern Chile, gathered and transcribed over a lifetime by Emilio Held Winkler (1898–1996), who was himself descended from a German immigrant family. His donation of large parts of his collection to the Liga Chileno-Alemana in Santiago prompted the creation of the repository in 1985.

Reading the letter, it became clear to me very quickly that Rudolf Philippi had an unfavorable opinion of Alexander Simon. Indeed, he evidently considered the painter a harmful influence on German immigration and on the image of the German settlements in Chile. The information he provided to Luis Montt marginalized Simon’s role in the making of the German-Chilean community. R. Philippi had met Simon personally only once, briefly, in Italy. However, after Simon was murdered in Magallanes, R. Philippi had privileged access to Simon’s private papers. As Simon was in the employ of the Chilean government at the time of his violent death—he had been hired by Bernhard Philippi, then governor of Magallanes, to document the area—his papers had come into the possession of the Chilean government. They had been sitting in a corner at the Ministry of the Interior unnoted, but when Simon’s widow asked for her late husband’s belongings to be handed over to her, the minister turned to R. Philippi to inventory Simon’s portfolio prior to its return. R. Philippi thus came to familiarize himself with the contents of Simon’s private papers.

In his description of Simon to Luis Montt, R. Philippi offers an unflattering personality assessment stemming from his intimate knowledge of Simon’s private papers: “Simon thought that it was easier to reorganize society than to paint pictures and that he was the man destined for this task by Providence”¹ (Letter to Luis Montt 5). As it turns out in the same letter, R. Philippi had personal motives for decrying Simon. R. Philippi had learned from studying Simon’s estate that Simon had questioned the character of R. Philippi’s late brother, Bernhard, in his diary. R. Philippi reciprocated by casting doubt on Simon’s character. With that objective, he not only discredited Simon’s political inclinations (Simon was a utopian socialist) but also dropped a few juicy details, some of them gleaned from gossip, about Simon’s sexual indiscretions.