Keynote Message of Senator Loren Legarda | Frankfurter Buchmesse Opening Ceremony | Tuesday, 14 October 2025 | Frankfurt, Germany

Imagine growing up being told that your national hero, the one who sparked the liberation of your people from more than three centuries of colonization, was not a warrior with a sword but a writer with a pen.

Ours was a medical doctor, a poet and novelist, in the name of Dr. José Rizal, who made imagination his sharpest weapon. His words carved hope where despair had reigned, dignity where oppression had prevailed. For that imagination, he was executed in 1896, condemned not for violence but for radical thought.

It was not arms the colonizers feared most, but ideas: ideas that roused a nation and ignited the first revolution in Southeast Asia.

Such is the power of literature to us Filipinos: to awaken, to resist, to liberate.

Rizal came to Heidelberg in 1886, a young physician of twenty-four. He studied ophthalmology under Professor Otto Becker at the Augenklinik of the University of Heidelberg, hoping to cure the failing eyesight of his beloved mother, Teodora Alonso. Imagine such devotion: the love of a son who traversed continents, explored libraries and laboratories, all to restore light in his mother’s eyes.

It was here, too, that Rizal encountered German literature, including the work of Friedrich Schiller, whose dramas thundered with the conviction that tyranny must fall, and liberty must govern. Rizal forged this temper into his own vision: a Filipino people who would stand free and never again live under foreign dominion.

In his solitude, by the Neckar, he composed the famous A las flores de Heidelberg. “Carry, carry, O flowers, my love to my loved ones, peace to my country and its fecund loam, faith to its men and virtue to its women…” A poem to flowers in Germany became a letter to his homeland.

From that longing emerged a book. Rizal completed the final chapters of Noli Me Tangere—the novel that held a mirror to colonial society and revealed the deep wounds of oppression—in a humble Protestant vicarage in Wilhelmsfeld. The following year, in 1887, it was published in Berlin by the Lette Verein, with women’s hands setting into type the very sentences that made powerful men tremble.

And on its first page, Rizal placed a challenge, a direct quote from Schiller’s poem Shakespeare’s Ghost:

“What? Does no Caesar, does no Achilles, appear on your stage now,
Not an Andromache e’en, not an Orestes, my friend?
No! there is naught to be seen there but parsons, and syndics of commerce,
Secretaries perchance, ensigns, and majors of horse.
But, my good friend, pray tell me, what can such people e’er meet with
That can be truly called great?—what that is great can they do?”

Schiller mourned a world abandoned by heroes, a world that had forgotten the grandeur of fearlessness. Rizal answered by becoming that hero.

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I stand before you as a daughter of an archipelago of more than seven thousand islands, scattered across the sea like pearls. Geography that others call fragmented, we call infinite. Imagination is the vessel that inspires our people of many tongues and many spirits, across mountains and seas. A nation freed because a son who set out to heal his mother’s eyes became the writer who illuminated his people.

Is this not almost as if history itself prepared this moment? Ten years ago, I first imagined the Philippines as the Guest of Honour of the Frankfurter Buchmesse, knowing what I have always believed that Filipino voices belong among the world’s greatest literatures.

The circle of history closes, but it also opens anew. Today, let the world see us for what we are: as knowledge makers, culture bearers, and conceivers of ideas from which the world itself may learn.

This is why we chose as our theme, “The Imagination peoples the air,” drawn from Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere.

Because imagination, my friends, can be threatening.

Threatening to tyrants, because it speaks of freedom.

Threatening to exploiters, because it demands justice.

Threatening to cynics, because it insists on hope.

Imagination must not be gentle—it is a necessary fire.

Fire that burns away indifference.

Fire that lights the dark corners where injustice hides.

Fire that refuses to let our conscience sleep while others suffer.

With more than 400 delegates, hundreds of titles, dozens of installations, performances, and conversations, each one a window into our imagination, we gather here to ask: What kind of imagination will people the air today?

Here, at the world’s largest gathering of stories and ideas, we bear witness to the power of words—to build what is just, not for ourselves alone, but for one another.

In a time when walls rise higher than bridges, when children’s bodies shrink to bone from starvation, when entire families are crushed and buried beneath shattered concrete, when hands are cuffed for nothing more than their color, we return to the threatening truths for which Rizal gave his life and through which a nation arose: that literature must provoke the conscience, break the silence imposed by fear, and ignite courage where misery has been sown by the despotic, the corrupt, and the cruel.

Before he left Europe, Rizal wrote, “I will dedicate my last farewell to Germany. I owe Germany my best remembrances.”

And so tonight, in honoring his legacy, we continue what Rizal began:

To let imagination describe the world as it is, and to refuse what it must not be.
To unsettle the comfortable who can look upon suffering and remain unmoved.
And to reach those who hold fast to their humanity, that they may know they do not stand alone in defending what gives life its worth: dignity and justice.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is from knowing that we speak. We come to offer you a glimpse of our becoming: where literature kindled imagination, imagination awakened courage, courage compelled action, and action brought forth liberation.

And if one book written by a Filipino on German soil awakened a nation thousands of miles away, imagine—just imagine—what we, together, can awaken today.

Mabuhay ang sining at panitikang Pilipino! Long live Philippine art and literature!

Maraming salamat. Vielen dank.