Speech of Senator Loren Legarda 165th Birth Anniversary of Dr. José Rizal Rizal | Wilhelmsfeld Park|21 June 2026

To our friends from Wilhelmsfeld, Knights of Rizal, dear fellow Filipinos, and to all other guests, Guten Morgen.

There are many ways to honor a great man – in monuments, in street names, in the lessons we teach our children. But every so often, a place offers something far more meaningful. It lets us walk where he walked. That is why we are all here. We did not come to Wilhelmsfeld to just speak about Dr. Jose Rizal from a distance. We came to stand on the ground that opened its doors to a young Filipino far from home and gave him a place to belong.

One hundred and sixty-five years ago, on the nineteenth of June, Jose Rizal was born in Calamba in the Philippines, half a world away from your town. So why mark his birthday in Wilhelmsfeld? Because this is where he found shelter.

In 1886, a young Filipino doctor came to live among you, as the guest of Pastor Karl Ullmer. He studied in Heidelberg, he walked the banks of the Neckar, and in a vicarage in this village, he completed the novel that would awaken our nation, the Noli Me Tangere.

It was also in those days that his admiration for the land that had taken him in inspired him to write in his poem A las Flores de Heidelberg:
“Id a mi patria, id extranjeras flores.” Go to my country, go, O foreign flowers.

He asked the blossoms along the Neckar to carry his longing home, to a country he could not see, and feared he might never see again. That longing finds its answer, as Filipinos and Germans stand together at his monument.

Over the past days, you have honored him in ways that would have touched him deeply. You opened the Rizal Historic Trail so that anyone may walk the wooded path he once walked between Wilhelmsfeld and Heidelberg. You sat down for a birthday dinner, recalling his 25th birthday, which he spent in the vicarage in 1886. And today, you gathered in a park that bears his name.

When I first visited Wilhelmsfeld and met Dr. Fritz Hack Ullmer, I left with a wish that the house where Rizal wrote his novel would one day be preserved for the people he loved. This past March, that wish came true. The house passed into Filipino hands, and those hands belonged to my son, Representative Leandro Legarda Leviste.

It will rise again as a museum for generations to come. To this town and to the Ullmer family, who have kept Rizal’s story alive across generations, the Filipino people are very grateful.

For more than a decade, I have tried to bring Rizal home to his own people, by way of Germany. With the help of the Philippine Embassy in Berlin, the Philippine Consulate General in Frankfurt, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and cultural agencies, we traced his footsteps in a documentary; opened Philippine studies in prestigious German universities; made a digital exhibit of the artifacts he donated to his friend, Dr. Adolf Bastian, a German ethnologist and the first director of the Berlin Ethnological Museum; and brought Rizal’s mind and ideals to the Frankfurter Buchmesse as Guest of Honour. In the Philippine Congress, I authored the National Cultural Heritage Act, the law that created Sentro Rizal, a home in the world for our arts, language, and culture. I am now working to pass the proposed legislation, the Sentro Rizal Act, which would strengthen the center into a true hub of cultural diplomacy. Rizal lived a quiet life in a town much like this one. The work of our generation is to make sure it is never a forgotten one.

To the Knights of Rizal, who keep his memory burning on German soil, I offer the thanks of a grateful nation. That your Order has planted a chapter here tells us that his ideas of freedom, of human dignity, and of reason standing against fear, were never bound by any border.

Dr. Jose Rizal, 165 years from the day you were born, we are here to remember you not as a man we mourn. You are a man whose vision is still ours to build. As the Knights of Rizal say, Non Omnis Moriar. Not all of you have died, and in our homeland, in Wilhelmsfeld, and in every mind still awakened by your words, you live on.

Vielen Dank. Maraming salamat po.