Message of Senator Loren Legarda: Closing Program of German Media Visit, Philippines as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2025

The imagination peoples the air. As you traveled across our islands these past days, I hope you have felt the force of imagination around you, flowing through our stories, etched in our landscapes, and alive in the spirited conversations that welcomed you. 

It is this same imagination that brought us here today. When the Philippines made its modest return to the Frankfurter Buchmesse in 2015 after a 15-year absence, I dared to ask: Why not the Philippines as Guest of Honour? I took this as a personal mission. In 2017, I met with Mr. Juergen Boos here in Manila, and that same year, began laying the groundwork. Even when the pandemic threatened to stall our momentum, we stayed the course, and by 2023, that imagination gave way to certainty.

As you have now seen for yourselves, we are a people of many languages, layered histories, and living traditions. Our literature arises from the confluence of indigenous wisdom, colonial legacies, ecological wonder, and global conversations. Our writers speak of struggle and healing, of memory and becoming, of home and the world beyond it.

Like many of you, I began my career in media as a young journalist reporting on the realities of everyday Filipinos. That pursuit of truth deepened into a commitment to action when I was elected senator at the age of 38. Today, as the longest-serving female senator in our history, I continue to dedicate myself to the noble work of uplifting Filipino lives.

Through laws such as the National Cultural Heritage Act and the Cultural Mapping Law, we have worked to document, protect, and preserve our tangible and intangible treasures—rituals, epics, plays, heirloom dishes, architecture, and lore that define who we are as a people, while elevating their scientific, economic and artistic dimensions.

More than preservation, however, I fought to equip the hands keeping these traditions alive with resources, infrastructure, and the dignity of fair livelihoods. I hope you witnessed this in your visits, including those who visited my hometown of Antique, as we’ve worked to link indigenous artisans and micro-entrepreneurs to markets, both here and abroad. 

Beyond our shores, one cornerstone of this vision is Sentro Rizal, an international network of cultural centers in our embassies and consulates that promote Filipino arts, language, and identity. In 2016, we also launched the Philippine Studies Program, now in over 20 universities worldwide, creating a formal structure for Filipino scholarship within the global academic community.

In 2015, after a 51-year absence, we returned to the Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious contemporary art and architecture exhibition. Leading our historic comeback, I ensured it was a strategic reentry of the Philippines into global artistic discourse, with our pavilion challenging perceptions and positioning Filipino artists at the center of international dialogue. And of course, this year, the Philippines takes center stage as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the world’s oldest and largest book fair, serving as a gateway to bring Filipino writers, artists, publishers, and illustrators into conversation with the world.

Germany, I believe, is the perfect stage for this moment. You have long been a gracious host to Philippine literature. Dr. Jose Rizal, our national hero, walked your streets and engaged with your cities. In 1887, he published his most important work in Berlin, the Noli Me Tangere, a book that sparked the first anti-colonial revolution in Southeast Asia.

In my visit to Wilhelmsfeld in 2019, Dr. Fritz Hack Ullmer welcomed me to the Protestant vicarage where his great-grandfather, Pastor Karl Ullmer, had hosted Rizal, where he penned the final chapters of Noli Me Tangere. I have since learned that the property is now being placed on the market, and I am working tirelessly to secure it for the Filipino people, repurposing it as a Sentro Rizal to be a permanent cultural and learning space for Filipino-German exchange.

Another treasure lives in the Berlin Ethnological Museum, which houses Philippine textiles and indigenous artifacts that Dr. Rizal donated to his friend, Dr. Adolf Bastian. When I first saw them in 2013—handwoven piña barong and shawl, a Bagobo attire, a Mandaya baby carrier, and a Tboli abaca wrap skirt—I did not see relics, but enduring works of cultural diplomacy and testaments to our people’s artistry and ingenuity. They remind us that diplomacy can also be woven, sung, or carved to speak across borders, embodying what I believe is our soft power in its purest form: the power to imagine together.

It is only fitting, then, that we chose Rizal’s line, “The imagination peoples the air,” to anchor our participation. Because imagination is not a luxury for artists, it is a necessity for nations. And the Frankfurter Buchmesse is our chance for Filipino writers, translators, illustrators, and publishers to be seen, heard, and understood. Their stories are as personal as they are universal: of survival, resistance, freedom, and empowerment.

Let me end with a small personal story. I was born in a beautiful old house in Malabon. Mango trees planted by my grandmother, Lola Mameng, still stand in her garden, where she often shared stories about her father, who served in the Malolos Congress that drafted the first  Philippine Constitution—the first republican constitution in Asia. My grandfather, Joe Bautista, was editor-in-chief of The Manila Times, and naturally filled that house with books, ideas, and healthy debates. That home was built by Otto Johns Scheerer, a German ethnologist who made the Philippines his home in the late 1800s and was appointed the first Governor of Batanes.

Every time I return, I am reminded that I come from a lineage of storytellers, thinkers, and nation-builders. And somehow, through a house built by a German and filled with Filipino voices, our histories—yours and ours—intertwine.

That is what literature does. It collapses distance. It makes neighbors of strangers. It lets the past speak to the present, and the present dare to imagine a better future.

So, to all of you who came here with open hearts, maraming salamat. I hope that what you have seen, heard, and felt here will populate your stories with truth and wonder. May they help carry this moment, our shared act of imagination, all the way to Germany and far beyond.

Let me end as I began: The imagination peoples the air. This year, let that imagination be Filipino.

Danke and I wish you all a safe journey home.