“The Imagination peoples the air” is a phrase plucked from the twilight of Sisa’s sanity in the Noli Me Tangere. It was not the obvious, nor the most popular choice for the theme, but it is the rightfully poetic one for the Philippines at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2025, the world’s biggest book fair. This all-important international publishing platform takes place in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, from Oct. 15 to 19.

Anchored on Germany’s historic connection with Jose Rizal, it will be an unrivaled opportunity to discover the breadth and depth of Filipino culture in just one place, as well as to make pilgrimages to some of the most important sites associated with the beloved national hero. Heidelberg is where Rizal studied, the nearby village of Wilhelmsfeld is where he completed the Noli, and Berlin is where this foundational text was published.

The Philippines, after all, has finally been accorded the hard-won position of “Guest of Honor,” only the second time ever for a Southeast Asian country to do so since the program began in 1988. Thus, the country plans to seed 100-plus authors, six National Artists, and even Olympian gold medalist Hidilyn Diaz for the occasion. It will be a pivotal moment for Filipino authors and publishers—and the world’s readers. 

It was Senator Loren Legarda who began turning the wheels of progress 10 long years ago to make this singular occasion happen.

At the recent press launch at the Evangelische Academie center in the old town of Romerberg in Frankfurt, she underscored its importance by saying, “We are a nation that read itself into being, a people who have written our way through disasters, colonialism, dictatorship, and diaspora —and emerged louder, more insistent, more human.”

She continued, “A decade ago, we imagined this moment. In 2015, when the Philippines returned to the Frankfurt Book Fair after a 15-year-long absence—with a small stand, a few hundred titles, and an outsized dream—we dared to believe that our archipelago of stories could take its place at the center of the world’s largest literary stage.”

“For literature,” Legarda emphasized, “has never stood apart from Filipino life. It was a book—the Noli Me Tangere, published in Berlin in 1887 —that stirred our nation into consciousness and, in time, into freedom.

“That legacy reminds us,” she declared, “that we are here because to read is to remember; to write is to bear witness; and to publish is to keep the conversation alive—to make room for what is difficult, for what is different, and for what still longs to be understood.”

To be sure, the Philippines itself is a difficult and complicated entity, that can only be partly deciphered by the Noli, a book deemed so forbidden and dangerous to the powers that be that it needed to be copied by hand by “escribientes” (scribes), passed around surreptitiously, and read out loud in secret gatherings. 

Rizal’s Noli is important not only because it showed the world the injustices that stalked the country but also because it taught Filipinos how to think about this impossible situation and, inevitably, to do something about it.

Like Rizal, the Philippines will arrive in Germany at an important moment of world history, when conflict and prejudice—but also screens and AI—beleaguer the globe. Books, as Rizal reminds us, are necessary to nurture the critical thinking necessary to confront this world, especially for young minds fenced in by X and TikTok.

In 1886, science, too, was newly discovering all kinds of wonders (the existence of germs and vaccines, for example), and the colonial powers were beginning to feel the winds of change.

Rizal had come to Heidelberg, a posh enclave an hour from Frankfurt, in pursuit of learning the latest tech in eye surgery. That was to be found in the cutting-edge Augenklinik that still dominates its main street. (“Augen” the German word for “eyes.”) It was the first of its kind in Europe, and for even the most advanced scholars of the time, let alone a Malay from across the world, probably the equivalent of going to SpaceX to study engineering. He had sought out the famous Dr. Otto Becker, the Elon Musk of ophthalmology, to learn all he could to save his mother’s eyes.

Heidelberg is and was no ordinary university town. Then as now, it had the air of an aristocratic Oxford or Boston Brahmin. Cobbled streets, stately half-timbered houses, snake on either side of the Neckar River. It had special laws that applied only to its wealthy, talented students (evidenced by a cozy jail still to be found meant just for these privileged dwellers). The town’s inhabitants, mostly in their under-twenties, are all well-bred and uniformly attractive, characters in a sort of Nordic Coachella. It was also an expensive town, reflected in Rizal’s careful totaling of his expenses for meals and hot tea, and candles. To be sure, his painfully small allowance from home, always late in coming, was stretched to the limit. 

Serendipitously, he would meet and befriend one of the most libertarian gentlemen in the area—Pastor Fritz Ullmer—on a picturesque path called the “Philosopher’s Walk” that they both traveled regularly on the edge of the river. It is his great-grandson and namesake, Dr. Fritz Ullmer, who helps us trace Rizal’s footsteps through these towns.

Pastor Ullmer, in his youth, was a member of a German student-activist group, the free-thinking “48ers,” and must have been, even in his middle age, a man with the air of climate warrior Greta Thunberg. (He had sworn he would never shave his beard until the bill of rights was restored to Germany, and he never did until his death in 1914.)

Rizal would meet this rare creature, and they would recognize something special about each other. Ullmer offered Rizal a comfortable respite as a guest in his home, saving Rizal from the stress and anxiety of waiting for his allowance.

The pastor’s vicarage is nestled in the rolling hills, called the “King’s Chair,” above Heidelberg, and it provided Rizal the opportunity to learn both the haute and the pop of German culture. It would also be the holiday home for one of Germany’s most beloved humorists, Wilhelm Busch, the creator of the boyish Max and Moritz cartoons. Busch was another friend of the pastor, and Ambeth Ocampo would later correctly point out the similarity of Rizal’s cartoons to the adventures of the two lads.

But more importantly, this is where Rizal also encountered Schiller—and the tale of William Tell. Dr. Ullmer recalls that the pastor learned from Rizal about the injustices of the Philippine condition and recognized the same thirst for freedom and the lessons that must be learned from the struggle in Schiller, he suggested William Tell as a way for Rizal to learn the German language. Every morning, at exactly 5:45, Rizal and Ullmer would sit for an hour to pore over this long poem and imbibe the adventures of the lone Swiss huntsman who would take on the Hapsburg empire.

This was at the zenith of Rizal’s intense idealism, as he wrote that first novel that would eventually shake the foundations of the Philippine colonial establishment. Schiller’s “William Tell” would be a story that conjured up a future Bonifacio—a valiant hero who would rally a people to rebel against an oppressive overlord. Rizal thought the work important enough and resonant enough to painstakingly translate it into Tagalog. (The manuscript is now on display at the National Library’s “Treasures” exhibit.)

What happened in between those halcyon years in Wilhelmsfeld and the desolation of Dapitan that led a weary Rizal to ask the Katipunan to bide its time before calling for Revolution?

It is these and so many other stories that continue to people (and confound) the Philippine air and are to be found in its books, music, and art.

The Philippines possesses a complex and messy culture, full of contradictions, a contrast to the streamlined and orderly atmosphere of Frankfurt, the site of the Buchmesse. It is a country with no clear-cut solutions.

“We are so lucky as a country to have a Rizal,” says Patrick Flores, curator for the Philippine experience at the book fair. “He reminds us, imperfect as we are, that we are who we are because we are Filipinos.”

The Ullmer house still stands to this day, sitting at the crossroads of both time and culture, a symbol of the hybridity and porosity of both Filipino and European cultures at the time—all of which the Philippines aims to recall and celebrate at the Buchmesse.

On the very last day of the launch, a report on two Filipino authors to be featured at the fair appears—in the very same newspaper that would report on Rizal’s execution 128 years ago, in January 1897; and in which Rizal’s very first obituary, written by the good Pastor Ullmer, would appear a few days later.

It’s a subtle and almost magical reminder that culture is never just about books, but the necessary and important sharing of stories.