Bernardo Philippi, Initiator of German Colonization in Chile
HE GERMAN-SPEAKING POPULATION of the south central provinces of Chile has aroused both national pride on account of its economic vigor, and concern because of its persistence as a foreign enclave. Its origin dates back to the middle decades of the nineteenth century (1849-74) when the Chilean government actively recruited some 4,ooo Germans,1 mostly village artisans and agriculturalists, to immigrate and colonize the then nearly unoccupied backwater provinces of Valdivia and Chiloe.2 That the government was attracted to the idea of German immigration, then unprecedented in Chile,3 was due mainly to the vision and perseverance of a young German merchant-marine officer, a foreigner utterly without political influence or social connections when first he came to Chile. This same man was responsible for the actual recruiting of many of the immigrants in Germany. Though he ranks with Hermann Blumenau as one of the prime movers of German colonization in South America,4 to date his work is little known outside Chile's German community. Bernhard Eunom Philippi was born on September 19, i81i, in Charlottenburg bei Berlin, the second of two sons. His father, a civil * The author is Assistant Professor of History at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, N.S., Canada. 1. See George F. W. Young, "German Immigration and Colonization in Chile, 1849-1914" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Chicago, 1969). 2. These two provinces were created by a law of August 30, 1826; the territory of the then still unsubdued Araucanian Indians (La Araucania) separated them from the rest of Chile. In 1861 the northern mainland portion of the old province of Chiloe became the province of Llanquihue; likewise, the present-day province of Osorno was previously the southern-most department of the old province of Valdivia. 3. Prior to the 1840S the Chilean government had attempted unsuccessfully to attract Irish, English, and Swiss immigrants; see Diego Barros Arana, Historia general de Chile (Santiago, 1884-1902), XI, 257-258; XIII, 590-591; XIV, 528530. 4. Hermann Blumenau was the great German colonizer of Santa Catarina (Brazil); see Fritz Sudhaus, Deutschland und die Auswanderung nach Brasilien im 19. Jahrhundert (Hamburg, 1940), pp. 70 ff.