Homesickness, like a sickly feeling in the stomach, is a struggle every person faces when leaving a home country for another. And Jose Rizal, in 1886, was no different. Finally, the pursuit of his studies in ophthalmology (seeking to be mentored by the famous German ophthalmologist Otto Becker) brought him to another European country–Germany. And here, in an unexpected turn of events, he would end up in a Protestant minister’s house.
Rizal arrived in Heidelberg on February 3, 1886, where Otto Becker had a clinic. Here was where he would spend his days learning ophthalmology. He found Heidelberg stunning in beauty, right smack “in a valley between two mountains.” This was where he was impressed by the Germans most especially. Rizal described Heidelberg as having “four or five Catholic and Protestant churches and they say that one of them is used one half by Catholics and the other by the Protestants.”
He was asking about Otto Becker and about a pub where students go to, and he was eventually pointed to Gulden Bierbrauerei. At the pub, upon introducing himself using crude German, Rizal attracted several people there who probably wondered from what faraway country he was from. They eventually invited Rizal over their table for a good German beer, enthusiastically telling him all the information he wanted, despite the language barrier. The difficulty in communicating was such that they all resorted to Latin, as Latin had been mastered by Rizal early on. It took the arrival of a Frenchman, who served as translator, for Rizal to use French to communicate. In this very cosmopolitan city, in a sea of strangers, Rizal found the tolerance on people’s differing beliefs, political or religious, a wonder of wonders. And in such a context, the inevitable happened–Rizal made friends.
Rizal would recount his impression of the Germans:
“The German student has fine presence, tall, and is very robust… The German student is kind, courteous, modest, and is not boastful. When he greets, he lifts up his cap entirely, throwing it forward.”
In another letter to Trinidad, his sister:
“[The Germans] do not care very much about clothes and jewellry, and go everywhere walking as briskly as the men, carrying their books or baskets, paying no attention to anybody else, and intent only on their duties… They are very fond of housework and learn to cook as assiduously as they might learn music or painting… the [German women] are active and half-masculine. They are not afraid of men, and care more for the substance of things than for appearances.”
One is reminded of the great sociologist Max Weber who did a study on the contrasting work attitudes promoted by Catholicism and Protestantism. He noticed that while in the Catholic rituals, worshippers are urged to show devotion by either outward marks of piety, novenas and genuflection or by leaving the world and entering into monasticism, Protestant lifestyle emphasized the concept of “calling”–that is, that the altar is no longer relegated to the church or in the seclusion of the monastery, but extended to the workplace. Industriousness, dedication in one’s craft, is God’s “call”, and to pour one’s heart into it, is ultimate worship to God. Hence, it didn’t matter if one is from the poorest of the poor or from the wealthy. An honest labor is worship, and an obligation done dutifully is to fulfill one’s calling, his own special role in the world.
The indirect effect is that all kinds of work would be dignified. No longer was Art the realm of royalty or saintly portraits in church. Even ordinary working days in the life of common folk became subjects of art in countries affected by the Reformation.
The cost of living had been pretty high in Germany. While not as expensive as was in Paris, Rizal noted, he struggled with heating his rented place especially in winter. He moved from one boarding house to another. This all the more made him homesick despite three months stay, as Rizal would express in his poem, “A Las Flores de Heidelberg.”
It was perhaps, in the long walks in the woods that inspired him to write the poem, that Rizal encountered a German Pastor and his family. Leon Ma. Guerrero, Rizal’s biographer, likened the pastor’s appearance to an “Old Testament patriarch”, with his wife and two children. The name of the Lutheran pastor was none other than Karl Ullmer. And as was the custom, the pastor befriended this stranger. Ullmer apparently recommended a boarding house in Wilhelmsfeld to Rizal, his town which was the closest the Heidelberg.
*Rizal’s sketch of Pastor Karl Ullmer, 27 June 1886, from Leo Cloma’s Flickr. The sketchbook was sold in an auction in Makati last February for PhP 1,635,200.00.
Eventually, Rizal wrote him a letter, dated April 24th, and finding courage to say this, told the pastor if he would, in his kindness, let him stay for a short while in the pastor’s home, or if he could recommend a room. The reason was that he wanted to learn German, and Wilhelmsfeld spoke a dialect, not the German language that the pastor also spoke. Upon receiving the letter, the pastor was delighted! Rizal was invited to stay for a good two months. We could only surmise what went on with Rizal during his stay in the home of a Protestant minister. But his letters are replete with clues.
*A sample of Wilhelm Busch cartoon, shown to Rizal by the Ullmer family to aid him in his learning of the German language every morning before breakfast. From Enderun’s InkOnline.
Rizal would comment about his experience with the pastor to the Jesuit priest he had debated with while exiled in Dapitan–Fr. Pablo Pastells.
“Your reverence should have heard my discussions with a Protestant pastor in the long summer evenings in the lonely depths of the Black Forest. There, speaking freely, calmly, with deliberation, we discussed our respective beliefs in the morality of peoples and the influences on them of their respective creeds. A great respect for the good faith of the adversary, and for ideas which were necessarily poles apart due to the diversity of race, education and age, led us almost always to the conclusion that religions, no matter what they were, should not make men enemies of one another, but friends, and good friends at that.”
Rizal was impressed with Germany’s religious tolerance, which was so much in contrast with his country at the time. With Pastells, he continued:
From the discussions, which took place almost every day for more than three months, I think I got nothing more, if my judgment does not fail me, than a profound respect for any idea conceived with sincerity and practiced with conviction. Almost every month the Catholic parish priest of a little town on the banks of the Rhine came to visit [the pastor], and this priest, an intimate friend of the Protestant, gave me an example of Christian brotherhood. They considered themselves two servants of the same God, and instead of spending their time quarreling with each other, each one did his duty, leaving it to their Master to judge afterwards who had best interpreted His will.
We will probably never know the impact that the pastor had on Rizal. Rizal was after all, a humanist deist through and through. Even in the interrogation of Rizal at his last moments in Fort Santiago, a priest asking Rizal to recant his writings and beliefs, remarked that:
On first impression he showed himself a Protestant because of the phraseology in which he manifested love and reverence for Jesus Christ, and soon enough told me more or less explicitly that his rule of faith was the word of God contained in Holy Scripture…[but] he frankly declared himself a rationalist or freethinker, admitting no other criterion of truth but private judgment.
One could only have an educated guess on went on in Rizal’s mind in those last moments. Rizal vehemently denied being Protestant, even saying to Pastells that if he declared himself Protestant, he would have had accolades and support. But who is to say that faith should have labels? Protestant or not, it was Rizal who inserted in his last poem the line, “I go where faith does not kill, where the one who reigns is God.” Such a strong statement of assurance of heaven, of salvation, that the staunchest Catholic would find it as sheer Protestant “arrogance.”
And yet, the impact this pastor had on Rizal was obvious. Such kindness from a European was rare, especially to an Asian who probably was used to being seen as second class person in the late 19th century Europe.
*Rizal’s sketch of Mrs. Ullmer, with the caption, “Die Hausfrau” (mother of the house), from the same sketchbook as above. Photo by Jonathan Cellona of ABS-CBN News.
To share a home to someone is to open one’s life, warts and all, to a stranger. And yet this was what Pastor Ullmer did. Rizal was welcomed with open arms. Nevermind the color of Rizal’s skin. The Filipino was treated like family. In his letter to Pastor Ullmer, Rizal said,
“When you go abroad, may you also receive the same treatment and friendship as I have found among you; and if being a foreigner, I can do nothing for you in a foreign country, perhaps I can be of some service to you in my homeland. The joy at being understood by other people is so great that one cannot easily forget it. You understood me too, in spite of my brown skin…” [emphasis mine]
Reformation 500 is a blog series commemorating not only the events in Europe five hundred years ago that ignited Protestant Reformation and the Modern World, but also the points of contact between Protestantism and Philippine history. This is a contribution to Philippine church history.
For more Indiohistorian notes on the Reformation, check out this link.
