Much of what we know about being German in Chile from the late 19th century through the interwar period stems from the men who ran successful businesses in cities such as Osorno, Santiago, Valparaiso and Valdivia. Scholars frequently use them, their associations and their institutions to highlight this immigrant community’s economic successes, these men’s professional skills and their contributions to the Chilean state. The family letters circulating around Luise Rudloff in Valdivia during the interwar period, however, tell us much more about how German-speaking Chileans negotiated multiple economic crises and opportunities, national upheavals and geopolitical shifts. Most importantly, they reveal the persistence of shared mental maps among family members, in which Europe, Latin America and North America were intimately intertwined. Families were not simply spread across these continents, they all were living simultaneously on them, tied into each other’s lives by correspondence that was managed and, in some ways, perpetuated by daughters, grandmothers, mothers and their children. That correspondence has the potential to upend our historical narratives of this tumultuous period. 
 

H. Glenn Penny is the Henry J. Bruman Chair in German History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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