A Load of old Böll? Irishness in Berlin

In 2008 I left Ireland and moved to Germany. At around the same the Irish economy collapsed in a smouldering heap. A part of me couldn’t help but feel that these two events were related, but people insisted on putting it down to US subprime mortgages and some chaps called Lehmann.

Before the various financial irregularities and catastrophes hit, being Irish in Europe opened doors and hearts.

“You are not English?”, my French ski instructor asked me a few days into a ski trip when I was fifteen.

“No, I’m Irish”, I replied.

“Oh, wonderful! Why you didn’t say something before?,” she asked, embracing me. Replying was futile, any sound I made was absorbed by her well-insulated ski jacket. What could I have said? It hadn’t occurred to me that I could win favour on the back of French-Anglo animosities?

One could be fairly sure of a positive reception in Germany also, where the popular image of Ireland had gone virtually unchanged since the publication of Heinrich’s Böll travel memoirs, Irisches Tagebuch, in 1957. Böll portrayed the ‘otherness’ of Ireland as he encountered it, a land battered by a uniquely wet rain, dotted with abandoned villages and populated by happy, barefoot children and melancholic donkeys. The book inspired planeloads of Germans to find and lose themselves in the soul-stirring mists of Ireland’s badly signposted West coast.

Böll’s romance seemed to persist in the well-read German psyche. It followed me wherever I went, including to the halls of Humboldt University in Berlin. In my first few weeks I approached a professor with a question on some finer point of his lecture on space law. As my German wasn't too good, I rehearsed the question in advance. As I approached, a number of linguisitic doubts lingered: what if I accidently use the informal pronoun, and is it der, die or das Weltraumschrott?

He graciously overlooked the many grammatical errors in the sentence and duly dispensed an answer. I, in turn, graciously pretended that I had understood it.

“And where are you from?,” he asked.

“Ireland,” I replied. A German friend had kindly taught me how to pronounce this word in German so it sounded less like I was saying ‘Iran’, a problem that had led to innumerable amusing misunderstandings and confused remarks on the paleness of my skin.

“Ireland!” The professorial frostiness melted away, his eyes drifted to the middle distance as he began recounting happy memories of holidays spent in Connemara. His gaze slowly – ah, the relaxed pace of life on Inisbofin island – made its way from the middle distance and settled back on the Erasmus student standing in front of him.

“And you know, you do have some red in your hair!,” he remarked.  

It was hard to escape the feeling I wasn’t being taken completely seriously as a space scholar. But the Ireland card did seem to make many such interactions a little easier, so I didn’t mind.

Over the course of the year, however, it became clear that Irish-German relations were starting to sour. There was a lot of German money invested in the troubled Irish banks. Newspapers carried stories of how the Irish had gotten a little over-excited during the years of plenty and squandered their borrowed cash on poorly constructed houses, helicopters and fake tans. And horses. Oh, the horses. A number of reputable German publications carried features on the ‘plague’ of horses – purchased in more prosperous times and now too expensive to keep – wandering around deserted EU-funded Irish motorways. It was the melancholic donkeys all over again, but this time it wasn’t quite so charming.

In January 2009 I found myself sitting in an EU law lecture just off Unter den Linden in the centre of Berlin. The professor explained how the Treaty of Lisbon would have functioned had it not been rejected in an Irish referendum. He asked if there were Irish people in the class to explain why European progress was being held to ransom by obstreperous Hibernian voters. I sank deep into my seat, hoping no one would recognise me. There was a time you could flaunt your Irishness the way Michael Flatley would flaunt a freshly waxed chest. That time, it seemed, was no more.

Over the coming months I often found myself constructing a rejoinder to assaults on Irish economic and moral integrity. No one, I was convinced, actually understood what was happening. Few could say for sure if Ireland’s massive and crippling state bail out of the banks was prompted by pressure from Frankfurt or merely a result of domestic political ineptitude. The German-Irish romance had ended, and, in keeping with a bad break up, seemed to have descended into a contest to establish who had suffered most.

Over the next few years Ireland underwent a series of ‘financial adjustments’, whatever that may mean, and gradually became the poster child for European austerity. Eventually, there were faint glimmers of a recovery, and Ireland was praised for its diligence, for having done its penance, and most crucially, for not being Spain, Portugal or Greece. This admiration was as meaningless and hollow as getting a hug for not being English.

What lesson did I draw from the experience?

I learnt that it’s der Weltraumschrott – the German noun for space debris is masculine.

No, I meant what’s the broader lesson here?

Oh, right, I’m still not sure. I think it starts with boycotting any periodical publishing lazy tales of stray motorway ponies but stops short of looking wistfully at tragic donkeys. Maybe there’s a middle ground, a medial mare, a compromise cob?

I learnt a lot on Erasmus but navigating the outdated, illogical and occasionally seductive appeal offered by my nationality in Europe? That remains a work in progress.