Ireland Through a Critical Lens by Desmond Bell: Essays about contested identity and place, from Ireland to Germany

Ireland Through a Critical Lens: A Miscellany of Life-Writing on Politics, Culture and Film

Author: Desmond Bell

ISBN-13: 9781782055778

Publisher: Cork University Press

Guideline Price: €49

In Rostock Recalled, an essay in Desmond Bell’s refreshing and meditative Ireland through a Critical Lens, the film-maker and sociologist recalls a visit to Germany in the immediate aftermath of reunification. The city of Rostock – part of an East German state that abruptly has ceased to exist – is in flux, for western capitalism has come to town. Credit is (sometimes) available; clothes can be purchased by mail order; new fridges hum in old kitchens. In flux – and the citizens of Rostock are also in shock at the changes that have erased their world, and replaced it with a society governed by new rules. The official term is reunification, but East Germany has in effect been annexed to the west, and its people have “rapidly found themselves cast aside by history”. They have been gifted “freedom” – but freedom in its capitalist guise comes with a frequently unaffordable price tag.

Rostock Recalled encapsulates the themes and interests developed in this collection, this “miscellany of life-writing on politics, culture, and film”. Desmond Bell possesses a filmmaker’s eye: intent and observant; wishing to decipher and explain what he sees; and – crucially – without an obligation either to sympathise or endorse what is filmed. We are asked in this essay to note the dark underbelly of German unification, and to acknowledge the additional shocks and consequences still to come. This is no exercise in Ostalgie, no rosy love letter to East Germany: it is, rather, an examination of human lives, and of the frequently shattering local consequences of decisions made far away.

This emphasis upon dispassionate observation, Bell explains in the book’s compelling introduction, began early: he was born in 1949 into a Protestant family in Derry and came of age amid the first flames of the Troubles, and trained himself – slowly and painfully – to direct a steady gaze at the glaring social inequalities and injustices of a Northern Ireland expressly designed to further the aspirations of families such as his. A course was set: and the writing in this collection is guided by these early challenges. Bell is simultaneously able to position himself both within and outside systems of power: intimately aware of the rules, while rejecting their underlying ideologies.

There is, of course, no glib parallel to be drawn between Irish experiences and those of East Prussia: the specificities of history forbid any such linkage

Some of the most powerful essays in this book flow from these early experiences in the cauldron of Derry. In Shooting Protestants: The Videography of Loyalism, for example, he spotlights the isolated and defensive nature of Ulster loyalism, excavating the reasons for the disturbing performativity of its street culture of drums and parades, and offering “an interrogation of a debilitating ideology”, shorn of wider political support and understanding.

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A later essay, Of Monsters and Men, examines filmic representations of Ulster Protestantism, noting – with a bluntness much in evidence throughout this collection – that few if any of these films engage with the “core political question which arises in the loyalist monster – namely the culpability of the imperious British state in its manufacture”. And Bell’s thoughtful reflections on the work of Derry’s Field Day cultural collective continue this thread of astringency, reflecting his belief that for all of its considerable achievements, the emphasis placed by Field Day upon the necessary evolution of a cultural nationalism eclipsed a crucial focus upon the role of class in Irish culture.

Bell’s emphasis upon contested identity and place ensure that his German essays sit gracefully alongside those focused on Ireland. On Visiting the Thomas Mann House in Nida examines the lost German culture of East Prussia: it was written only a few years ago, but has attained an even sharper relevance today, as the war in Ukraine rumbles on. Bell explores the tense Baltic border between Lithuania and Russia’s heavily militarised Kaliningrad exclave, to visit the museum to Mann, who summered on this coast before the Nazis came to power. Now, instead of Russian tourists holidaying on the beaches, a naval vessel sits ominously just offshore. Bell climbs a hill and looks across into Kaliningrad: “In Ireland many of us seem to have forgotten what a closed or contested border looks like. Or how a really savage partition of a country is experienced by the losers of history.”

There is, of course, no glib parallel to be drawn between Irish experiences and those of East Prussia: the specificities of history forbid any such linkage. But it would be well to look steadily and with courage upon many scenes from which we habitually avert our gaze – and Desmond Bell’s writings, brought together in this excellent collection, suggest the clarity that can flow when we do.