Being caught between cultures is a disconcerting experience. It tends to leave you feeling as a stateless outsider, no longer really at home when at home, and never quite belonging to your adopted country.
Peter Jankowsky's outsider status is confirmed once he begins to speak. For him there is also the issue of language. His world is suspended between English, which he came to learn, and German, the native tongue which he must modify, even appear to contract during teaching, in the course of his daily work. After more than 30 years living in Ireland, he remains a Berliner.
This relationship is further complicated by 18 months spent from the age of four in a small village in Silesia, central Germany. Aside from his accent and his elegant, formal English, two qualities mark him as a German - his intense, analytical personality and a natural curiosity which enables him to respond to incidents on a personal as well as a more abstract level.
To a couple of generations of Irish people studying German, he has been an exacting language teacher at the Goethe Institute in Dublin. To an even more select group he is a translator and a poet. For television viewers he remains well known through his role as Hermann Goertz in Caught In a Free State (1983), a critically acclaimed, four-part television about the experiences of German spies arrested in wartime Ireland. Trained as an actor in Berlin, acting is his first profession.
But his widest audience consists of the loyal listeners of one of RTE Radio's best-loved programmes, Sunday Miscellany. Devised in 1968 by Donnacha O'Dulaing, Cathal O Griofa and the late Ronnie Walshe, it has long been part of Sunday mornings, is something of a national institution and its latest listenership figures stand at 167,000 - surpassed only by the news.
First invited in 1995 by producer Martha McCarron to join the panel of contributors, Jankowsky has consistently offered an outsider's insider view on a programme he describes as "quintessentially Irish". Or, perhaps, an insider's outsider interpretation of not only what it means to be a foreigner in Ireland, but also what it is to visit his native Berlin as a tourist - all filtered through his distinctive speaking voice.
His pieces go beyond observation, however. At times he approaches the most painful aspects of what it means to be human. He has looked at his younger self, at the 18-year-old who first arrived in Ireland in search of himself, progressing to the uneasy romantic and, most affecting of all, to the father watching his young son. This last is most important, as Jankowsky was never given the chance to play son to his own father.
Jankowsky arrives on time for the interview, wearing a cap and carrying a Xeroxed copy of Georg Buchner's story Lenz, following on a chance remark made when arranging this meeting. He is an intense, quietly dramatic character and, as his pieces suggest, is too honest to be entirely at peace. Though perfectly affable, he also seems slightly haunted.
Myself Passing By is more than the "memoir in moments" stated on its cover; it is an episodic account of a long and ongoing personal quest, told with some humour, such as the tale of his young son offering 189 unwanted Christmas trees a home. Born in 1939, Jankowsky never met his father - "the love of my mother's life" - who was killed at the beginning of the war. As his first step-father was killed near the end of the upheaval, Jankowsky was raised largely by his mother and grandmother. Memories of his wartime childhood, including watching his grandmother confront a Russian soldier as he arrived at their door looking for a woman, stay with him. There is also a sense of responsibility.
"I was only a child. I had no part in it. But as a German, I too share the burden. I can not distance myself from the story." Agreeing that all nations have committed crimes, he says "the difference is we, coming from one of the most respected of cultures, did it with such cold, bloodless, factory efficiency." Living in Ireland has made him aware of being "a representative of my country and my culture". Although he says he has long felt "an emotional distance from my country", an odd love for it undercuts many of his comments - such as when he speaks of Berlin as "a beautiful green city in the middle of a forest".
Initially drawn to Ireland by the need to get away and also by an interest in archaeology, Jankowsky remarks that it was only this past summer, he felt that he could go and live again in Germany, a country he has never lost touch with. Much of that distance is due to his conservative Catholic upbringing and unhappy relationship with his second stepfather, who still lives with Jankowsky's mother in Berlin. As for Ireland, he says: "I have noticed the changes. I am less entranced and more disillusioned."
Describing German as a rich, very flexible, beautiful and productive language, he admits being worried by the loss of its many dialects. Equally disturbing is the influx of English words into it.
As for his feelings about Germany itself, he says it is "an ever changing relationship; pride and anger. But the question is too complex, almost impossible to answer. There is a phrase in German, Ein weites Feld." He sighs in that calmly despairing way he has. "Yes, the Germans are a difficult people."
Myself Passing By: A Memoir In Moments by Peter Jankowsky is published by New Island, £8.99. He also features in Sunday Miscellany, edited by Marie Heaney in association with RTE and published by Town House, £10.99
