GERMANY:A new translation may increase interest in Böll's 50-year-old classic, writes Derek Scallyin Berlin
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the best book about Ireland you've probably never read.
In Germany, the Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) by Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll is cherished as a modern literary classic, with its sketches of vanished places, people and attitudes written in a spare, poetical prose.
Like no other book before or since, it fixed German perceptions of Ireland as a misty green isle where the people tick differently.
While US tourists flock to Ireland in the wake of The Quiet Man, generations of Germans still make the pilgrimage to Böll's cottage on Achill.
The writer arrives in Dún Laoghaire, chilled to the bone from a ferry journey across an Irish Sea that could be the river Styx. After a greasy breakfast and milky tea "the colour of an overfed baby" he visits the grave of Jonathan Swift in St Patrick's Cathedral and the nearby slums, establishing the book's tone of wonder and anger.
Böll delights in the Irish carefree attitude to life and the casual attitude to time, a welcome relief from the German patron saints of Angst and Punctuality.
Without condescension, Böll decides the Irish are poor but "happier than they know", living in a country "that hates rising early".
"The morning hours of seven to 10 are the only ones when the Irish are monosyllabic," he relates with amusement.
However, behind the levity skulks a quiet rage at how, in the mid-1950s, "Ireland is still exporting its treasure" - workers, priests and nuns - along with whiskey, horses, beer and dogs.
He peppers his dispatches with images never seen on a John Hinde postcard: a milk bottle standing like a white flag of defeat on the front step of a recently departed emigrant; a "dark-haired beauty praying with the defiance of an offended saint before a statue of the holy Magdalene".
A perfectly observed story describes the restless late-night vigil of a country doctor's wife as she waits for her husband to return from delivering a baby.
After various travels, Böll arrives and settles in Achill, shocked and fascinated by the "skeletons" of the island's famine villages. "No bombed town looked like this," writes Böll, a second World War soldier and prisoner of war, appalled at the slow destruction wrought by the Atlantic wind.
Though ill at ease with the Germany of his past and his present, Böll never moved to Achill completely. But from the mid-1950s until his death in 1985 he returned regularly with his wife and sons, René and Vincent.
"It was quite an experience coming from the ruins of postwar Cologne to a country untouched by war," said René Böll last weekend at a conference about his father's book organised by the University of Limerick's Centre for Irish-German Studies.
"When we returned to Cologne I remember clearly my brother exclaiming, 'Finally: rubble again'!" Like the rubble of postwar Cologne, the landscape of Heinrich Böll's Ireland has been cleared: now a country of net immigration and economic prosperity, Achill even has its own call centre.
But the Irish Journal is more than a historical curiosity: Böll's journal was a literary conscientious objection to Germany's Wirtschaftswunder and places an accusing question mark over Ireland's own economic miracle.
That's something that preoccupies Hugo Hamilton in Die Redselige Insel (The Island of Talking), his marvellous new book, just released in Germany, that retraces Böll's Irish journey 50 years later.
Böll's work was given a cool reception when it appeared in Ireland, partly because the country was trying to move on from much of what he cherished, but also because of a poor English translation. As a result, the Irish Journal has languished for years in a limbo of lack of interest and limited availability.
René Böll hopes he can soon resolve a long-running rights dispute with the English-language publisher to allow a new translation that captures the book's poetry and its humour. Like the complaint of a German man Böll met shortly after his arrival in Ireland, who described Dublin thus: "Here everything's dirty, everything's expensive and you can't get a decent steak anywhere."
How things have changed: these days there's no problem finding steak.