'Hitler's death didn't mean a damn thing to my father'

Liv Hempel, the daughter of Germany’s envoy to Dublin during the second World War, talks about her childhood in Monkstown and the infamous time De Valera called to offer his condolences on Hitler’s death

‘WHERE DID Switzer’s go to?” asks Liv Hempel after walking up Grafton Street this week. The daughter of Germany’s wartime envoy to Dublin recalls shopping for school uniforms during the 1940s at the former department store in the building that now houses Brown Thomas. But not everything has changed. Over coffee at the Shelbourne Hotel, Hempel, an elegant, refined woman who looks considerably younger than her 75 years, remembers that her father, Eduard Hempel, patronised the hotel during his time as head of the German Reich’s legation – effectively ambassador – to Ireland between 1937 and 1945.

Hempel, now living in New York, has been on a visit to Ireland that has included an “emotional and wonderful” visit to Co Mayo, where she had a private reunion with her former nanny. Elisabeth Sweeney – formerly Baroness von Offenberg – who will be 97 next month, brought the two-year-old Liv to Ireland by liner from Hamburg in 1937, and lived with the Hempel family in their official residence, Gortleitragh, in Monkstown, Co Dublin.

They had not met since May 1945, and neither even knew the other was still alive. Earlier this year a German art collector sent a painting to Whyte’s fine-art auctioneers, in Dublin, that turned out to be a childhood portrait of Liv Hempel. The subsequent publicity triggered contact between the two women and led to a reunion that Hempel describes as “very touching and very moving for both”.

Speaking with an accent that is a curious, and pleasing, mix of Irish, German and American tones, she recalls happy childhood holidays in Achill, Waterville and Glendalough and says: “I have still have a special attachment to this country. Ireland was very good to us.”

She lived here until she was 15, when the family returned to Germany. After finishing secondary school and “a few years in university” she emigrated to the US, built a new life, worked in Manhattan, became an American citizen “during the presidency of JFK” and today lives in retirement in New York state.

The second World War, known as the Emergency in Ireland, overshadowed an otherwise classically comfortable, affluent childhood in south Co Dublin. The family “spoke German at home”, but she learned English from the servants, especially “Nelly Kelly, a kitchen maid”.

For security reasons she and her siblings “were pretty-much housebound during the war” and educated “by a German tutor, Herr Günther, who came to the house”. She recalls that “when the war ended we all said, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Now we can go on the tram.’ ”

In fact her father dispatched her, aged 10, for a year to a boarding school in Ring, Co Waterford, where “if you didn’t speak Irish you got hit with a stick – but I survived it”. Six decades on, she “can remember a few words” and, arriving at Dublin airport, “when I saw the signs I could translate a little”.

After her stint in the Gaeltacht she progressed to “the Loreto in Foxrock, where the nuns were kind to me. I was the only Protestant in the school, and they didn’t try to convert me.” She still has friends from her schooldays and this week has spent a few days with an old pal in Dalkey, where she “enjoyed great hospitality”.

In 1945, when the war ended, her father resigned his diplomatic post and the family was granted asylum in Ireland. Hempel recalls that all the staff left the residence and the children were told: “Make your own beds.”

Her father was not allowed to work, but her mother, Eva, started a confectionery business in the basement and sold patisserie to local people. After the family returned to Germany the house was damaged by fire, in a presumed arson attack, and was later demolished.

Hempel had four siblings. Her younger brother Berthold, who was born in Ireland, died in Dublin during his childhood, in 1948. Constantin married a woman in Dublin but they separated, and he emigrated to London, where he married the actress Anne Geissler, subsequently known as Anouska Hempel. He died in 1973 following a car accident “when the brakes failed”; his passenger, Ned Ryan, the Tipperary-born antiques dealer and friend of Princess Margaret, survived the crash. (Ryan died last year.)

Another brother, Andreas, studied medicine at Trinity College, became an ophthalmologist in London and is now retired in England. She visited him there last week for his 80th birthday. Her younger sister, Agnes, who was also born in Ireland, returned to Germany and today lives near Frankfurt.

After returning home her father helped to establish a new diplomatic service for postwar West Germany. When he retired, he and his wife moved to a small estate in the Black Forest. Following their deaths, Hempel and her sister cleared out the house and sent many items to auction. Among them were four portraits of family members – of herself, her brother Berthold, her father and her mother – commissioned from the Irish artist Patrick Hennessy in 1939. Hempel says she has no regrets about getting rid of the paintings: “At my age I’m decluttering.” Her own portrait sold in Dublin on March 14th for €4,800. Earlier this week she met the Dublin woman who bought it.

She also called into Whyte’s on Molesworth Street to see the portrait of her brother Berthold, which has also turned up, and is to be sold later this month. The whereabouts of the portraits of her parents are unknown; they are believed to be in a private collection somewhere in Germany. Hempel thinks it was “fluky” that her portrait had turned up in Ireland after so long and that it led to the reunion with her nanny. But it’s not the first time that figures from her Irish past have unexpectedly reappeared. One evening in the 1970s, at “a posh restaurant in New York”, she realised, with a shock, that the maitre d’ was “my father’s butler from the house in Dublin”. Unbeknown to her, Karl Schreiber had also emigrated to the US. They became friends. On another occasion, on a beach in Mexico, she bumped into a doctor who had treated her brother Constantin a lifetime ago in the emergency unit of Monkstown Hospital.

She sighs and smiles, somewhat wearily, when asked about one of the great controversies of 20th-century Ireland: the infamous visit of Éamon de Valera, as taoiseach, to the Hempel residence to express condolences on the death of Hitler, 66 years ago this month. Neither she nor her siblings were present in the room, as “the children were kept apart” in another area of the house whenever Irish government officials came to events, including dinners and receptions.

At first reluctant, Hempel agrees to comment to The Irish Times, “for the record, because I’m only going to do this once”. She describes her father as “a good man with no love for that regime. The man had no Nazi tendencies. He loved his country.”

Pausing to reflect, she continues: “In hindsight, I believe that the reason De Valera called to the house was out of friendship. He and my father were personal friends: it wasn’t simply a case of prime minister and diplomat. There was more than that. He visited because he knew my father, and the condolences were to my father because his position [as envoy to Ireland] was finished.”

In her final comment on the subject she says: “Hitler’s death didn’t mean a damn thing to my father; he was happy about it – like we are happy about Osama bin Laden.”