The country described in Heinrich Böll's Irish Journal was everything Germany wasn't - and suggested a way of healing the wounds of history, writes Hugo Hamilton
In the summer of 1972, the same year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, it was reported that the German police had raided the home of the writer, Heinrich Böll. Armed police were said to have surrounded his house in Langenbroich for up to two kilometres while around 12 officers entered to search for terrorists.
I first heard this story in Berlin during the 1970s. The first half of that decade was a time of great tension, a time of demonstrations against the Vietnam War and against the new Pinochet regime in Chile. In 1967, a student named Benno Ohnesorg had been shot dead by German police after the riots which greeted a visit by the Shah of Iran.
When the terrorist movement, Red Army Faction (RAF), kidnapped Peter Lorenz, the candidate for Lord Mayor of Berlin, in 1975, I can remember the ruthlessness with which the police raided the communes of left-wing sympathisers, literally turning fridges upside down, so I could well believe that they might also have ransacked the home of a great German writer.
The truth of the story is somewhat less dramatic. While members of the RAF were on the run, a taxi driver reported that he had brought visitors to the Böll house, so the local police chief felt duty-bound to check it out. It was all very polite and friendly, in fact, with the writer inviting the police in to meet his visitors, who were by then drinking coffee. Although Böll later corrected the record in a television interview, the mythic dimensions of the legend live on to this day.
The right-wing press had already turned Germany's most celebrated author into a hate figure. He had received death threats and had been branded the "father of terrorism" ever since publishing an article in Der Spiegel magazine defending the right to resist the capitalist system on which the Federal Republic was modelled.
Twenty years after the death of Heinrich Böll, he remains one of the most important literary figures in Germany. According to his latest biographer, Heinrich Wormweg, Boll became the "refuge of the German conscience". He had been conscripted into the war, or "enslaved" by the Nazi regime he abhorred. A devout Catholic from the Rhineland who never joined the Hitler Youth, he was wounded in combat and became a deserter. He had written letters for soldiers who could not write themselves, so it was no accident that he survived with an extraordinary gift for describing the horror of war, the physical and emotional ruins from which his country emerged.
AS A NOVELIST, Böll became best-known for the satirical touch with which he examined the German character. Even his description of war as a time of "singing, shooting, talking, fighting, starving and dying" seems to have that innate, home-grown sense of irony which became his literary trademark. Elsewhere, he described war as the disease of the 20th century, just as the plague was the disease of the Middle Ages. In spite of his deeply critical stand, he was concerned with identity and nationhood. He was deeply opposed to any form of rearmament in Germany.
In the 1970s, young Germans were embroiled in an ideological struggle for a true democracy. At times they took the reshaping of their country to extremes, with a kind of inner rage, a self-hatred or inverse racism almost. What they needed was a folk hero. Unlike other countries, Germany lacked the kind of ordinary hero who might become emblematic of change. Britain had John Lennon. The US had Bob Dylan and Martin Luther King. Germany seemed unable to locate that iconic revolutionary who might take on the cloak of popular hero.
They had Franz Beckenbauer, the great footballing hero of the 1974 West German World Cup victory. They had the activist, Rudi Dutschke, until he was shot in Berlin by a radical worker motivated by the right-wing press. They had Petra Kelly, of the Green Party, whose career also came to an abrupt and violent end. But they needed a Che Guevara, an outlaw, an edgy figurehead with contemporary resonance. Which is why we can now understand the sympathy that existed among young people initially for resistance through direct action. Perhaps the RAF gang, also known as, the Baader-Meinhof group, had that outlaw charm, one that represented, even in the late 1970s, a kind of belated resistance to the Nazi regime.
By right, young Germans should have chosen Sophie Scholl, the student who had been put to death by the Nazis in 1943, as their figurehead of resistance, but at a time when there was no plaque even in the University of Munich to commemorate her courage, her memory was betrayed and marginalised in a society unable to take anything positive from its own history.
OF COURSE, GERMANY had already had its folk hero: Hitler. Germans could not trust another one. To this day, every child in Germany is raised on the negative iconography of its past. While other countries base themselves on the good role models of their forefathers, German children base their lives on bad people, on people they should not be like. No wonder that in the 1970s, a young nation in trauma needed a new, clean identity, with a more positive vision.
It was German writers such as Heinrich Böll who took on the task of de-contaminating the language and discovering a new imagery. They had Günter Grass and The Tin Drum, the story of a child refusing to grow up, a story which ironically still fits the Germans today. They had Bertolt Brecht with his socialist parables. They had postmodern, brat-pack writers such as Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard, but many of these writers appeared to be more like demolition artists, whereas Heinrich Böll was the writer who was reconstructing the German conscience and the German identity.
Böll did what Bob Dylan refused to do, allowing himself to be the voice of protest. He struck back at the right-wing press who had hounded him throughout the 1970s with a masterful novel called The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum, describing the true horror of media intrusion. But it is with a slim volume of travel essays on Ireland, published in 1957 as Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal), that he seemed to rescue the Germans from themselves. This book, more than the writer himself, became, for many generations, the folk hero of Germany.
Literary commentators such as Marcel Reich-Ranicki, who championed Böll and admired his critical stand as a writer and commentator on the German psyche, have referred to it as a "hidden book about Germany", a book that found Ireland to be the exact opposite. Ireland was, in first instance, a country untouched by the second World War. When Böll arrived with his wounded German heart, he found a non- judgmental society, full of natural humour and dignity.
HE WROTE ABOUT Irish emigration, about the man in Limerick who left for the US, leaving the lights on and a full milk bottle outside the door. He discovered a kind of poverty in Ireland that reflected the experience of his own people in Germany's famine years. He wrote from the German perspective, from the point of view of people searching for a place of healing. He wrote how the Irish were even ambivalent towards the Nazi past, how he had to teach them to love Germans, not because of Hitler, but in spite of Hitler.
In a study of people on Achill Island, who became immortalised in Irish Journal, he was described by many of them in turn as a polite man, entertaining and friendly, who always had time for a talk and a drink in the pub - but they also said there was something deeply sad about him.
"'He had sad eyes," one of them remarked.
In Irish Journal, Böll observes that Irish people constantly use the word "sorry", as if they were the saddest, sorriest people in the world. It is ironic that he never noticed it about himself or that he never knew how many Germans would follow in his footsteps, exhausted by their own history, saying "sorry" in their own heads at least as often as every Irish person said it out loud.
This small German masterpiece, which has sold well over a million copies to date, is, above all else, a spiritual place of refuge. Perhaps no other book in German literature claims this position as a monument of healing, a place which, even though Ireland has changed since then, represents an enduring status of folk hero, a literary home.
The Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend continues in Achill today. Hugo Hamilton will give a talk on the impact of Böll's Irish Journal in the Cyril Gray Memorial Hall, Dugort, at 8.30pm this evening. From 2pm-5pm, Böll's cottage - now a residence for writers and artists - will be open to the public