WORLD VIEW:Heinrich Böll's slim volume of sly beauty has frozen an ideal of Ireland in millions of German minds, writes Derek Scally.
If Germany beheaded an Irish citizen today, you can be sure you would hear about it. Tabloid headlines about "heartless huns" and livid Liveline callers would bring the curtain crashing down on German-Irish relations.
But the fate of St Killian, the Cavan man beheaded by a scorned German woman in 689, is seen as the foundation stone for harmonious relations between Ireland and Germany.
Mullagh-born monk Killian and two friends, Totnan and Kolonat, arrived in the German city of Würzburg as fishers of men in 686. They snagged a local big fish with the conversion of Duke Gozbert and his subjects to Christianity. Gozbert's wife, Geilana, was less co-operative, not surprising after Killian pronounced her marriage a violation of canon law because she was the widow of Gozbert's brother. She showed Killian and his friends what she thought of canon law and sent her soldiers out for their heads.
Exactly 1,319 years later, a joking President McAleese told Würzburgers this week that there were no hard feelings. Indeed, even before her three-day state visit to Germany, it was clear that - leaving the odd tax spat aside - Irish-German relations are harmonious and stable.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is a regular visitor to Berlin and, on his invitation, Chancellor Merkel will return the favour in the coming weeks.
On their days in Germany, the State visit veterans in the President's delegation said they were pleasantly surprised by the goodwill they encountered. In return, President McAleese took time out to reflect on why Ireland can be thankful for that goodwill.
She said Ireland's journey to Europe began, with German help, a lot earlier than EEC accession in 1973 and the subsidised salad days that followed.
Exactly a century before Crick and Watson identified the double helix structure of DNA - the key to life - German scholar Johann Caspar Zeuss left us the key to the life of our native tongue.
His Grammatica Celticawas the first written grammar of Irish and other Celtic languages, the product of a decade of work studying manuscripts scattered around Europe. The work built on the earlier conclusion by another German philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, that Irish was a legitimate member of the European language family.
At first glance, Grammatica Celticaappeared at an inopportune time, in the cataclysmic aftermath of the Great Famine, when parents urged their children to embrace English and emigration as their passports to survival.
But in hindsight, the work gave the enfeebled Irish culture of the time a slow-acting shot in the arm, a stamp of external legitimacy that would feed into the cultural reawakening and independence movement.
Now, 150 years after Zeuss, Germany is home to hordes of people whose enthusiasm for Ireland makes Irish-Americans seem tame. Both treasure the same Irish ideal of half a century past: the Irish-Americans descend on Cong in search of The Quiet Man; Germans arrive in Achill clutching their well-thumbed copy of the 1957 Irish Journalby Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll.
His slim volume of sly beauty has frozen an ideal of Ireland in millions of German minds. Some 50 years later, it's not unusual for the Irish Embassy in Berlin to get two or three Irish Journal-related queries in a week.
The English translation appeared in 1967 and branded a "ghastly little book" by Conor Cruise O'Brien. "He idealises everything that is most wishy-washy in the Ireland he thinks he has seen naturally laments any signs of progress," he wrote in a 1967 review.
However, according to writer Hugo Hamilton, the book is really about Germany, not Ireland.
The economically-undeveloped Ireland of the 1950s served as a sentimental backdrop, a scenic surface on to which traumatised post-war Germans could project romantic feelings so crucial to their identity. Those romantic notions of nature, landscape and homeland (heimat), ruthlessly co-opted by the Third Reich in the 1930s, could be explored again in the protected isolation of Achill Island, a kind of the Nürburgring for the battered German soul.
This surrogate function of the book has faded with time, but the goodwill it generated lives on.
At a state banquet in Berlin on Monday, for instance, one of Dr Merkel's inner circle confessed over coffee: "I'm a secret Ireland fan. My birthday is on March 17th." The other main attraction for many Germans to the Irish Journalwas Böll's feeling that Ireland had escaped the West German economic miracle and its relentless demands.
Half a century on, though, there are signs of a Böll boomerang effect in the steady stream of young people leaving Ireland for the buzzing German capital. Every bag packed and every flight booked is another, invisible vote in the long-running Boston or Berlin contest.
Behind the lure of cheap rents and good times is a common feeling of protest at the personal cost and financial demands placed on young people by Ireland's own economic miracle.
Derek Scally is Berlin Correspondent.