What is it with Ireland and Germany?

Thoughts on an understated love affair

Lovely Dalkey.

“Greetings from Ireland,” I finished my text message to a German friend once I’d landed in Dublin earlier this week.

I’d flown in directly from Warsaw on a plane full of Polish families, clearly returning from holiday back home. More used to flying between London and Berlin, I was surprised by how long the flight took from one end of Europe to the other. While the kid behind me kicked his feet into the back of my thin Ryanair seat, always somehow just in time to prevent me from nodding off, the drinks trolley came around twice. Not to be outdone, perfumes, cigarettes and scratch cards followed in its wake. After three hours that felt like five, I landed in rainy Dublin and sent said text to Berlin.

At Dalkey Book Festival. Img: Brendan Kenny

“You’re in Ireland?! That’s so cool,” came the response. Was it cool? Don’t get me wrong, I like Ireland. I’ll use any excuse to spend some time here. The landscape is beautiful, the history fascinating, and I always have interesting conversations here. My current fiction escape from German things happens to be The Dublin Trilogy by Caimh McDonnell. So, I even choose to spend a fair bit of time in Ireland mentally. But I must admit that I have never shared the deep fascination for Ireland that many of my compatriots hold.

When I tell Germans that I live in the UK, surprisingly often the response is: “Why didn’t you move to Ireland?” as though both were options on a menu of destinations for German emigrants. Apparently, around 15,000 Germans live in Ireland, but that’s a small number compared to the 135,000 living in the UK. In both cases, this isn’t usually because people picked a new home on the map but because work, love or chance has caused them to settle somewhere new.

But there is no doubt Ireland holds a special place in the imagination of Germans who want to escape or enjoy dreaming about it. Music plays a key role in this. When I was growing up in Germany in the 1990s, Riverdance was an absolute phenomenon. Mostly consisting of Irish music and dance, it drew huge audiences in Germany, as did successors like Lord of the Dance. Enya is also massive, and so were many other artists associated with Irish music.

I was reminded of my disconnect from the German affinity with Irish music shortly after I landed here. I’m in Ireland for the Dalkey Book Festival, which is held in the eponymous village southeast of Dublin. Long-term readers of ZEITGEIST may recall that last year, I embarrassed myself by talking to Chris de Burgh without realising who he was. Many Germans would immediately have recognised him. His music was and is incredibly popular in Germany, where he frequently gave concerts on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This year, he is scheduled to do a tour in over 20 German cities to celebrate 50 years on stage.

Because I’m so ignorant of these things, I had no idea that Dalkey is home to many Irish celebrities, including those beloved by a great number of Germans. In the author’s tent, I had expected to bump into fellow speakers and writers, not so much pop and rock musicians.

This time, I unexpectedly found myself being introduced to Bono, who warmly shook my hand and asked about my books. Feeling slightly guilty about the idea that I, as a musical ignoramus, should get a chance to chat with a man many Germans would bite your hand off to meet, we nonetheless had an interesting conversation about his relationship with Germany. I knew he was extremely popular nationwide. Many of my friends were into U2 and would attend their concerts. The band filled huge venues, including iconic ones like the Olympiastadion in Berlin.

So I knew Germany loved Bono. What I hadn’t quite appreciated was how much Bono loved Germany back. “You’ll probably disagree with me,” he began, “but I love Angela Merkel.” He’d met her a few times and found her hard-working, funny and likeable. We talked a bit about the welfare state and about how German audiences reacted to his politics on stage over the years. He also recalled how strange it was to record Achtung Baby at the Hansa Studios in Berlin at the time of reunification in October 1990 – a period during which the disorientation and confused emotions in the German capital seemed to mirror the internal conflicts of U2.

Bono clearly came away with an accurate impression of the German soft spot for Ireland. ‘I bet you know who The Kelly Family are,’ he laughed. I confirmed that I did. They are an Irish-inspired folk band consisting, as the name suggests, of members of the extended Kelly family. They are an Irish-American family, but I’m not sure many Germans are aware of that. Certainly, when I was a kid in the nineties, we all assumed they were Irish.

Like most teenagers, I was an avid reader of Bravo magazine, which consistently featured a mix of pop culture, film gossip, relationship advice, and sex education. I remember quite vividly that the Kelly Family often featured in its pages because they looked so different. Next to the glossy Spice Girls or perfectly curated boy bands like The Back Street Boys, the Kellys looked ... erm… earthy. They all had long, wavy hair. The women seemed to wear no makeup. They wore baggy knitwear in greens, browns and maroons. In short, they looked like Irish hippies or at least matched any such notion Germans may have had.

The Kellys weren’t my cup of tea, but they were big in Germany. Their 1994 Album Over the Hump topped the album charts for four weeks and stayed in the Top 10 for 53 weeks. There was something about the look of the family members and the alternative lifestyles they represented that struck a chord with many younger Germans. The Kellys and Ireland more generally represented a kind of wild, romantic beauty that appealed to people who felt trapped in the grind and banality of everyday life in Germany.

There is a long tradition of that. In the 1970s, West German hippies were among the New Age Travellers who settled in Coole Mountain, County Cork, where they sought to live off the grid. The Platonic ideal of rugged, spiritual tranquillity that Ireland represented was a powerful draw for people seeking authenticity, meaning, and community. These movements never became mainstream, but the notion that there was something ancient, Celtic and unspoilt about Ireland did. And it endures. Around half a million Germans visited Ireland last year – the third latest group of visitors after the US and the UK.

Well, this German visitor is certainly enjoying herself in Dalkey. One of Dublin’s wealthiest districts, it’s more celebrity haven than hippie commune, but I’m not complaining. I get to talk about Germany to lovely audiences by day and to lots of interesting people by night. I may be immune to its musical charms, but the magic of Ireland works on me in other ways.