IF YOU want to see a grown woman melt with happiness before your eyes, mention the word “Ireland” to Waltraud Grampp.
It is 18 years since the author was first “infected with the Ireland virus”, as she puts it. She has visited Ireland 24 times since and each time is a “homecoming”.
“I remember on the first trip standing in Eyre Square in Galway and thinking, ‘I could stay here’,” says Grampp (60). “It was the dream of my partner and I to retire in Ireland, but he died 12 years ago and things worked out differently. Now I come back whenever I can.”
Just arrived from Bad Homburg, near Frankfurt, Grampp sits in the Teachers Club on Parnell Square on the first evening of her 25th Ireland trip – a “civil society tour” offering a dozen German visitors a mixture of sights and talks.
Germans are the largest tourism market from continental European to Ireland each year and our third-largest worldwide. Some 432,000 Germans visited the island last year, up 14 per cent on 2010.
Germany’s love of Ireland has been tempered by recent realities – first the Celtic Tiger, then the crash – but by no means extinguished.
Grampp is looking forward to feeling once more the “magic” of the landscape around Clifden, her favourite place in the country – although the magic has suffered somewhat because of all the new houses.
“What do people do in their house on a hill every day? Why does the house have to be on the hill at all?” asks Grampp, whose latest book is set largely in Ireland. “If everyone wants space in the countryside, there’ll be no countryside left.”
Drive through the German countryside and the difference is striking: when the villages end, the houses end too. Aware she is starting to sound like the cliched humourless German tourist, she jokes solemnly that not even German efficiency is what it used to be.
“It used to be said you could send a German into a forest with an axe and he’d come out with a train,” she says. “These days, I’m not sure if he’d come out with even a branch.
“The work ethic isn’t the same, and the country is getting older and poorer, too.”
German feelings of angst and vulnerability, stirred up by globalisation, have been amplified in the euro zone crisis, she suggests. Bailout requests go far beyond what some Germans feel their collective wallet can handle.
“I think that the Greece, Portugal and Ireland crises are just the tip of the iceberg, with the rest of Europe not far behind,” she says.
What does she think of the argument, often heard in Ireland, that banks lent German money recklessly and should also be asked to pay?
“A bank loan isn’t a gift,” she says. “If it’s more than I can afford it’s no wonder when the problems come.”
Grampp though is not blind to the other side of the argument. She recalls Rosalie Goes Shopping, a 1989 film starring German actor Marianne Sägebrecht. Its catchline: “When you’re $100,000 in debt it’s your problem. When you’re $1,000,000 in debt, it’s the bank’s problem.”
So is Ireland’s banking debt Germany’s problem too?
“I see it as a problem for the whole EU because we cannot separate things: if one has a problem, it spreads automatically to the others,” she said. “We can only find a sensible solution. That banks did stupid things on all sides is clear, the problem is that no one reacted quickly enough to stop it.”
Fellow visitor Ulrich Ahrensmeier’s memories of Ireland go back to 1973, when he and three friends drove around Ireland in a Volkswagen beetle.
Walking down O’Connell Street in Dublin Ahrensmeier (59), a photographer from Hanover, remembers another country.
A “poor, conservative and prudish” place in 1973, where an old man in a pub, hearing they were German, announced that Hitler wasn’t that bad. “We didn’t know how to react, then we realised he was for Hitler because he was against the British,” he recalls.
It was during that trip, during a pub sing-along in Salthill, Galway, that Ahrensmeier was confronted with his broken relationship to his homeland.
“We were enjoying the folk songs until it was our turn,” he said. “We realised we couldn’t sing one entire German folk song between us. It was a broken tradition because of how it was co-opted by fascism, forcing a complete break afterward.”
Ahrensmeier says Germans’ love of Ireland is often misunderstood by locals as uncomfortably hardcore, insufferably patronising or both. The photographer says that Germans’ love for Ireland is a surrogate love for a country it sees at peace with itself.
For German eyes, Ireland has retained some of the irregular and imperfect ways and provides a welcome escape from the often exhausting pursuit of perfection back home.
The two visitors agree that a crossroads has been reached in our relationship. We have also reached a pedestrian crossing on O’Connell Street near their hotel.
Shattering a dearly held Irish cliche of the Germans, neither waits for the green man when they cross.
Ralf Sotscheck, Ireland correspondent for the Tageszeitung daily, suggests that Germans have never forgotten how differently they were treated by the Irish after the war – whatever the reasons.
“The Irish were even one of the first national sides to play against the German soccer team after the war, when no one else wanted to,” he says. “Since then there has been an idea in Ireland that in thanks, the Germans wear green as their away jersey. It’s only a legend, but it’s a nice one.”
A week after returning from Ireland, when I call Grampp and Ahrensmeier they are still glowing from their latest trip.
“I got so much sun that it triggered my sun allergy,” Grampp laughs. “The personal contact to people, regardless of where we went, was never negative, only positive.”
Although an annual visitor, she is still struck by the changes to previous trips. The biggest change are the motorways, she says, but smaller changes are significant, too.
“In 1994, I seem to recall people having more time,” she says. “You could be looking in a shop window and fall into conversation with someone doing the same. That spontaneity is less strong now.”
Ahrensmeier says that ordinary Germans are perhaps not as clued-in as they might be to the real hardships behind Ireland’s reform progress, but German confidence in Ireland’s ability to pull out of this, he adds, should not be disregarded in a contrary fashion by the Irish as ill-informed, patronising German romanticism.
“For all the difficulties in Ireland with the crisis I still see a we-can-do-this energy,” he says, mentioning by name “The Gathering” – the plan to invite home Irish emigrants in 2013.
“It’s the right idea at the right time,” Ahrensmeier adds. “Dublin and Galway seemed strange on this trip. I still saw tourists, yet I found Grafton Street emptier than I remember.”
Tomorrow: the Irish companies winning in Germany
