Sir, - As the son of a German immigrant to Ireland, as a writer and a member of Aosdana, I would like to voice my support for Francis Stuart at a time when he has come under renewed attack for his presence in Berlin during the war years. With many relatives who lived through the Nazi period, some of whom stood against Nazi ideology, I tend to think of racial hatred as a very real thing in our society. I try not to moralise for a previous generation. Instead I try to understand the circumstances that led to the Holocaust and to see concepts like Nazism, racism and fascism as real ingredients of that hatred.
It worries me, therefore, when people make hysterical accusations against a writer who has been shown repeatedly not to have uttered a single line of racial hatred in his entire works. I worry when people attempt to demonise Francis Stuart without reading his work, relying instead on a discredited television programme to do so. I am concerned that when people casually employ terms like Nazi and fascist, there might come a day very soon when we no longer know what it really means. How are we ever going to counter racism in Europe, when respectable intellectuals continue to use the Holocaust like a moral board game in order to score points? Fifty years of triumphant moral attitudes and blame was not enough to prevent Sarajevo.
The greatest offence to the victims of the Holocaust is to misrepresent these terms. What we get from indiscriminate taunts of this kind is a moral blindness which will prevent us from caring. Ireland already has its own share of racism, and the sort of vituperative attacks on Francis Stuart from Maire Cruise O'Brien and others only creates a fog around the real thing. It makes me think that Irish people have learned nothing from the Holocaust when a learned man like Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien can call Francis Stuart a rat (Irish Independent, Saturday, November 30th).
Stuart is no racist. He is not hiding anything, because writing novels and poetry is not the place to hide anything. To my mind, he possesses the most important of all literary attributes, that for which we in Ireland think of ourselves as a great literary nation, and for which we put our writers on banknotes - the literary greatness of his rogue intellect. It is precisely his kind of awkward presence which prevents us from foundering in that moral fog. All other accolades are hollow. In the words of his friend and contemporary, Samuel Beckett, the greatest curse that can befall anyone is "an honoured name". Nobody understands this better than Francis Stuart. - Yours, etc.,
Hugo Hamilton,
Tivoli Terrace East, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.