The Past is not a Weakness Did the Coen brothers get it right in their cult-classic ‘The Big Lebowski’? The Germans as a bunch of nihilist, cry-babies who believe in ‘NOSSING’, the self-mutilating, rodent-owning, ransom-hunters who cannot even get the ground rules of kidnapping right and cut the little toe off one of their own gang members to send in the post. Of course, we would never believe in cultural stereotyping if it didn’t contain some truth, if the Germans didn’t somehow accept their own stereotypes as the head-hanging baddies who listen to car-crash music and end up getting the wrong briefcase with the dirty undies inside.

Ireland - Germany (published by The Irish Times) I can remember my German mother once trying to make a point to the Irish people about litter. Outside a sweet shop in Glasthule, she could no longer bear to watch an entire family throwing their ice pop wrappers onto the street in front of her. Without a word, she politely decided to pick up after them and put their litter into the nearby bin.

The Loneliness of Being German (published by The Guardian) In 1957, the German writer Heinrich Böll published his famous travel book called Irish Journal. The Irish hated it and the Germans loved it. For the Irish it had too many donkeys and stone walls, too much dreaming and backward innocence. For the Germans, however, this is precisely what allowed them to dream and to experience desires which were outlawed in Germany. They carried the book with them in their rucksacks, searching for an emotional connection to the people and the landscape. It gave them a sense of innocence and belonging, an inner life of feelings that was denied to them in their own country.

Shift (excerpts from The Aran Islands by John Millington Synge) The first thing we noticed going out to Aran was the light. It was coming from the opposite direction and felt strange. To a person brought up in Dublin, on the east coast of Ireland, the world seems to be turned around a full hundred and eighty degrees when you take the boat from Galway out to the islands. The white glimmer of sunlight that we expect to see when coming ashore is right there ahead of you on the way out to sea. The feeling of leaving becomes confused with the feeling of going home. It’s like an inverse homecoming, something that must be similar to getting on the plane in autumn and landing somewhere on the far side of the world in spring. On the Naomh Eanna ferry out to Irishmore, it felt as though we were going backwards in time, travelling into the mirror. We was staring into the light over the Atlantic. We could barely see the shape of the three islands in the distance. We could smell the sea and the diesel fumes and feel the throb of the engines in everything we touched. We could hear the murmur of Irish being spoken around us on the boat and became aware, without saying it openly, that we were no longer facing east, towards London, towards the buzz of Europe, but west, into an older, untouched world.