The weather in Ireland

‘The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather. You can call this rain bad weather, but it is not. It is simply weather, and weather means rough weather.’ This is from Irish Journal by Heinrich Böll, a German Nobel prize-winning author who died 40 years ago today. Although it is called a ‘journal’ and does occasionally read like one, there are no dated entries, and the text is more reminiscent of a travelogue or memoir than a diary.

Böll was born in 1917, in Cologne, Germany, into a working-class Catholic family. He was the eldest of four children, and his early life was shaped by the strong religious values of his household and the economic hardships of the interwar period. Böll attended the University of Cologne, where he initially studied German, history, and philosophy, but his studies were interrupted by World War II. Drafted into the German army, he served on the Western Front, an experience that profoundly shaped his pacifist beliefs and critical stance toward militarism. After the war, these experiences deeply influenced his literary themes of guilt, loss, and the human cost of conflict.

After the war, Böll returned to complete his studies, earning his degree before embarking on a successful literary career marked by a strong social conscience and a focus on the moral complexities faced by individuals in postwar Germany. He married Annemarie Cech, a journalist, in 1942, and together they had four children. Böll’s early career was distinguished by poignant short stories and novels that tackled the realities of war, guilt, and the rebuilding of German society. His most notable works include Billiards at Half-Past Nine (1959), The Clown (1963), and Group Portrait with Lady (1971), which earned international acclaim and cemented his reputation as a leading voice of the postwar generation.

Throughout his life, Böll remained an influential literary and cultural figure, vocally advocating for democracy, human rights, and social justice. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972 for his uncompromising and compassionate writings that captured the spirit and struggles of his time. He died on 16 July 1985, in Langenbroich, West Germany, leaving behind a profound legacy as one of Germany’s most important and respected postwar authors. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and the Nobel Prize website.

Böll was not a diarist in the traditional sense, however he was a prolific letter writer and essayist, and he did keep notebooks with story ideas, sketches, and fragments. He also produced one book that, in title at least, has the trappings of a diary: Irisches Tagebuch (Tagebuch is usually translated as ‘diary’) published in 1957 by Kiepenheuer & Witsch. This was translated into English by Leila Vennewitz and published by Peter Owen in 1958 as Irish Journal. Despite the title, the book is more of a poetic, essayistic travelogue - part reportage, part fiction, part meditation on poverty, Catholicism, and human resilience. A modern edition published Northwestern University Press in 1998 can be sampled at Googlebooks.

Here are the opening paragraphs from chapters 1, 3 and 9.

‘Arrival

As soon as I boarded the steamer I could see, hear, and smell that I had crossed a frontier. I had seen one of England’s gentle, lovely sides: Kent, almost bucolic - I had barely skimmed the topographical marvel that is London - then seen one of England’s gloomier sides, Liverpool - but here on the steamer there was no more England: here there was already a smell of peat, the sound of throaty Celtic from between decks and the bar, here Europe’s social order was already assuming new forms: poverty was no longer “no disgrace,” it was neither honor nor disgrace: it was - as an element of social awareness - as irrelevant as wealth; trouser creases had lost their sharp edge, and the safety pin, that ancient Celtic clasp, had come into its own again. Where the button had looked like a full stop, put there by the tailor, the safety pin had been hung on like a comma; a sign of improvisation, it draped the material in folds, where the button had prevented this. I also saw it used to attach price tickets, lengthen suspenders, replace cufflinks, finally used as a weapon by a small boy to pierce a man’s trouser seat: the boy was surprised, frightened because the man did not react in any way; the boy carefully tapped the man with his forefinger to see if he was still alive: he was still alive, and patted the boy laughingly on the shoulder.’

‘Pray for the Soul of Michael O’Neill

At Swift’s tomb my heart had caught a chill, so clean was St. Patrick’s Cathedral, so empty of people and so full of patriotic marble figures, so deep under the cold stone did the desperate Dean seem to lie, Stella beside him: two square brass plates, burnished as if by the hand of a German housewife: the larger one for Swift, the smaller for Stella; I wished I had some thistles, hard, big, long-stemmed, a few clover leaves, and some thornless, gentle blossoms, jasmine perhaps or honeysuckle; that would have been the right thing to offer these two, but my hands were as empty as the church, just as cold and just as clean. Regimental banners hung side by side, half-lowered: did they really smell of gunpowder? They looked as if they did, but the only smell was of mold, as in every church where for centuries no incense has been burned; I felt as though I were being bombarded with needles of ice; I fled, and it was only in the entrance that I saw there was someone in the church after all: the cleaning woman; she was washing down the porch with lye, cleaning what was already clean enough.’

‘Thoughts on Irish Rain

The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather. You can call this rain bad weather, but it is not. It is simply weather, and weather means rough weather. It reminds us forcibly that its element is water, falling water. And water is hard. During the war I once watched a burning aircraft going down on the Atlantic coast; the pilot landed it on the beach and fled from the exploding machine. Later I asked him why he hadn’t landed the burning plane on the water, and he replied: “Because water is harder than sand.” I never believed him, but now I understood: water is hard. And how much water can collect over three thousand miles of ocean, water that rejoices in at last reaching people, houses, terra firma, after having fallen only into water, only into itself. How can rain enjoy always falling into water?’