Consideration of the historical associations between the island of Ireland and Germany tend to devolve to the two global conflicts of the 20th Century - the 36th Ulster and 16th Irish Divisions on the Western Front, Sir Roger Casement's attempt to forge a revolutionary Irish Brigade from prisoners-of-war on the continent prior to the Easter Rising, Abwehr spying missions in Eire, County Down's working farm for the children of the Kindertransport at Millisle, the Luftwaffe triple blitz of Belfast and the Glencree German War Cemetery in the Wicklow Mountains.
From what I can garner from the order of battle my maternal great-grandfather was in the second wave of Ulstermen attacking the Schwaben Redoubt on 1st July 1916 at the Somme - all the Irish soldiers of a then British Ireland would return to a deeply unsympathetic future. Twenty five years later both of my grandparents' houses in the Oldpark and Woodvale districts of North and West Belfast would be destroyed in the Easter 1941 air raids.
However as outlined here by the Goethe Institut, the cultural links between the two countries do extend well beyond this particular adversarial remit. They include Franconian patron saint Kilian being born in County Cavan, the decisive role of King William's Commander-in-Chief Frederick Schomberg at the Battle of the Boyne, the emigration of German Protestants from the Rhenish Palatinate to southern Ireland at the start of the 18th Century and the premiere of Handel's The Messiah in Dublin in 1742. There was also the permanent residency in Ireland of Twenties cabaret singer and Allied black propagandist Agnes Bernelle while the country left huge cultural impressions on writers Friedrich Engels and Heinrich Boell.
In the historical context of Belfast there would also be the enormous contributions made to the civic and industrial life of the city in the Victorian and Edwardian eras by Otto Jaffe and Gustav Wolff of Hamburg. The lives of two West German businessmen meanwhile - Thomas Niedermayer and Werner Heubeck - fall within the long grim narrative of the modern Ulster Troubles and both are well recalled to this day by very many Northern Irish people for very different and deeply unsettling reasons.
Niedermayer was the 45-year-old managing director of the Nuremburg-founded Grundig electronics factory in Dunmurry on the outskirts of West Belfast and honorary West German counsel for Northern Ireland. He came to live in the province in the late Sixties and resided in the Glengoland district. The industrialist was kidnapped on 27th December 1973 by two members of the IRA. The abduction was witnessed by his daughters and it is believed the rationale behind the operation was to bargain for the release of Republican prisoners jailed after a mainland bombing campaign.
Although the choreography of events remains unclear Niedermeyer was murdered soon after by his captors - possibly in the context of an escape attempt - and buried in an illegal rubbish dump near Colin Glen which was a short distance from the family home. His body was found only seven years later - face down, bound and gagged. The degrading nature of Niedermayer's killing was compounded by the suicide of his wife in the sea off County Wicklow in the Irish Republic an exact decade following his funeral and then that of both his daughters in the Nineties. His eldest daughter's husband also killed himself subsequently.
Niedermeyer's grave to my knowledge is at Christ Church in Derriaghy south west of Belfast. The shame of his murder and its mortifying repercussions - alike the French, Italian and Spanish fatalities of the 1974 Dublin and 1998 Omagh bombings - remains a deep stain on the honour of Ireland and the life affirming folk soul it embodies for so many people around the world.
Five years after the end of the Great War Werner Heubeck was born in Nuremburg. During the Thirties he was a member of the Hitler Jugend and during the Second World War served in the Hermann Goering division of the Luftwaffe and the Afrika Korps. After a period as a prisoner-of-war in the USA he worked as a proofreader at the war crimes trials in his home city where he met his Welsh wife who was a translator. They moved to the United Kingdom and Heubeck became a British citizen. In 1965 he came over to Northern Ireland to manage the Ulster Transport Authority buses - this the year before the first three political murders of the conflict were carried out in West Belfast by Loyalist paramilitaries.
The running of the rebranded rural Ulsterbus and then the metropolitan Belfast Citybus services from 1973 were to be transformed during his 23 years of management. Heubeck remains an especial figure in the social history of the Troubles with respect to his actions in personally boarding hijacked buses during the worst years of the conflict to singlehandedly remove bombs planted by terrorists. Also for driving along routes that the company staff had been intimidated from, taking the first service run of the day along roads that had experienced overnight disorder, moving vehicles with explosive devices still on board or returning burning buses to depots for salvage. Heubeck was on first-name terms with the full raft of his company staff and counselled colleagues who had been affected by security incidents.
When I think of this kind of vintage stoicism I often recall the headmaster of my old Belfast primary David Russell who previously had worked at another school situated at a notorious and literally deadly flashpoint in the north of the city very near my paternal grandparents' home. He had been in a Japanese Prisoner of War camp and underscored to Anthony Bailey - who authored the 1980 Acts of Union - that after his experiences in the Far East that "it's hardly likely that anything that happens on the Oldpark Road is going to worry me". Shortly before he died Mr Russell revisited Japan to meet a former miner who had treated him kindly during a serious bout of illness while imprisoned there.
Despite the widespread targeting of buses during the years of civil disorder Heubeck's leadership and belief in keeping services running to schedule represented a fundamental toehold on normality for a country spiralling on the brink of blanket societal collapse. Estimates suggest that over 800 of the 1300 fleet were destroyed during the Troubles while several staff lost their lives including the horrific murders of Sydney Agnew in 1972 as a witness to a republican hijacking, four Ulsterbus workers at Oxford Street station on Belfast's Bloody Friday IRA blitz and Harry Bradshaw in 1977 for simply working a shift in public service during a Loyalist strike. In Lagan bus station in Belfast's Marlborough Street there is a memorial dedicated to all the victims of bombs on buses during the Ulster conflict while the Ulster Transport Museum at Cultra houses an original Daimler Fleetline Citybus in honour of the murdered drivers.
Werner Heubeck was awarded the OBE (like Niedermayer) and then the CBE for his services to civic life in a Northern Ireland at war with itself. He retired in 1988, moved to the Shetland Islands and died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 85. With his heavy accent, thick glasses, raincoat, trilby and fastidious Northern European fitness regimes in a nation not then particularly renowned for any form of holistic life management, Heubeck remains an unforgettable and truly charismatic figure from very dark times in Ireland.
In old Celtic and Hibernian parlance the term "blow in" is used to describe a person or group of people with no deep roots to either the physical locality or generic neighbourhood culture. It can be used in a dismissive or bantering fashion and overrides any quantitative length of actual settlement in an area. It is intriguing to consider the fateful course of life that brought such highly competent North West European professionals as Niedermayer and Huebeck to Ireland's shores in the late sixties - let alone to the political fragility of pre-Troubles Ulster with its potentially explosive ethnic makeup. Both men would experience the same daily tribulations which affected all the working people of the North for an unforgivable period of time - glowering tension, stark danger, rank strangeness and often utter insanity.
Ireland must never ever forget these two men and the lives they lead.
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