Clover and Communism, Leprechauns and Nazis

Writing on a bus, traveling the windy, ill-kept roads to Dingle, Ireland, my handwriting turned to that of a two-year-old. As we bounced along over the hills, I mused over the uselessness of sending postcards and photographs home as I wrote to my family. Much of the beauty of Ireland is not the kind that can be translated through a photo or postcard. You must see it for yourself; feel the space and weight of the mountains and the hills. You must see the green of Ireland with your own eyes; the depth of it doesn't come through a two-dimensional print. As I stood on those hills, my pale freckled skin felt distinctly Irish. Everything felt softer and more comfortable, like I had always been there. Perhaps some day I will have the chance to return, if my Irish luck holds out.

It is also only in Ireland that I would be drunk by three o'clock in the afternoon. Mind you, I was just trying to get the full Irish experience, with a bottle of Jameson as my means to an end. I discovered that when the Irish get drunk, they confess all their sins to their friends as though to a priest. Is this a part of the strict Catholicism that held sway here up till about ten minutes ago, or just Irish pub culture? To show that I was well prepared for the full Irish experience, I had a book called McCarthy's Bar with me the entire weekend I was in County Kerry. So I was reading about Irish pubs in Ireland – cliché maybe, but was I going to let that stop me? I think not. I'm too German for that.

Pete McCarthy pointed out a couple things that struck a chord once I arrived. The first is that it's a truth universally accepted that when a bunch of western Europeans get together in a pub, it is to make fun of the Germans, or the French, if there are any lying around. The second: on the way to Ireland and on St. Patrick's Day, there is an overwhelming desire in everyone to be IRISH. Where else in the world has there been anything like this? Why does everyone want to be from a country full of farmland and sheep? Don't they know that without the rain and coastline it would be Iowa? I have fallen victim to this exaggerated Irishness as well - I'm fiercely proud of my Irish heritage (even though we're not sure if it is even half of our blood). This year for St. Patrick's Day I outdid myself. I ran around, as everyone else did, like a mad leprechaun, clutching a bottle of Jameson and sporting orange pants, a green shirt, and a white duster in honor of the flag of the Republic of Ireland. I even helped a few friends convince an Irishman to let us into a Dingle pub that he said was full by shouting from the back of the crowd, “but I'm half Irish!”

My strange fascination with Celtic art leads me to graveyards and New Age gift shops all over Europe. Curiously, all of these offer a range of 500 year old symbols of Catholicism, as well as a startling array of crystals and amulets. Once, next to a display on St. Patrick in a shop in Dublin, I saw a brownish substance on a shelf of “herbal remedies” labeled “dried blood.” Hoping it wasn't human, I got the hell out of there, my clothes still smelling of Nag Champa incense. Despite this fascination, I still have not managed to see the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin. I always show up on the wrong day, when the original goes back into the vault. And then they want seven Euros for a fake? I think not. I opted for the CD-ROM version instead (it zooms, man!), with the intention of pilfering most of the designs for my own work. So I paid 35 Euros to an English Protestant University in Dublin for a version of 4 Gospels of the Catholic Church illuminated by Irish Catholic Monks. And they say the Irish Problem is simpler now.

I've been trying to appreciate that Catholic heritage, but I just don't think it's right for me. The instant I walked into the Vatican I sneezed violently three times. Besides, half of me is from a country that created Martin Luther. Maybe we just have a taste for rebellion in my family. I feel I have closer ties to my pagan ancestry – for all we know, part of our family was in Ireland before Christianity was ever introduced to it. We have ruddy skin, somewhat square faces, and funny ears that stick out, all traits of the “Old Irish” descendants. And I do like Nag Champa.

The fact that a few members of my family look Irish may just be a fluke anyway. I have a theory that my strawberry blonde hair and blue eyes come from my German half, a part of me that I have had a more difficult time accepting. I was always interested in Irish culture and history, and passionately nationalist on their behalf, but for Germany, the history books left me with little more than indifference. The ancient history of the region is dark to me, and more recent events are difficult to swallow. Not that my family is connected with any of the gruesome actions of the last century; in fact, quite the contrary. My grandfather was awarded several medals for his conduct in Europe during WWII, a fact that my proud and historically oriented family clings to. But the shame that the Germans carry for the Nazi party seemed to have spilt across the Atlantic, and we seemed to want to erase any ties until very recently.

My first real continental exposure to that missing half of my native culture came in Berlin. Speaking no German whatsoever, I had to rely on my (half-Hungarian) English boyfriend's one year of German to pull us through. James' favorite things to say were “zwei bratwurst bitte” and “danke” (in keeping with polite English convention). Though, even I had that mastered, after a few days. Fortunately those studious Germans knew to speak English before I even open my mouth. Was it the backpack, the map, the camera, or the sunburn that gave it away?

As the days passed, I explored more of the city (and more of the food), and began to be more comfortable with Berliners. Okay, so I rarely saw one smile, they're a bit insensitive about their memorials, and people are still fleeing the city in droves 14 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but they're not all bad. They have some of the sharpest senses of humor I have ever encountered. All of the guidebooks warn of this but can never truly prepare you for the quick wit of a Berliner. On a train in the city the man checking my rail pass asked me if I spoke English. When I said yes, he asked, “Does it hurt?” His face was perfectly straight. They keep their city clean, and they still make one hell of a grilled bratwurst. From them I took a strong sense of history and, oddly, pride and indignation on their behalf.

History has always fascinated me. In houses I grew up in, there were shelves upon shelves of books on the stories of revolutions and wars and politics that it takes to make a country, but those books can only say so much. In Berlin I saw living history, layer upon layer, intertwined and coexisting. The Berlin Wall was built over Nazi bunkers, and Prussian palaces were destroyed to make way for Nazi and Soviet government buildings, complete with bowling alleys. Disillusionment with communism and the will to leave it behind is seen in every building in East Berlin. Construction equipment toils on every block, and the rubble of the Soviet Union is replaced by empty offices and apartment buildings. History is still being made in Berlin, even as they try to forget it.

Amidst the chaotic storytelling, in Berlin I found something I didn't expect and wasn't really prepared for – familiarity. I could see things in the people I talked to and explored with, things that took me back to my own family. The German culture is a proud and a stubborn one, and having had to deal with so many things in recent generations, they have developed a stunningly irreverent sense of humor. Their troubled history has created an enormous reservoir of feeling, which the Germans keep hidden behind good-natured barbs and mugs of golden beer. They joke about their guilt complexes when they aren't antagonizing the French bloke in the next hostel dorm.

My family does its best to make chaos of the two cultures. At family reunions, our Irish tempers often get the best of us, and though we are a fairly close family we seldom apologize. German stubbornness gets in the way. Both the Irish and the Germans, at least in my experience, can be rather strong willed, sometimes leading to a conflict that would not otherwise be. We all sometimes have that German chip on one shoulder, but the Irish will to persevere against the odds helps us balance it out on the other. I was surprised and delighted to find where these things came from in my family, confusing as they are.

An American looking for their cultural identity faces a unique challenge. For centuries, immigrants have poured into the United States looking for freedom, work, or something as simple as a roof to live under and food to eat. It is a country with few natives, and most of us can trace our ancestry to the European countries that first began to colonize it or from which émigrés fled. As a half-Irish half-German mutt, I jumped at the chance to study here in Europe. Traveling abroad gave me quite a unique opportunity to discover the lands of my ancestors, and a bit of my self along the way that I didn't know I needed to find.