Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

"Erin the tear and the smile" has nothing on German sentimental popular songs. Or so it seems from a pile of letters written by an Irish schoolboy back to his family around the mid-1930s. He first came across them at a wine festival on the Rhine - a nightly hooley with lots of oompapa music, dancing and liberal outpourings of the new vintage - or just unfermented grape juice. The songs deal with the blonde kid on the Rhine that someone told to say hello to her, and say himself would soon be back. Then a waltz, Einmal am Rhein, or "Once on the Rhine", an amorous longing for happy days of the past. And so on. Then lovely folk-songs celebrating the seasons.

The letters, long-kept in an old suitcase, then told of his studies in a university town where he was brushing up his German. His landlady introduced him to a young man who detested the Nazis. For an unusual reason - they wouldn't let him join. For, although he bore a distinguished name in the scholastic world, the party found out that he had a grandmother or great-grandmother who was Jewish. He worked off some of his rage by driving a huge motorcycle at great speed around vertiginous roads through the wooded countryside - with our schoolboy on the pillion. Another aspect of the time soon came up. The boy needed a change of glasses and his landlady had the right man for him. An appointment was made to go to the oculist late one evening. It was explained that the oculist, being Jewish, could only practise (probably illegally) at night. Although the landlady had a son in the SS, the oculist friend was still invited to the family musical evenings, as was the motorcyclist.