Leipzig on the Lee – An Irishman’s Diary about a postwar dystopia, set in Cork

After all the Easter-adjusted centenary commemorations, it's disconcerting to read The Irish Times of 100 years ago today and be reminded that the Rising hasn't happened yet.  But it also adds to the surrealism of the latest instalment in a comic fantasy the paper had just begun running, entitled "If the Germans Came".

Introducing the feature in late March 1916, The Irish Times summed up its anonymous author's premise thus: "He assumes that the Germans have won the war, and instals the Baron Von Kartoffel in Government House as Military Governor of Cork".

In fact, the paper had the author's sex wrong. He was a she – the real-life Mary Carbery, aka Lady Carbery of Castle Freke, near Clonakilty, although she would retain her anonymity when the series was eventually published in book from, as The Germans in Cork (1917).

Fictional dystopia

Events in

Ireland

had overtaken it by then. But fears of an invasion had been a feature of the early war years, and hers was not the only book to result. Even before partition, there was a separate northern version of the fictional dystopia,

The Germans in Bessbrook

, also published in 1917.

The then-unionist Irish Times played up the propaganda element of Carbery's work, which among other things envisaged the deportation of all Sinn Féiners (having been so much trouble to the British, they were not trusted by the new overlords either).

But as the paper also had to admit, the author did not paint an entirely unsympathetic picture: "His (sic) Baron is not one of the blood-thirsty brutes who led the German troops into Belgium. If we had met him before the war, we should have found him a rather likeable fellow."

Sausages

Indeed, from the published extracts, the author seems to be at least as interested in the humour of the situation as in drawing political lessons. Here she has the Baron, in a letter home to his “beloved Anna”, lamenting the standard of food and drink in Cork: “I miss our good sausages. The natives have no ideas as to the proper manipulation of pork. As regards beer, I shall soon be happy in that respect, for both the large breweries here (as also those of Dublin) have been taken over by a German firm, and are already staffed with men sent from Munich.”

Still, and fictional fantasies aside, the English-born Lady Carbery really did believe that the Germans would tyrannise Ireland, if let. So when the 1916 Rising happened, she took consolation from its confinement to Dublin. “Thank God that poor rebel Cork has remained quiet and sane,” she wrote in her diaries.

Not that she lacked sympathy with Irish nationalism, either. Brought here by marriage in 1890 and then widowed, she went at least partly native during her exile.

She even made efforts to learn Irish (albeit inspired by news that Queen Victoria was attempting Hindustani). And she once described herself as more nationalist than unionist. So she may not have been entirely disappointed at the way her beloved son John, who inherited the title Lord Carbery, turned out.

Born in 1892, he grew up to be a fearless, even reckless, eccentric. He was an enthusiastic aviator and the first Irishman to "loop the loop". But he also became a republican, fundraising for Sinn Féin, and renouncing his title to become plain John Evans Carbery.

After he sold Castle Freke in 1921, it was a long-popular story that he had taken his leave of it by firing a shotgun at all portraits of his aristocratic ancestors (doubts have since been cast on this legend). In any case, he departed Ireland for Kenya, to join the infamous "Happy Valley" set.

Aircraft

If not bad, or mad, he was certainly dangerous to marry.  His first wife divorced him after he allegedly whipped her. A second, herself a pilot, died in an aircraft accident that some believe was suicide. When a third left him for her lover, he flew after them and pelted their car with rocks.

By the time the second World War loomed, his antipathy to the land of his mother’s birth was complete. He upset fellow expatriates at a club in Kenya in 1938 by proposing a toast: “To hell with England. Long live Germany”.

No doubt he couldn’t have foreseen what the Nazis would do.

But maybe his mother could. Among the misadventures of Baron Von Kartoffel 22 years earlier, she had him arrange – for supposedly humane reasons – to gas the inmates of Cork Lunatic Asylum.