As a teenager in Gelsenkirchen, 100km north of Cologne, Axel Pawlik’s inventive teacher used James Bond, literature, and the Troubles to teach English. The Troubles “was engaging, fascinating to learn about”. It lit a spark. A road-trip around Ireland just after high school “made an impression”, particularly Donegal. “I fell in love with the place.” Finally, after decades of connections and visits and friendships, and many adventures, he and his wife, Inge Stiller, now live in the county, where he has a second career as the Donegal Chocolate Man, running a small artisanal chocolatier.
After studying computer science in college, as a conscientious objector instead of military service he did civilian service in a hospital for two years in the early 1980s. “I met a great bunch of people. It was interesting work, with real people. Totally different thing from computer science. I had a really annoying boss, one of the nurses. Well, she’s still my boss now, right? Thirty years later.” He holds up his hand, smiling, showing his wedding ring.
It was 1984, “still at the stage of ‘what are emails?’ and I fell into the internet-email thing”. What started casually became a successful company, one of the first internet providers in Germany. In his mid-30s he sold the business, though not for a fortune, he says. “What do we do now? I looked at my wife. We have two small children. The oldest was about to go to school. We were acutely aware if that should happen in Germany, we would then be locked in.” It was a now or never moment.
Over the years he, and later Stiller, and their two boys, Paul and Hennes, visited Ireland on holidays. “We just fell in love with the place and the people.” He recalls the first time he brought Stiller, in Easter 1988, he thinks, saying it’s mild, never really cold, “and she didn’t take many pullovers”. It snowed.
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They moved to Donegal in 1996, they rented an old farmhouse in Dunfanaghy, “a bit draughty but it worked”.
“I’m German. I expect things done properly with forms and signatures and all that. But we turned up at the school that just says, Oh, come on in, sit down there. It was great.”
Stiller worked as a nurse “to keep us afloat for a while”. Free of the shackles of management, which Pawlik didn’t like, it was “a breath of fresh air. I can do what I like, something different. Now, what do I like?” He got involved in setting up a country market, and baking bread. “No one liked it, it was sour German sourdough. There wasn’t a pandemic; nobody knew what it was!”
After three years in Donegal he got a job offer via a friend, as chief executive of a nonprofit supporting internet service providers in the Netherlands. Their Donegal adventure “wasn’t that long, but it was a very interesting and formative period for us”.
The family then moved to near Amsterdam. His job involved travel. Stiller nursed. The boys went to school. They bought a house, but they still holidayed in Donegal. “We always had at least a mental foot in Ireland.”
After their sons finished school, “my wife said, I want to be there. We suddenly realised ... we had more friends in Ireland than in Holland”. Renting in Rathmullen, they zig-zagged back and forth. When the pandemic hit he was in Amsterdam while Stiller was in Donegal. Then he made it over.
He fulfilled a long-held dream and did a three-month course in Ballymaloe Cookery School, the first after lockdown. Later, he saw a documentary “doing weird things with chocolate, like engineering ... That got me sort of hooked on the chocolate thought. I started tempering chocolate, painting chocolates. The kids liked them. My wife liked them. Then they said, enough! We don’t want any more!” He started selling them at Dunfanaghy country market, then others, and some gift shops.
They now live in Portsalon, Co Donegal, surrounded by beauty, equidistant between Fanad lighthouse and Kerrykeel, where he has his chocolate kitchen. He makes bonbons by hand, “a decorated chocolate shell, filled with salted caramel or some fruity things, or boozy stuff” and Stiller packages them. “I make a small amount. That’s fun. That seems to be a slowly growing little business. In the kitchen, I just smile at myself. Yeah, there’s nobody but me that bothers me.”
I watched the funny show in the evening news about speaking rights in the Dáil. That is to some degree on the amusing side for me as a blow-in
Where does his huge grá for Ireland come from? “The fairly obvious thing, the fairy-tale, is that the Irish and Germans love each other because the Irish think the Germans are so efficient, and the Germans think the Irish are so laid-back. This is great, until you’re a German in Ireland, and the plumber goes, Ah, sure, I’ll come tomorrow, and he doesn’t, and that goes on for three weeks.” He laughs.
“In Germany and Holland, if you go from one city to the next, you have to turn up and register. Here, we went up to the local police station, Hey, we moved here from Germany, now we want to register.” They said “Ah, sure. We’ll send somebody.”
A garda called. “He had a cup of tea, and we chatted for an hour. He drove with me to a scrapyard to get a fixed roof for the Land Rover. How can you not love that? It’s just fantastic, right?”
“People are friendly. The countryside is great. Maybe not enough trees out there, but they have a beach. You need a couple of years to gather your handyman. Now we have a plumber we know, who fixes the heating every time it falls over.”
However, “You can charge your electric car in the Netherlands at every corner, here, not so much, even today.”
He found it “amazingly bad” when it took so long to recover after Storm Éowyn. “How can that happen? I understand in the remote bits, it takes a long while, but otherwise, the infrastructure isn’t up to scratch. Uisce Éireann is making a new plant in Rathmullen. But, boy, that’s a bit late, isn’t it? Shouldn’t that have happened earlier?”
He’s dismayed at worldwide right-wing growth. “The global situation has gone bonkers.” Locally, “I watched the funny show in the evening news about speaking rights in the Dáil. That is to some degree on the amusing side for me as a blow-in. We see also the right-winger nuts who burn down houses and hotels, because possibly there’s a rumour some asylum seekers might be coming in. Oh my God, people, don’t you have any empathy?”
“Now I’m just happy with the local people. We feel quite at home here. Our neighbours said, we admire you for the braveness of emigrating. Who’s emigrating? It’s Europe. We can go from place to place. This is a nice neighbourhood, right? So we came here. Thank you for having us.”
