I first met Peter Bielenberg in 1976 in Galway. His wife, the writer Christabel Bielenberg, was participating in the first National Writers' Workshop moderated by the playwright Thomas Kilroy and based in University College Galway. Writers in the workshop, a radical new development at the time, gathered in the college at weekends. Christabel travelled with Peter from Carlow where they have lived since the late 1940s.
I lived in my girl's apartment in the heart of Galway. It was a ground floor flat with a postagestamp garden, little natural light and many doors. The knock came on the front door one Saturday, late afternoon - "Bielenberg here" - and in ducked this very tall, dapper, sun-tanned smiling man in his mid-sixties, though he could have been 20 years younger. He was carrying a bottle of Martini and several packs of cigarettes. From that day 25 years ago, Peter and Christabel and their home in Carlow became part of our own lives. Their hospitality, as we were to discover, embraced so many people, people from all walks of life from so many corners of the world, that it was a kind of mini-UN.
It was an unlikely friendship in many ways. Peter was a formidable man whose early life and young manhood had been lived in the proving ground of a self-contained, self-demanding and assertive Germanic culture. But behind all exteriors, no matter how insulated, there is often another story, another life. With Peter it was an extraordinarily caring, protective, if no less purposeful self that drew so many to love and respect him.
Many debates were bartered and unresolved in the "den" which doubled as the office to his farm of land in Co Carlow. It was here that the life of his family and friends in pre-Hitler Germany was recounted. Much less so their fate which remained such a personal matter for Peter that only rarely did the reality of that terrible time - the murder of his friends and his own imprisonment in Ravensbruck concentration camp - break through our nights of argument and debate. His sense of Europe and of European identity, founded on such bitter experience, was always vigorously enabling and ahead of its time.
Peter was also ferociously committed to the democratic spirit, having witnessed at first hand the appalling results of Nazism. He was, like his lifelong partner Christabel, a passionate advocate of human rights and was strongly committed at the earliest stages in the 1970s and 1980s to what ultimately became the Northern peace process - A commitment for which he sought neither recognition nor acknowledgement. As in so much else in his sense of life, Peter Bielenberg was robust in his opinions and expressed them accordingly.
The time our families shared together was always special, so it is nigh on impossible to pick out one memory of Peter as an epiphany. I see Peter shooting around in his Renault 5 - "wearing it" was the term - taking us to the rath field - his joy - and calling down the deer as they gathered, flighty and trusting around him. Or as he stood on the steps in a downpour of rain, framed by the big awkward door, waving farewell with an old overcoat thrown around his slightly stooping shoulders. Or maybe it's the World Cup in the US in 1994 as we shouted at the infuriatingly unreliable television reception. Or else the older Peter craning up from the kitchen table with a wry, knowing smile of damnable mortality on his face. Or again, in his den, culling the newspapers, in a world of his own.
For me it was always the slow, shaking head, talking down at the shoes routine when you better look out, for something was either not quite right, or else was exactly as it should be. He was a good man to know. He helped many and he was true to himself. May he rest in peace in his beloved Carlow.
G.D.