In the 1920s Germany and Ireland were new European democracies operating in adverse international, political and economic conditions. This book places the bilateral Irish-German relationship in the context of the professionalization of the Irish Foreign Service and the Irish Free State's progressive carving out of an independent foreign policy. It assesses the key Irish personalities involved in Irish-German relations. These include the successive Irish representatives in Berlin, the eminent scholar Dr Daniel A. Binchy, Leo T. McCauley, and the contentious Charles Bewley. Eamon de Valera and Joseph Walshe (Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs) also played a crucial role. Irish responses to the Wall Street Crash, the rise of the Nazis, and Hitler's policies (domestic and foreign) are all analysed. Did Irish officials foresee the fall of Weimar and the rise of Nazism? How did they view the unfolding nature of the Nazi regime? The clashes between Bewley's apologetic justifications of Nazism after 1935 and de Valera's critical attitudes towards domestic Nazi policies are examined. The ineffective efforts to expand Irish-German trade during the Anglo-Irish Economic War shed light on Irish attempts at export market diversification in the emerging protectionist world economic environment. The analysis places Irish-German relations within the maturation of events in Europe in the 1930s, taking account of the League of Nations' failure, the popularity of Fascism, the Blueshirts, the fraught international atmosphere, and Hitler's revisionist foreign policy. De Valera's support of Chamberlain's 'appeasement' of Hitler before March 1939 is located in the framework of de Valera's attitudes towards collective security, neutrality and Hibernia Irredenta.

This edited monograph sets out to track the course of change in both Ireland and Germany and in Irish-German relations over the last 20 years. 1989 marked the 40th year since the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany - the same year saw the toppling of the Berlin wall and with it the fall of the Iron Curtain. In Ireland, 1989 was a year nestled within a period of high unemployment and poor economic performance. Yet within a few years, a transformation occurred that brought unprecedented change, economically and socially. Therefore, symbolically speaking, a number of walls fell in Ireland that brought new spaces, if not freedoms - increased standards of living and better living conditions for many, new confidence in Self, and greater openness and tolerance for the Other within a society that had been predominantly monocultural for much of the twentieth century. The tenor of this book is one which charts, analyses, discusses and celebrates transition and change in Ireland, in Germany and in the relationship between Ireland and Germany in the hugely significant period of the last twenty years.

German���±Irish relations have been characterised by a wide variety of contacts throughout the centuries. These included age-old religious and scholastic and, since the beginning of this century, military and economic links. This book sets out to explore a decade of these relations as yet undocumented. The time from 1945 to 1949 was a period of difficult decisions and complicated diplomatic activity following the end of the Second World War, with Ireland having to decide on the fate of over 300 German citizens in the country ���± soldiers, spies and diplomats ���± who were wanted by the Allies. The period after 1949 is characterised by the normalisation of relations with Germany on a political, diplomatic and economic level. These many moves towards stronger personal, economic and cultural links with Germany were among the first tentative steps taken in the primarily isolationist Ireland of the 1950s towards Europe.

Focusing on the era in which the modern idea of nationalism emerged as a way of establishing the preferred political, cultural, and social order for society, this book demonstrates that across different European societies the most important constituent of nationalism has been a specific understanding of the nation's historical past. Analysing Ireland and Germany, two largely unconnected societies in which the past was peculiarly contemporary in politics and where the meaning of the nation was highly contested, this volume examines how narratives of origins, religion, territory and race produced by historians who were central figures in the cultural and intellectual histories of both countries interacted; it also explores the similarities and differences between the interactions in these societies. Histories of Nationalism in Ireland and Germany investigates whether we can speak of a particular common form of nationalism in Europe. The book draws attention to cultural and intellectual links between the Irish and the Germans during this period, and what this meant for how people in either society understood their national identity in a pivotal time for the development of the historical discipline in Europe. Contributing to a growing body of research on the 'transnationality' of nationalism, this new study of a hitherto-unexplored area will be of interest to historians of modern Germany and Ireland, comparative and transnational historians, and students and scholars of nationalism, as well as those interested in the relationship between biography and writing history.

This groundbreaking book is an indispensable contribution to appreciating the dilemmas facing Ireland in the ‘age of Brexit’. Encompassing an exhaustive account, it traces the relationship between Ireland and FRG by drawing on original material from both. It critiques depictions of Irish-German relations as peculiarly affable and explores the problems presented by trade, Britain, neutrality, NATO, Northern Ireland and the Cold War. The work contends the German ‘economic miracle’ was a vital stimulus for Ireland’s tardy retreat from protectionism. It maintains that Ireland’s reorientation was informed by lessons gleaned from Irish-German trade relations as well as a budding recognition of the potential offered by German industrial investment. This granted Germany weighty influence over the shape and direction of Ireland.