The way we met.
Michael Richter, Dublin – Konstanz- Berlin
I write this in English because we first met in Dublin. A few words about the background: I finished my doctorate in 1968 in Berlin with a thesis on Giraldus Cambrensis. Subsequently I had a two years’ postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Wales which I spent in Aberystwyth. A colleague took me to Dublin in 1969 for a historians’ conference where I met the professor of medieval history, Fr F.X. Martin, from University College Dublin who himself had done some work on Giraldus. Three years later I was invited to teach medieval European history at UCD for a year, replacing someone who was on sabbatical leave. His someone may have been Denis Bethell. I continued on temporary appointments in UCD for another four years until they gave me a permanent job. It was then that we met, through Denis. He had been on leave and spent a year in Vancouver. After his return he had Janos as a visitor, and this is how we met.
It must have been one of those legendary parties in Denis’s Victorian apartment in Monkstown with a view of Dublin Bay, huge windows that did not close properly, and a big fireplace where the ashes of the peat fire spread into the room like lava from a volcano. Nobody who experienced this apartment will ever forget it.
Denis had brought with him the project of what came to be known as ‘The Quirin’. It referred to a book by Heinz Quirin with the title Einführung in das Studium der mittelalterlichen Geschichte. The plan between Denis and Janos was not just a translation but more or less a re-writing. The original work had been very Germanic and Denis wanted to give at least the British an equal share. Sadly Denis died very young in the spring of 1981, and ‘The Quirin’ never saw the light of day.
But Quirin materialised in Dublin. He found an enthusiastic follower in the geographer Dr Anngret Simms, of German origin, a Catholic with the very protestant Irish name Simms (Uncle Otto was for a while Archbishop of Dublin: to him I owe the knowledge of a very special reading in the Book of Kells where Christ said (Matthew 10, 34): ‘Behold, I bring you not peace but the sword’, non pacem sed gladium; the text in the Book of Kells has the reading non pacem sed gaudium!) Anngret was very interested in medieval settlement history which she had learned in Germany and now wanted to spread to the Irish Middle Ages.
Quirin not only visited but Anngret saw to it that he would lecture as well on settlement history. He had brought with him lengthy lectures in German, in heavy German with convoluted sentences. Denis assigned to me the task of translating these into English, mission almost impossible. And it was painful to listen to them delivered in English by Heinz Quirin with his heavy Saxonian accent. There is more to it: Heinz Quirin had been one of my teachers at Free Univerity Berlin. I may add that he was not a favourite teacher of mine, but I will never forget an intermediate exam which I took. In the course of which he pushed across the table a facsimile of a medieval charter, fortunately mounted on cardboard, and shouted: ‘Gaiser oder Babst?’. Thank goodness I recognised immediately that it could not be a papal document. Of course I do not know whether he had remembered me from my student years, but during his several Dublin visits I became his steady companion. A last word on Denis. His favourite course to teach was a seminar on Bede (it was called Documents’ course). We learned to appreciate Bede from an Irish perspective which is most instructive. Denis also invited specialists from the field, mainly from Britain, if possible from Oxbridge. One of these was Patrick Wormald. He gave a lecture on Bede and Beowulf (also a standard topic with Denis) in which Bede did not come out very favourably. This lecture was published in 1978 but never made it on Denis’s booklist. And surely Denis would not have approved of what I wrote about Bede in 1999 where I coined the phrase characterising the attitude of English medivalists ‘In Bede we trust’. I am sure that for this pun I will never be asked to give a Jarrow lecture.
So we met because of Denis. We lost sight of each other for some time, then met again when Janos was instrumental in my being invited to CEU three times to lecture on medieval oral culture. I never had such motivated students before or after. And because of my visits I ventured into learning Hungarian. As an Irish colleague had assured me: ‘Hungarian is not any harder than Old Irish.’ And Old Irish I had acquired at UCD, in the course of six years’ intensive study.
Michael Richter
