This is the centenary year of the birth of the German novelist Heinrich Böll, who found inspiration and peace after the Second World War in rural Ireland. Next week a group of writers and old friends are gathering at his cottage on Achill Island off the coast of County Mayo to discuss his work 

Late in the Second World War, a policeman came cycling his High Nelly to our home on Achill Island to question my father about occasional small packages that arrived for him from Germany.

It was a kindly query, and my father’s answer – “These are books by great German writers” – sent him whistling on his way. Bored with the dullness of his job in the civil service, my father had taught himself German and he relished the excitement of Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin in the original.

In 1955 one of the packages opened to reveal a collection of short stories, Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa…. The author, one Heinrich Böll, had taken up a summer residence scarcely three miles away from our home. Then, late in 1957, Irisches Tagebuch, later translated into English as Irish Journal, arrived. It had been written in Böll’s house in Dugort, Achill Island. Sadly, my father’s diffidence prevented him from ever calling on his new neighbour.

Heinrich Böll was born in Cologne in 1917; he was drafted into the German army, fought on both the Russian and French fronts in the Second World War, was wounded and spent time in a prisoner-of-war camp. His experiences during those years formed the groundsheet of his writings; he was one of the first German writers to attempt to put those times into focus, to alert the human soul to its deeply flawed nature, and to urge a self-renewing Germany to a recovery of its spiritual integrity. The Nazis, he wrote, “revolted me, repelled me on every level of my existence: conscious and instinctive, aesthetic and political”.