‘How do we welcome the stranger, with humanity or anger?’ The forgotten Germans who found refuge in Ireland

In the early 18th century, a few thousand Germans fled religious persecution and near starvation in their homeland and ended up in remote rural Irish villages. The Irish Palatines, as they were known, were poor, conservative homesteaders who couldn’t speak the language and were the object of suspicion and violence – precursors to the displaced Syrians or Afghans of the past decade.

Their story is told in Refuge, a co-production between Staatstheater Mainz and the Irish company Fishamble. Part love story, part social commentary, it is performed by a mixed cast, mainly in English but with some German interludes.

It focuses on a German couple, Hannah and Peter, who have lost one of their two sons through illness and are trying to make a go of it on farmland on the edge of a small town in Limerick. Their Protestantism and their reluctance to mix with the Irish add to a sense of peril.

Peter is driven by another motive. He owes his plot of land to the manor’s (invisible) English squire, Thomas Southwell. The 1st Baron Southwell of Castle Matrix is keen to dilute the locals’ Catholicism and so provides the Germans with cheap rent in return for their obedience. Feudal landlord and dependent tenant find common cause.

More than 100 German families settled on Southwell’s lands, marrying almost exclusively among their own. Over a 40-year period, only seven marriages are recorded as taking place with someone outside the community. The “pure” German population was enlarged by 500 children.

Hannah doesn’t think like the rest of them. She begs her husband to extend an olive branch to the locals, but he refuses. She defiantly does so, seeking friendship, and possibly romance, with a local farmer she haltingly calls Mr Ireland. Trouble ensues.

The playwright, Deirdre Kinahan, says she seized the topic with alacrity: “Immigration – and our response to it – is one of the most crucial, yet divisive, issues of our age. How do we welcome the stranger, with humanity or anger?” She adds she knew instinctively that the forgotten story of the Palatines would speak to Ireland and Europe’s present predicament. This led her to include the tale of a contemporary young Afghan boy in the narrative.

The production has played at the Dublin Theatre festival and concludes in Mainz, capital of the present-day Land of Rhineland-Palatinate, and the territory from which most of the original settlers came. Between the two destinations, it made a diversion to Berlin, at the behest of the Irish ambassador, Maeve Collins. “This story of a relatively unknown episode in Ireland’s history with Germany resonates with the experiences of contemporary audiences,” she says.

It all began with an English queen. Early in 1709, hopes for a better life were raised when a “Golden Book” began circulating among the Palatinate’s population, bearing a picture of Queen Anne on the cover, promising a prosperous and easy life in America. The idea was to encourage hearty white Protestants to settle in the American territories without unduly depleting the population of England.

This was hugely attractive to the Palatines, who had seen their land ravaged by a series of wars conducted by the expansionist zeal of France’s King Louis XIV.

A group of these Germans petitioned the English queen, accepting her plan. But instead of an anticipated 500, more than 13,000 refugees set sail along the River Rhine to Rotterdam, before making the crossing on overcrowded small boats. One in five died on the precarious journey. The rest arrived destitute, and were housed in tents in and around London.

Such were their numbers that the initially warm reception soon cooled. Wherever they went these Germans were subjected to suspicion, harassment and violence. By the end of November 1709, the first moves were made to deport them.

The English government settled on other solutions. A certain number were allowed to go on to America. A smaller contingent of about 3,600 was relocated to underpopulated Ireland, to boost the Protestant stock.

It would take several generations before the Palatines began to integrate. Some converted to Catholicism through intermarriage and assimilation, though the majority remained Protestant (either Methodists or members of the Church of Ireland).

One of the best-known families was the Switzers, whose chain of department stores in Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway supplied luxury goods for a century and a half before the high-street institution was taken over and renamed.

Like the Huguenots – who had fled to England, Holland and Germany two decades earlier, after Louis’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes – the Palatines are now hard to differentiate from the original population.

For the play’s cast and crew, the “re-discovery” has been a moving experience. Holger Kraft, who plays gruff Peter, says he came to regard the piece less as Irish-German, more as pan-European, and with a universal message that “we all have to stick together”.