German - Northern-Irish Friendship (long read, loads of info)

[LaFoto]

I thought some might be interested in where I was last week and what I did there (and in preparation to it in many weeks before).
For many years, my home town of Dorsten (where I no longer live today) has maintained a friendship bond with a place in Northern-Ireland. At first it all started as private contacts, later developed into a partnership with exchange visits between two church congregations and lead into being a town twinning in the 80s.

My family have been involved in this friendship ever since I can THINK. We have had our first Northern-Irish guest staying in 1960.

As it happens, we are still friendly with that man, who has loooooong been married, and he and his wife have OFTEN come over to Dorsten on either group visits or private stays, and they would always be at my parents' (now only my dad's) house, and they are once more in Dorsten RIGHT NOW.

And my father suddenly had this idea that it was about time to do a thorough collection of all the material people have created/gathered over the course of time, newpaper articles, photos, travel journals and whatnot, to compile it and make a presentation of all this.

So there were 57 years to cover from the very first "weaving the bond" to today, and in a joint venture, the whole "Vogel-family", i.e. our father, my sister, brother and I, worked out this presentation. My father had collected and digitalised the material, my sister and I have been selecting what to say and what NOT to say and HOW to say things (so the presentation would be ENTERTAINING!) since April, I translated all of it into English, and our brother later put the selected (still vast amount of) material into an also quite entertaining PowerPoint presentation.

When Thursday, 16 August, drew nearer and nearer, our father got more and more nervous. He had long felt he was overburdening himself with this assignment of his own, and he was glad to see that we came to his help with thinking up the texts and putting it all together. And yet, when everything was done in mid-July, he was still worried our brother might not get the PPpresentation ready in time, and after my brother HAD got it ready in time, that it might be too long and people would get bored.

NOTHING of the kind happened in the end and the presentation was A BIG SUCCESS - and I think my father is as relieved now as he hasn't been in a long, long while!

The whole visit of the group to Dorsten and the presentation have been covered by the local press, and here are the articles and their translations:

Moving Visit From Ballyclare

Church congregation is looking forward to their guests


Dorsten. The Lutheran Church congregation in Holsterhausen is looking forward to receiving their guests from Ballyclare Presbyterian Church. For more than 50 years there has been a friendship bond between the two parishes. Ballyclare is in Northern-Ireland. Guests from that area are going to visit Dorsten and surrounding places from today until 27 August.

Theme Night


One highlight of their stay is going to be the theme night on Thursday, 16 August. At 7 p.m. Karlheinz Vogel will present so far un-published photos from the time of the friendship with Ballyclare in Martin-Luther-Church Assembly Hall. Along with the photos, there will be reports on various stages of the joint history.

The partnership became official when in the years 1956/57 Harold Allen, meanwhile minister of Ballyclare Presbyterian Church, started to organise the contacts with Dorsten. This was followed by the official town twinning with Newtownabbey in the 80s.

The visitors, lead by Reverend Robert Bell and ex mayor Vera McWilliam, will arrive today. On Thursday, they will meet at 10 at the Unification Square. After a guided walk around the centre of town, they will be officially received in the Old Town Hall, later they will visit the Jewish Museum. On Friday they will travel to Xanten. Next week on Tuesday they will go to Düsseldorf, and on one day they will also visit Lembeck Castle. Also a trip to Soest and one to Lake Moehne are on the agenda.

They are also invited to come to the Good-Bye Party on Saturday, 25 August at 8 p.m. and to the service on Sunday in Martin-Luther-Church at 10 a.m.

Jack thinks that Dorsten is great!
Reception of Ballyclare guests


Dorsten. On, off, on, off – works perfectly! – and also little Jack beams as much as does his torch which he has only just received as a gift from the mayor of Dorsten.

Jack is only just 4 years old, and therefore the youngest of all in all 17 guests from Ballyclare who were received by Lambert Lütkenhorst yesterday in the Old Town Hall. With his brother Steward (7) and sister Megan (9) and his parents Lucy and Martin Hull, Jack is visiting Dorsten for the first time and he really likes it here. All five found enough space in the home of Gabi and Werner Springer in Marienviertel, and the Springers also have two fluffy cats to play with, unless they run and hide under the sofa.

The friendly bonds between the Lutheran Church congregation in Holsterhausen and Ballyclare Presbyterian Church have been there for over 50 years. In the 80s, this partnership was followed by the official town twinning with Newtownabbey in Northern-Ireland. But not only “young” friends like Jack and his siblings, also old friends such as Reverend Robert Bell and ex mayor Vera McWilliam were greeted by Lütkenhorst. He underlined that the past decades have created a solid basis for a partnership which now helps to not only maintain longstanding contacts but also to plan new projects, mostly so with regards to the “Twin Project” in connection with the area becoming “Cultural Capital of Europe” in 2010.

There are many activities on the agenda until the guests will leave again on 27 August, e.g. excursions to Xanten and Düsseldorf, Soest and Lembeck Castle.

So Little Jack is going to see yet a lot more. But yesterday he first of all decided to try the steaming vegetable soup that he and all the others were served after the reception in the Old Town Hall.

 

[LaFoto]

Journey Through Time to Beginning of Friendship
Visitors from Ballyclare, Northern-Ireland – Anecdotes from the past
Holsterhausen. The only thing missing was the sound of an old film projector, then the journey through time would have been absolutely authentic. Karlheinz Vogel revived old memories with his photo and film presentation on the 50-year anniversary of the parish partnership with the Northern-Irish town of Ballyclare held in the assembly hall of Martin Luther Church.

Lively reports

The guests from Northern-Ireland, who have been in Dorsten since Tuesday, could follow an all complete journey through time, from the very beginnings of the exchange visits to the present day, and this with many photos, anecdotes and quotations from old travel journals. There were lively reports on the building of a “Bridge of International Friendship”.

The local press from 1950 wrote “People from Ireland visit Dorsten”, when there was a first conference with young people in Haus Beck, which was meant to set the ball of reconciliation of the people rolling. In the years to come, Pastor Reuter from Hervest and Reverend Harold Allen from Ballyclare became the motors for the exchange visits which at their earliest beginnings were solely based on personal contacts. “Germans get a glimpse of Ulster” was the headline of the Belfast Telegraph when a first group of Germans travelled there in 1952 and thus caused quite a lot of attention, which was unexpected but very hearty, and which accompanied the visits on all the years to come.

The participants of the journeys learned much about everyday life with their friends. In 1962, the Northern-Irish guests also went to see the Berlin Wall and our press reported in 1971 “Thick plumes of smoke lead the way through Northern-Ireland” – terror was afflicting the country and kept the Dorsteners from going there for several years.

But this is part of the past and so the presentation could carry on telling about pleasant memories of dances, excursions and one or the other particularly close partnership which started decades ago. There were funny comments, laughter and talks – sure proof that the symbolic handkerchief which has been on every journey and has been exchanged with the promise to come back ever since 1959 will continue to cross the Channel many more times.

And from the other local paper in Dorsten:

(This needed to be "glued" together somehow, it would not fit onto my scanner)

Where the White Handkerchief Blows

The Vogel family highlighted the 57 years of friendship for our guests from Ballyclare with a film documentation that will become part of the history of the twin town

By Patricia König-Stach

Holsterhausen. There are once again guests from Ballyclare in Dorsten right now who will stay for 10 days. In the 57 years of German-Irish meetings there have already been a good many interesting and spectacular items on the itinerary of the two congregations.

On Thursday night, Karlheinz Vogel and his family presented the guests with a special kind of documentation. Together with Corinna Schleiffer, Christiane and Jens Vogel he showed the 17 guests and many German visitors as “Film Vogel” - under his old emblem from the sixties - a review on 57 years of German-Irish partnership in the assembly hall of Martin-Luther Church. Corinna Schleiffer and Christiane Vogel accompanied the presentation in the two respective languages.

The first photos showed the all destroyed centre of Dorsten. But the memory of the last war, which had also afflicted Belfast, could not keep the two pastors Reverend Harold Allen from Ballyclare Presbyterian Church and Horst Reuter from Hervest from becoming friends at the first conference in the learning centre of Schloss Beck back in 1950. That friendship lead to the fact that only two years later together with Pastor Reuter 14 young Dorsteners travelled to Northern-Ireland.

There they were not only received like state representatives and accompanied daily by articles in the “Belfast Telegraph”. They also were lucky enough to see the Prime Minister Winston Churchill on their stop-over in London. In Ballyclare the group of young people was presented with a programme full of visits to companies and excursions to the Irish countryside.

Seven years later, many official receptions added to all this, and even the BBC invited the group lead by Rudolf Börgershausen to give an interview. After that, the young were talked to in the streets even by strangers.

When waving good-bye off the boat something happened that was to become a tradition in all further visits: one member of the German group lost his handkerchief. Harold Allen caught it and promised to bring it back the year after.

And that was actually done. A year later the then mayor of Dorsten, Paul Schürholz, and members from politics, industry and administration greeted an Irish youth group on Glück-Auf-Square. The first footage of colour film recordings are proof: young women in elegant dresses and young men in dashing suits and their arrival in the 12 Beetle cars and their motor bike escort were to be seen.

Photos showed young children who got born into the German-Irish partnership. The now adult people, Gerlinde Overbeck, Charlotte Rupietta and James Armstrong, were among the audience and were honoured with a rose each by the two presenters.

Also the first female mayor of Newtownabbey, Vera McWilliam and her “consort” Ray McWilliam were honoured with a rose. They had first met on the trip to here in 1967 and fell in love, and they got married that same year.

When the parish partnership shifted from Hervest-Dorsten to Holsterhausen, there were only few things saved of the visits to and fro, but that changed again in the years to follow, so also the second part of the presentation documented the highlights of the more recent trips in an impressive manner, offered anecdotes and talked about all sorts of events which could not even be stopped by the political troubles and ever simmering civil commotions in Northern-Ireland.

This was a presentation that will always be remembered in the history of the partnership.

The partnership is older than our twin town
The partnership of the Lutheran and the Presbyterian Churches is much older than the “official” town twinning between Dorsten and Newtownabbey. For the large area of Newtownabbey north of Belfast, which reaches far out into the County Antrim, was only made a “borough” in 1958. Harold Allen, “father” of the partnership, had started to work as minister in Ballyclare two years before.

This is the photo I took when my brother was still setting up his laptop, projector, tape player and loudspeakers for the music and all and my sister was marking her German texts (last minute! ) before anyone else arrived, and you can see our dad's old photography logo of "Film Vogel" under which he worked back in the 60s:

And these two photos show me speaking, so I could not have taken them: my son Florian took the Powershot and took these in the very low light of the room, not using the flash, of course, so they are technically "wobbly" but still the only photos that were taken during the presentation:

Someone MIGHT be interested?

 

[JohnMF]

Good to see it went well.

Must have been nice for your dad to see his ideas all come together smoothly

 

[LaFoto]

Yes. He must have felt like an entire mountain range lifted off him when it was all done!

For whoever is interested in all this big amount of info, there's a blog out by one of the Northern-Irish members of the group that you might want to look at, too, maybe? http://dorsten2007.blogspot.com/

 

[Alex_B]

Well, looks like it all went pretty well Good to see the big event was a success

I almost read it all, but at high speed

 

[Becky]

Excellent! Impressive relationships maintained for so long!

Ballyclare is very close to my home town actually... small world!

 

[Antarctican]

Hey, thanks for all the hard work in translating all those the articles for us. And the amount of work that went into collecting, selecting, editing, digitizing, and translating the actual presentation is mind-boggling. I'm sure the film was well received, and that the thanks of the participants made it all worthwhile for your family.