Eberhard ‘Paddy’ Bort. Scholar. An appreciation

Born: 1 December 1, 1954;

Died: 17 February 17, 2017

EDINBURGH has had many wandering scholars: Andreas Scheu, the Viennese friend of Marx, the composer Hans Gal and the historian George Hammersley. Eberhard "Paddy" Bort from Tuebingen, who has died aged 62, fitted this tradition - his humanist scholarship was updated to the computer era but it was still based on what the great reporter James Cameron enjoyed: "private life, public houses".

Paddy was a name he acquired en route, teaching German at Trinity College Dublin in 1978-9, along with an accent which meant he was usually regarded as Irish. But he combined the energy of a medieval schoolman out of Hohenlohe with a genius for organisation which quickly mastered the digital age. Suggest a conference or symposium and it got done swiftly and authoritatively, launched with a hoolie – mirth, dance and song – and then off on the next project.

He was born in 1954, a schoolteacher’s son in Ilsfeld, just south of Heilbronn, the city which in 30 minutes on 4 December 1944 lost 7000 people when its timbered houses were hit by RAF high explosive and incendiary bombs. The horrors of the Second World War marked him throughout his life, movingly articulated when he found a Scots writer who reacted to such a tragedy with hope and commitment: Hamish Henderson, and his plea to the new generation to "build for the living love, patience and power to absolve those tormented, or else choke in the folds of their black-edged vendetta."

My big office at Tübingen University became, after the difficult days of the 1970s – Baader-Meinhoff was local – an ersatz laboratory in which student ingenuity could be given its head. In 1986 the BBC’s Scotland 2000 team filmed us – devolution in action! – while the students campaigned to convert a huge but useless cloakroom into a theatre, which was in service by 1988, Paddy’s Anglo-Irish Theatre Group at its head.

Putting on a show was also an academic opportunity, and after 1991 there was annual festival, housed in the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation’s Erler Akademie at Freudenstadt. Early business concerned extending English to the former German Democratic Republic, to replace Russian: with the lead taken by a remarkable St Andrews Anglist, Dr Frank Frankel. In 1999 the Magic Mountain hosted the first foreign visit by a Scottish minister: Sarah Boyack, Minister of Transport: we sold her trams and the Borders Railway.

Paddy lectured widely in Europe, and at Tacoma near Seattle. He might have been won for Irish Studies in the US, but he warmed to the pluralistic version of ‘These Islands’ and in 1995 became researcher to Prof Malcolm Anderson at Edinburgh, analysing Europe’s frontiers and their political cultures.

Freddie Frinton’s ancient butler concluded that iconic Anglo-German film Dinner for One with "Same procedure as every year!" but once installed in Surgeons’ Square our man, now reviews editor of Scottish Affairs, critiqued the hype that concealed dodgy banking and an ‘offshored’ oil economy.

He held that centralisation had stymied local government, and the decline of manufacturing, from about 25 per cent of GDP in the early 1990s to barely 10 per cent after the 2008 crash mismatched ambition and reality. He pointed out an Irish forerunner in the sharp satire of Dennis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River (1931) whose German engineer installing a hydro-electric scheme runs into ‘the poet with the pistol’: an over-romantic ghost. This couldn’t replace an adaptable manufacturing economy with its finance in the hands of the local state.

All of this came from a life of teaching, acting and singing, poetry and reviewing, like a revenant from Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party. My wife Virginia, cooking in our Tuebingen kitchen, twiddled the radio, found Pick of the Week and a familiar voice. Edinburgh Folk Club had just been voted best in Britain. Paddy seemed a rationalist version of the Irish reformer George Russell ‘AE’: Keep the co-ops and the beard: lose the mysticism …

Over a dozen books, countless lectures, essays and latterly videos – how he did it frankly beat me – but his friend Owen Dudley Edwards had a similar rate of well-researched, elegant, forceful essays. Ascherson caught him at an Edinburgh meeting: "Those blue eyes and snowy beard peeping out benevolently between the stacks of paper – he was like an Edward Lear man, with the birds of the earth nestling in that great Vollbart. And as Auden said about Lear, 'Paddy became a land”'. Everyone sailed towards him."

No more. Paddy fell dead in Edinburgh on the evening of Friday 17 February, closing a 36-year friendship. His father had died young, and his talented brother Claus. Cause of death was ‘an enlarged heart’ – and that simply described the man.

CHRISTOPHER HARVIE