Ralph Hauptmann

Through the Eye of the Scribe Ralph Hauptmann

In 1988, a 22-year-old German student submitted a thesis analysing some seventy odd works on the rise of Ulster Unionism which had been written over a period of roughly one hundred years. The thesis received an award for being one of the best works submitted in that academic year, and the student was offered a job as junior lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Almost thirty years later, the same student, after a life full of twists and turns (and in the meantime living in Portugal), decided not simply to translate his thesis into English, but rather to re-write it from the perspective of a mature scholar with thirty years more of academic, professional and especially life experience. "THROUGH THE EYE OF THE SCRIBE" does not attempt, at least not primarily, to describe or even define the phenomenon of Ulster Unionism. It rather aims at presenting the different views on various aspects of this phenomenon held by authors and politicians, showing how these views have shifted over the decades, starting with contemporary sources from the 1890s up to the time of the writing of the thesis in the late 1980s.