a family Following their marriage, Hennig and his wife had formed a home and family in Aachen, and had two daughters, Gabriele and Monica, born in 1936 and 1938. Despite the work in industrial management, to him uncongenial, Hennig managed to pursue his studies and in 1936 he published an article about the book Vernunft und Existenz (Reason and Existence), later becoming a personal friend of the author, Karl Jaspers (1883-1969). It was in the same year 1936 that Hennig became a convert to Catholicism, in which he was later followed by his wife. Conversion and exile One element in the conversion was the revival of an acquaintance with Heinrich Keller (1894-1942), with whom Hennig had studied in Leipzig and who as a Jesuit was rector of a college at Valkenburg in the Netherlands. When the Hennigs realized that they, too, would have to emigrate and that options were extremely limited, Keller was the means to a contact with the prestigious Jesuit run school, Belvedere College in Dublin, to which Hennig made an exploratory visit at Easter 1939. On 26 August 1939 he left Aachen legally for Belgium and shortly afterwards learned that an entry visa for Ireland was waiting for him at the Irish Legation in Paris. Managing to have it retrieved by a paid messenger, and forced then to leave his family behind for the moment, he first landed on the English coast at Folkestone and then headed via London through England and made the sea-crossing to Ireland on 6 October 1939. He recalled that at Folkestone a Jewish passenger was refused permission to land and as a consequence took his own life. Hennig was later told that by that time neutral Ireland had admitted only 110 immigrants in the face of the European war crisis. Years of hardship Apart from work in a teaching post that turned out to be less remunerative and more precarious than had seemed, Hennig launched himself into an intensive activity of article writing, private German lessons, teaching at the national seminary for priests in Maynooth and at University College, Dublin, lecturing and even radio talks. Though formally neutral and in various respects pro-German, the Irish Free State was an impoverished country and wartime conditions made it difficult for the foreigner Hennig, though a Catholic with a reasonable grasp of English, to make a living. Trying after the birth of a third child