Germanica Pacifica – serie

With the arrival of 1,400 New Zealand troops in Apia at the beginning of World War I, the government of Samoa was transformed peacefully from a German «protectorate» to a New Zealand military administration. The New Zealand administrator, Colonel Robert Logan, who now found himself in charge of not just hundreds of bored New Zealand troops, but an entire country and its colonial apparatus was, however, completely out of his depth. This is borne out by ensuing events, all documented in detail by Karl Hanssen, manager of the large DHPG German copra production company. Hanssen’s complete diaries from August 1914 to May 1915, compiled from the original manuscripts held at the Berlin Federal Archives and the Auckland War Memorial Museum, are presented here for the first time, both in English translation and in the German original. This annotated edition provides a rare and unique insight into the experience of World War I in the South Pacific.

In 1873 the German naturalist A.B. Meyer spent five months in New Guinea. He had expected «bloodthirsty and untamed savages» and was amazed to find «men of milder customs». His compatriot Otto Finsch returned from a voyage through Hawaii, Micronesia, New Zealand and Torres Strait declaring Germany’s most respected anthropologists wrong. Human races could not be neatly distinguished: they «merge into one another to such an extent that the difference between Europeans and Papuans becomes completely unimportant». This richly interdisciplinary book explores the transformative impacts of personal encounters in Oceania on understandings of human difference, and illuminates the difficult relationship between field experience and metropolitan science in late nineteenth-century Europe.

Germans in Tonga is the culmination of an eight-year research project in which the author and his team of researchers gathered biographical material on Germans in Tonga. There are four main sources: the British Consul Tonga files, held in the Western Pacific Archives of the University of Auckland Library Special Collections; the Defence Department Enemy Aliens files and Aliens Records held at Archives New Zealand in Wellington; the Archives of the German Foreign Office (Auswärtiges Amt) in Berlin; and the Ministry of Justice Archives in Nuku’alofa, Tonga. The volume contains short biographies of over 350 Germans in Tonga born over a 110-year period between 1822 and 1932 and features an introduction by the author on the historical background to the German connection with Tonga.

Karl Hanssen’s memoirs provide an invaluable outsider’s view of life in New Zealand prisons and a unique perspective on German Samoa under New Zealand occupation. In October 1915, Hanssen, manager of the DHPG, a large German copra production company, was sent from Samoa to New Zealand to serve a six-month sentence imposed by a New Zealand military court for bypassing war censorship regulations. He served his sentence in a number of prisons in New Zealand, including two months in the high-security prison, Mt Eden.Hanssen’s memoirs – in English translation and in the original German – are made available for the first time in this edition, which also features photos from his Samoan album and a comprehensive introduction by Bronwyn Chapman on the historical and political background.

The book presents the first comprehensive history of Swiss settlement in New Zealand. It describes Swiss settlement in New Zealand from the time of the gold rushes in the 1860s to the present day in a very accessible way. The focus is on the Swiss-born migrants: who they were, why they came, how they have adapted to life in New Zealand, and their ongoing links with their homeland and the Swiss community in New Zealand. The migrants’ stories are set in the historical and social context of the period in which they arrived. The book is a mixture of archival and other research of primary and secondary resources, and life history interviews. It will appeal to academics interested in the New World and migration studies and to Swiss living in New Zealand and elsewhere.

This volume is an annotated edition of Frida Peemüller’s memoirs of her time in German Samoa from 1910 to 1920. In her memoirs Frida Peemüller gives us a unique insight into what was happening in Samoa under the last years of the German administration, under New Zealand occupation during World War I, and in Germany itself at the outbreak of war, as she had returned to Germany in 1914 and was one of the very few Germans whom the New Zealand authorities permitted to re-enter Samoa. Her memoirs also give us a remarkable perspective on life in Aden in the early twentieth century, as it was on the ship returning her to her job with the American Consul in Aden that she met her future husband, the Samoan plantation owner Barnim Peemüller. The years they spent together on his Ululoloa plantation were to be, as she writes, the best years of their lives, as in 1920 they were repatriated by the New Zealand authorities back to a Germany that bore little resemblance to the country they remembered.