Poet's Family Memoir A Search Amongst Nazi Ghosts

Holman, a retired senior adjunct fellow at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha | University of Canterbury (UC), says the seeds for his latest book were planted decades ago during childhood conversations with his Welsh grandmother Eunice, regarding her sister Lilian (Lily) Hasenburg (née Bywater).

Although Holman was aware that this great-aunt had married a German national and moved from England to Germany prior to World War I, he knew little else about the “ghost” of his subtitle. However, one memory his grandmother shared stuck with him.

“The hub of this book is a comment Nanny never forgot,” says Holman. “She told me that, during a visit to Liverpool in 1934, Lily said: ‘Hitler is a great man, Eunice. He’s doing wonders for the German people’.”

This recollection, and the bitterness with which his grandmother recounted it, led Holman to wonder about Lily’s lived experience as an English expatriate in Germany during the cataclysms of World War I, the Great Depression, the fall of the Weimar Republic and ascension of the Nazis, and World War II. He was curious to place Lily’s life — and her near erasure from family and official records – within this wider context.

The ensuing search took him to Germany, where he immersed himself in the culture, and even studied German language at the Goethe-Institut in Berlin — and later to England, following the trail of scant clues left by Lily. The section of the book that recounts this period, titled ‘Away’, is part detective quest and part social history.

Though Holman sought assistance from a genealogist, and from local amateur and professional historians, unearthing concrete details about Lily’s life proved difficult. He sees this as a poignant reflection of the times she lived through.

“That’s what war does. It erases so many stories – both through lives lost, and because those who remain often don’t want to talk about it.”

He believes descendants can gain significant insight by exploring this traumatic legacy, like he did, and sees the personal reckoning he underwent during the research and writing as a parallel narrative running alongside his search for Lily.

“I was raised in the postwar ‘victor culture’ that cast the Germans as the enemy. So, the journey of the book was partly an inner one, about recalibrating my past. But it was also an outward journey, because I had the chance to meet Germans and learn something of what they’d lived through – and continue to live with.”

We ignore such lessons from the past at our peril, Holman says. “The psychology of fascism is always lurking in human society. It hasn’t gone away.”

Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi Ghost will be launched at an event from 5.30pm on Thursday 10 October at Scorpio Books: Five Lanes/The BNZ Centre, 120 Hereford Street, Christchurch. All welcome, refreshments provided. RSVP here.

Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi Ghost by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is published by Canterbury University Press, RRP $36.99, softbound, 215 x 145mm, 200 pages, ISBN: 978-1-98-850347-9, available in bookstores and through Canterbury University Press.

Jeffrey Paparoa Holman is an acclaimed poet, historian and memoirist. His poetry has been shortlisted for the New Zealand Book Awards; his family memoir The Lost Pilot (Penguin, 2013) was warmly received in Aotearoa and overseas. Best of Both Worlds: The story of Elsdon Best and Tutakangahau (Penguin, 2010) was short-listed for the Ernest Scott Prize (History) in Australia. Since retirement from his role as senior adjunct fellow at the University of Canterbury, he has taught creative writing in both primary and high school programmes.

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