House of Pereira To Walk Under Palm Trees | Page 5

PREFACE

When the Museum of Samoa asked me at short notice to come up with a title for the online photo exhibition , I chose , almost at random , the phrase “ To Walk Under Palm Trees .” It derived from a quote by former Samoa resident , Friedrich Stünzner writing wistfully from Germany : “ I long sometimes to walk under palm trees .” It summed up for me the glorious but ill-fated involvement that Germany had with its “ pearl of the south seas .”
It obtained an even deeper resonance when I learned later that Mr Stünzner may have been paraphrasing famous words from one of Goethe ’ s novels , “ Elective Affinities .” In this book , one of Goethe ’ s characters writes in a diary , “ No one can walk under palm trees with impunity ” (“ Es wandelt niemand ungestraft unter Palmen …).”
The German residents of Samoa were true to Goethe ’ s foreboding : they paid a high price for their tropical pleasures and remarkable diligence . Through no fault of their own , and despite their steady and liberal governance and their tireless industry , they were forced from the islands after the First World War . The Treaty of Versailles , of 1919 , gave the New Zealand Administration wide discretion to decide the fate of the hundreds of Germans living in Samoa or in internment in New Zealand . To the victor belong the spoils , as the saying goes , and the New Zealanders chose deportation and confiscation .
The several hundred men , women and children who were repatriated to Germany in 1919 and 1920 represented about 80 % of the Germans who had been resident in pre-war Samoa , by my rough calculations . A number were allowed to stay – those who had been married to locals – as well as a handful of others who were specially favoured . Those who were forced to return to Germany almost without exception lost everything they had owned in Samoa : land , homes , bank deposits , cash in hand . They were allowed to take luggage and a few household effects . The departed returned to struggle and hardship in their former homeland . The Treaty of Versailles ruled that the returning Germans should be compensated for their losses by their own government . The evidence of many is that this did not happen .
A Romantic Remembrance
In the grim conditions that applied in Germany in the 1920 ’ s many former residents wrote to the New Zealand Government pleading for permission to return to Samoa . Archives NZ files indicate that the New Zealanders took a hard line : only two families were allowed back , and these two were so favoured because they had blood connections with
Garben Family Collection
Christel Garben “... like a lost paradise .” the islands . For the rest , Samoa was destined to become a romantic remembrance whose tropical scents and breaking surf grew in allure as the years passed . Christel Garben , who had been a housemaid for Governor Solf and then a planter at Siusega , wrote in the “ Rheinsche Landeszeitung ,” in 1939 , “… das lebt und weht und taucht in der Erinnerung auf wie ein verlorenes Paradies ” – “ it lives and wafts through my mind like a lost paradise .”
| To Walk Under Palm Trees - The Germans in Samoa : Snapshots from Albums | Tony Brunt
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