Promised New Zealand: Fleeing Nazi Persecution by Freya Klier (Otago University Press) 2009. Translated by Jenny Rawlings. 256 pp. NZ$45.00. Available from http://www.amazon.com/Promised-New-Zealand-Fleeing-Persecution/dp/1877372765
Originally published by Aufbau Taschenbuch in Germany in 2006 as Gelobtes Neuseeland: Fluchten ans Ende Der Weld, this book tells the stories of 23 refugees from German-speaking countries who abandoned their homelands to flee to the unknown shores of distant New Zealand. Some came before World War II, while others survived the horrors of the camps and arrived soon after war’s end. Most were young adults who carried with them a mixture of relief, hope, and a belief in the future. While their hearts yearned for those whom they had left behind, they nevertheless built new lives in the country of milk, meat, and honey. Among the refugees are such well-known people as the poet Karl Wolfskehl (who never quite adapted to life outside his homeland) and renowned philosopher Karl Popper, who found refuge in Christchurch while lecturing at the university there.
The book’s real strength lies in the stories of the ordinary and perhaps unremarkable people, industrious doctors and lawyers, business people and farmers who were classified as “aliens,” but who nevertheless adapted their lives with varying degrees of success. The losses they suffered were multiple: loss of homeland, security, friends, family, language, and culture. All experienced struggle and hardship. Klier, a Berlin-based writer, human rights activist, journalist, and film and documentary maker, interweaves the personal stories of escape, resilience, and resettlement with the political events of the day.
In the book’s foreword, the author explains that, during an airplane flight, she struck up a conversation with an Auckland woman. From this chance meeting, Klier learned about the emigration of German and Austrian Jews to New Zealand in the years leading up to World War II. Germany, and then Austria, were in the grip of National Socialism (Nazism), and farsighted Jews made plans to emigrate as far as possible from the madness surrounding them. After meeting the Auckland woman, whose mother had been one of the Jewish refugees, Klier first researched in the archives of Berlin, Wellington, and Christchurch, and then set about to meet some of these now elderly survivors and their families. She was moved by their stories of survival, determination, and courage, as well as by the warmth and openness with which they received her.
Klier first describes the life of Reuel Anson Lochore, a New Zealand admirer of German culture. Lochore studied in Germany before the war and retained his enthusiasm for things German for the rest of his life. Ultimately, he served as New Zealand’s ambassador to Germany in the post-war years.
Klier recounts the history of German-New Zealand relationships from the time when German settlers first came to New Zealand. In World War I, New Zealand fought on the side of the Allies and had suffered huge losses in proportion to its population, a fact that contributed to anti-German feeling during the ensuing years.
Within the opening few pages, the scene switches from early German settlement in New Zealand to the personal experience of 12-year-old Peter Muenz, who recounts his memory of hearing that the National Socialists came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933. Next, we read about 15-year-old Hans Jottkowitz from Berlin and how the ascent of Hitler affects his life. Karl Wolfskehl, then living in Munich and part of an elite group of writers and intellectuals, makes an entrance, upon which the story returns to New Zealand and the political and economic conditions in that country.
Use of the present tense gives the story an immediacy that makes for compelling reading. Within a few pages, we learn about restrictions facing Jews in Germany, personalized by the introduction of Ruth Adler’s family in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, and the Adam family from Berlin already looking to emigrate. Gradually all the protagonists are introduced, their situations interspersed with the political and economic events shaping their destinies.
The 23 immigrants whose stories form the subject of the book came mostly from Germany and Austria, but also from Moravia (Czechoslovakia) and Poland. New Zealand government policy had never favored immigrants, much less refugees. Nevertheless, about 1,100 refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Europe eventually were accepted for settlement in New Zealand. Most who succeeded in gaining entry attribute their success to a mixture of contacts, money and luck. The reader follows the stories with interest and a sense of wanting to know more as the book switches from one protagonist to another and progresses from anti-Semitism to war and from the general to the specific.
Many of the survivors whose stories are included have since died, which enhances the book’s value. It is important that these stories are written into the history of New Zealand—not all the nation’s immigrants have been of Anglo-Saxon, Christian roots (though most were). The Jewish refugees contributed much as businesspeople, entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers and shopkeepers, and most “punched above their weight.”
From the genealogist’s point of view, the book is particularly useful if one is seeking a family that immigrated to New Zealand during the 1930s and 1940s, or simply wants to understand the immigrant and refugee experience in New Zealand. One drawback, however, is the difficulty in picking up the strands of a single specific family and following them through; all the stories are divided into time frames, difficult to pick up as they are interspersed through the book.
A summary at the end and single sentence on each of the subjects at the beginning of the book allow for easy reference, as does a map of Europe in the early 1930s. A section of photographs puts faces to the names, and the book concludes with a brief epilogue detailing German-New Zealand relations since World War II, together with a single-sentence summary of the postwar lives of each of the refugees. This book is easy to read as a cross between a history, an adventure story, and a novel.
Claire Bruell
