When I was a librarian at Canterbury Public Library back in the 1980s, one of my jobs was to help with family research. One user wanted information on a great-uncle who was evidently a black sheep – no one in the family would talk about him, she said, and she was intrigued and wanted to find out what she could. She had an impression that he was a bit of a rascal, a loveable rogue. With just a few dates and not much more to go on, I helped her load a microfilm of the Christchurch Press from the period and left her to it. When I later checked how she was doing, she was weeping silently at the machine: her great-uncle, she discovered, was one of the last people to be hanged at Lyttelton Gaol.
Genealogy is not for the faint-hearted, and for every David Lomas feel-good reunion story there is another story of tragedy or scandal or unsolved mystery. In Lily, Oh Lily, poet Jeffrey Paparoa Holman goes in search of his great-aunt Lily, who moved to Germany in the early 20th century and later came to admire Adolf Hitler. Fascism had, in the decades leading up to World War II, a broad appeal that went well beyond the borders of Germany, Spain and Italy; in England, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists attracted a strong following, and many of the intelligentsia had either fascist leanings or were casually antisemitic.
Who was Lily Hasenberg and what became of her? These questions form the heart of this book, as the author searches for answers – answers that are sometimes found, sometimes lost, sometimes tantalisingly close but out of reach. Other subsidiary questions are also raised. Did Lily marry a Jewish man who was later murdered by the Nazis? How did Lily’s brother manage to get her out of Germany in 1940? Holman’s dedication and persistence in his search are exceptional. He travelled to Germany, where he studied German at the Goethe-Institut, and to England, where Lily was interned during the war.
The trail goes warm and cold – those who personally knew Lily are dead, family legends are unreliable, records are lost. At times, I wondered at Holman’s tenacity, his pursuit of this distant relation he had never met – what drives him? Partly, I think, simply the desire to know, to put together whispers and fragments, to assemble a narrative he can understand and perhaps put to rest. But also partly, I think, to comprehend how ordinary people can be attracted to extreme ideologies and embrace evil. This gives the quest a topical relevance, as many of us struggle to understand how seemingly good people, friends and family members, can be radicalised and transformed by disinformation.
Was Lily Hasenberg an evil person? We never get close enough to her to know, but there is enough here to suggest she didn’t merely keep her head down and survive. Her enthusiastic support for Hitler caused a rift between her and her sister, Holman’s grandmother, that never healed. But what strikes the reader is her ordinariness. What Hannah Arendt observed at Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem was how undistinguished he was. Lily Hasenberg was no Eichmann, but her evil, if evil it was, was also of the banal kind. Late in the book, Holman observes: “It may seem to any reader, come this far, that we know very little of Lily Hasenberg the person.” That’s true, and it’s frustrating, as Holman himself must have been frustrated. But we do gain glimpses of one ordinary person’s life caught up and carried by a terrible wave of history. Holman quotes WG Sebald, the great chronicler of trauma and historical erasure, at the beginning of the book, and it was the author of Austerlitz that I was most reminded of in reading this account of Lily’s life, with its small discoveries, its lacunae, its barely discernible traces.
Lily, Oh Lily: Searching for a Nazi Ghost by Jeffrey Paparoa Holman (Canterbury University Press, $36.99) is available now.
