Frida Peemüller’s Memoirs of German Samoa 1910-1920

Abstract

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.