Use of the word "had" more than once in a statement in the German language?

Question

Even though the question contains the word `had`, I am referring to any forms of the word `have`. In English it's easy to think of a sentence which has two `have`s in it. For instance: > I have had enough on my plate. OR > He has had some good luck using that bat. I have come across similar statements (unless I am entirely astray here) in German. The most recent example is the phrase `die er eben noch gehabt hatte` which is a part of the following sentence. > Er war ein wenig blass und außer Atem, aber ganz im Gegensatz zu der Eile, die er eben noch gehabt hatte, stand er nun wie angewurzelt in der offenen Tür. I could understand the rest of the sentence reasonably well, but am confused at the part `gehabt hatte`. Since in my case this is a frequent occurrence, I was wondering if there're any rules regarding this.

Answer 1

"die er eben noch gehabt hatte"

Let's look how we got there...

The basic statement would be: "Er hatte die eben noch gehabt." ("He has had her still just now" or simpler "He still had her just now" )

But, since this is a "Nebensatz" (subordinate clause), the rule says to move the past tense helper verb "hatte" to the end of the clause and the subject ("er") after the backward referencing article ("die").

Thus we get: "..., die er eben no gehabt hatte,..."

This is btw. "Plusquamperfect" (auch "vollendete Vergangenheit"; "completed past"), which is build from the simple past (Imperfekt or Präteritum and the Partizip Perfekt; "hatte gehabt").

HTH