The House by the Lake Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Thomas Harding

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Family Trees

  Maps

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part I: Glienicke

  1. Wollank, 1890

  2. Wollank, 1913

  3. Alexander, 1927

  4. Alexander, 1928

  5. Wollank, 1929

  6. Alexander, 1930

  7. Schultz, 1934

  8. Alexander, 1934

  Part II: The Lake House

  Interlude, August 2013

  9. Meisel, 1937

  10. Meisel, 1937

  11. Meisel, 1942

  12. Hartmann, 1944

  13. Hartmann, 1945

  14. Hartmann, 1945

  15. Meisel, 1946

  16. Meisel, 1948

  17. Meisel, 1949

  Part III: Home

  Interlude, December 2013

  18. Fuhrmann, 1952

  19. Fuhrmann and Kühne, 1958

  20. Fuhrmann and Kühne, 1959

  21. Fuhrmann and Kühne, 1961

  22. Fuhrmann and Kühne, 1962

  Part IV: Villa Wolfgang

  Interlude, January 2014

  23. Kühne, 1965

  24. Kühne, 1970

  25. Kühne, 1975

  26. Kühne, 1986

  27. Kühne, 1989

  28. Kühne, 1990

  29. Kühne, 1993

  30. Kühne, 1999

  Part V: Parcel Number 101/7 and 101/8

  Interlude, February 2014

  31. City of Potsdam, 2003

  32. City of Potsdam, 2004

  33. City of Potsdam, 2014

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  Picture Section

  Copyright

  About the Book

  One House. Five Families. One Hundred Years of History.

  The House by the Lake is a groundbreaking and revelatory new history of Germany over a tumultuous century, told through the story of a small wooden house. Breathtaking in scope, intimate in its detail, it is the long-awaited new history from the bestselling author of Hanns and Rudolf.

  About the Author

  Thomas Harding is a journalist who has written for the Sunday Times, Financial Times and the Guardian, among other publications. He co-founded a television station in Oxford, and for many years was an award-winning publisher of a newspaper in West Virginia. He lives in Hampshire, England.

  Also by Thomas Harding

  Hanns and Rudolf

  Kadian Journal

  The House by the Lake

  A Story of Germany

  Thomas Harding

  For Elsie

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  1. The lake house, July 2013 (Thomas Harding)

  2. Otto Wollank (Wollank Family Archive)

  3. Dorothea von Wollank (Ullstein/ Topfoto)

  4. Groß Glienicke Lake, photograph by Lotte Jacobi, 1928 (Alexander Family Archive)

  5. The lake house, photograph by Lotte Jacobi, 1928 (Alexander Family Archive)

  6. Henny Alexander on the lake house veranda (Alexander Family Archive)

  7. Alfred Alexander in the garden at Glienicke (Alexander Family Archive)

  8. Alfred (front centre), Elsie and Bella (back row left) and friends at the lake, 1928 (Alexander Family Archive)

  9. Otto and Dorothea von Wollank’s funeral procession, 1929 (Groß Glienicke Chronik)

  10. Robert von Schultz (Landesarchiv Berlin)

  11. Joseph Goebbels calls for Jewish boycott, Berlin, 1 April 1933 (USHMM/National Archives, College Park)

  12. Fritz Munk with Alfred and Henny Alexander, Groß Glienicke (Munk Family Archive)

  13. ‘Jews are barred from entering’ sign, Wannsee, 1935 (SZ Photo/Scherl/Bridgeman Images)

  14. Will Meisel (Edition Meisel GmbH)

  15. Eliza Illiard in Paganini (Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek Museum für Film und Fernsehen)

  16. Will Meisel at the lake house (Edition Meisel GmbH)

  17. Hanns Hartmann (WDR/Liselotte Strelow)

  18. Gatow airfield, with Groß Glienicke Lake visible (top left) (National Archive London)

  19. Wolfgang Kühne (Bernd Kühne)

  20. Lake house 1960s (Bernd Kühne)

  21. Berlin border fence, Groß Glienicke Lake, 1961 (Groß Glienicke Chronik)

  22. Berlin Wall layout (Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik)

  23. View of Berlin Wall from Groß Glienicke Lake (Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik)

  24. Thälmann Pioneers meet soldiers, Groß Glienicke (Groß Glienicke Chronik)

  25. Berlin Wall with view of Groß Glienicke Lake and islands (AKG)

  26. Intershop, East Berlin, 1979 (AKG)

  27. Delft tiles in lake house living room (Thomas Harding)

  28. Scene of Ulrich Steinhauer murder with Steinhauer’s body visible, far left (Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicher-heitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik)

  29. Border crossing opens at Groß Glienicke, 1989 (Andreas Kalesse)

  30. Bernd Kühne’s child on border path, 1989 (Bernd Kühne)

  31. View of the house from the lake shore, 1990s (Alexander Family Archive)

  32. Inge Kühne, Elsie Harding and Wolfgang Kühne (left to right) at the lake house, 1993 (Alexander Family Archive)

  33. Lake house, 1990s (Alexander Family Archive)

  34. Marcel, Matthias and Roland (left to right) (Marcel Adam)

  35. Boys’ room (Thomas Harding)

  36. Tree growing through brick terrace (Thomas Harding)

  37. Clean-up Day, April 2014 (Sam Cackler Harding)

  38. Denkmal ceremony, August 2014 (Sam Cackler Harding)

  39. Groß Glienicke Lake (Thomas Harding)

  FAMILY TREES

  In the sand of Brandenburg the springs of life have flowed and still flow everywhere, and every square foot of ground has its story and is telling it, too – but one has to be willing to listen to these often quiet voices.

  Theodor Fontane, 2 December 1863

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  TO TELL THE story of the house by the lake, I have relied primarily on the accounts of Zeitzeugen, or time witnesses – people with a knowledge of the house and its history, as well as Augenzeugen, or eyewitnesses – those who personally experienced the events described. Every effort has been made to corroborate and confirm each statement.

  Throughout I have used the place names and spellings that would be most familiar to an English-speaking audience. This is, however, a story of Germany, and so I have made a few important exceptions to this rule – most notably ‘DDR’ and not the anglicised ‘GDR’ to describe East Germany, and ‘Groß Glienicke’ rather than ‘Gross Glienicke’ to describe the village at the heart of the book.

  PROLOGUE

  IN JULY 2013, I travelled from London to Berlin to visit the weekend house my great-grandfather had built.

  Picking up a rental car at Schönefeld Airport on the city’s southern edge, I set off round the ring road, taking an exit next to a radio mast that looked a little like the Eiffel Tower. I continued on, past signs pointing towards the old Olympic stadium and the suburb of Spandau, and then left by a sprawling petrol station, and into the countryside. My route took me through a thick birch forest.
Occasionally the trees broke to reveal flat, open farmland. Somewhere to my left I knew the River Havel flowed parallel to the road, but it was hidden behind the trees. It had been twenty years since I had last visited this place and nothing looked familiar.

  Fifteen minutes later, I turned right at a traffic light and saw a sign welcoming me to the village of Groß Glienicke1. A few metres beyond, another sign marked what had once been a border crossing between West Berlin and East Germany. I slowed to a crawl. Half a kilometre further, I spotted the landmark I had been looking for, the Potsdamer Tor, a cream-coloured stone arch standing opposite a small fire station. I drove under the arch, and parked.

  From here I wasn’t sure where to go. I didn’t have a map of the area, and there was nobody around to ask for help. I locked the car door, and walked a few paces down a narrow lane, overgrown with weeds and brambles, until I saw a green street sign for Am Park. Was this it? Hadn’t the lane been sandy? I vaguely remembered a vegetable patch and a kennel, a neatly ordered garden and tidy flower beds. Fifty metres on, the lane suddenly stopped at a wide metal gate marked ‘Private’. Although wary of trespassing, I ducked under a strand of barbed wire and pushed my way through a field of shoulder-high grass, heading in the direction of what I guessed was the lake.

  To my left stood a row of modern brick houses. To my right stretched an unkempt hedge. And then, there it was, my family’s house. It was smaller than I remembered, not much larger than a sports pavilion or double garage, hidden by bushes, vines and trees. Its windows were patched with plywood. The almost flat black roof was cracked and covered with fallen branches. The brick chimneys seemed to be crumbling, close to collapse.

  The lake house, July 2013

  I picked my way round it slowly, touching flaking paintwork and boarded-up doorways, until I found a broken window. Climbing through, my way illuminated by my iPhone, I was confronted by mounds of dirty clothes and soiled cushions, walls covered in graffiti and crawling with mould, smashed appliances and fragments of furniture, rotting floorboards and empty beer bottles. One room looked as if it had been used as a drug den, littered with broken lighters and soot-stained spoons. There was a sadness to the place, the melancholy of a building abandoned.

  After a few minutes, I clambered back out of the window and walked towards the house next door, hoping to find someone to speak with. I was lucky, for a woman was working in the garden. I hesitantly introduced myself in broken German, and she responded in English. I explained that I was a member of a family who used to live at the house. Did she know, I asked, what had happened to it? Who owned it now? ‘It has been empty for over a decade,’ she told me and then pointed towards the shore. ‘The Berlin Wall was built there, between the house and the lake,’ she said. ‘It’s seen a lot, but it’s an eyesore now.’ Confusingly, I appeared to be the focus of her anger. I only nodded, staring back to the house.

  I had been told about the lake house, or ‘Glienicke’, all my life. It had been an obsession for my grandmother, Elsie, who spoke about it with wonder, evoking a time when life had been easy, fun and simple. It had been, she said, her soul place.

  My family, the Alexanders, had flourished in the liberal years of 1920s Berlin. Affluent, cosmopolitan Jews, theirs had been the values of Germany: they worked hard and enjoyed themselves, attending the latest exhibitions, plays, concerts, and taking long walks in the surrounding countryside. As soon as they could afford it, they had built themselves a little wooden lake house, a symbol of their success. They had spent every summer at Glienicke, enjoying a rustic, simple life, gardening, swimming in the lake, hosting parties on the terrace. In my mind, I kept an image of the house, compiled from the sepia-tinted photographs I had been shown since childhood: a glistening lake, a wood-panelled room with a fireplace and rocking chair, a manicured lawn, a tennis court.

  But with the rise of the Nazis, they had been forced to flee, moving to London where they had struggled to establish a new life. They had escaped when so many had not, but they left with next to nothing. In my family, this was Glienicke’s story: a place once cherished, then stolen, located in a country now reviled.

  For as long as I can remember, my family had eschewed all things German. We didn’t purchase German cars, washing machines or fridges. We holidayed across Europe – in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy – but never in Germany. I learned Spanish and French at school, even Latin, anything but German. The elder generation – my grandmother and grandfather, my great-uncles and -aunts – did not speak of their life in Berlin, of the years before the war. It was a closed chapter. Any emotional connection to their lives in the 1920s had been severed. Reluctant to explore the past, they chose instead to focus on their new country, becoming more British than the British, sending their children to the best schools, encouraging them to become doctors, lawyers and accountants.

  As I became older, I realised that our relationship with Germany was not as black and white as I had been led to believe. My grandfather refused to speak another word of German from the day he arrived in England, but my grandmother kept up her German, regularly chap-eroning coachloads of German tourists around the country, pointedly eulogising Shakespeare, the Magna Carta, and what she called ‘British fair play’. From her memories, her comments, jokes occasionally, I caught traces of a life now lost.

  It was in 1993, four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that I had last seen the house. I was twenty-five years old, on a weekend trip to Germany with Elsie and my cousins. She was ready, at last, to show us her childhood city. For us, the younger generation, it was a fun family excursion, a walk down memory lane with our grandmother. It was only on the aeroplane to Berlin that I began to see what the trip really meant – what this other life was. Halfway through the flight, my grandmother walked down the aisle and sat on my armrest. ‘Darling,’ she said in her thick German accent, ‘I want you to see this,’ and handed me a brown envelope. Inside were two olive-green Nazi-era passports belonging to her husband and father-in-law, and a piece of yellow fabric emblazoned with a black J. I knew that the Nazis had forced the Jews to wear such marks. The message was clear: this is my history, and this is your history. Do not forget.

  And I didn’t forget. Upon returning to London, I began asking questions, seeking information about our family’s past, and why it had been so carefully covered up. It was an interest that never abated. Which is why, two decades later, I had booked a flight to Berlin and was now back at the house, to find out what had happened to my grandmother’s ‘soul place’.

  The next day, I drove from Groß Glienicke to the local government offices in Potsdam, twenty minutes south of the village. There, in the basement of the courthouse, I found an information desk staffed by an elderly woman busy at her computer. Pulling out my phrase book, I haltingly asked for a copy of the house’s official land records. The woman informed me that I needed permission from the property owner to view the documents. When I explained that my great-grandfather had died in 1950 she only shrugged. I attempted to plead, and after I had produced my passport and credit cards, and sketched out a rough family tree, the woman finally relented and disappeared into a back room. Eventually she reappeared with a sheaf of papers. Jabbing her finger at the top page, she explained that the house and the land on which it stood were now owned by the city of Potsdam. I asked what that meant – what was to become of the house? She turned back to her computer, typed in the lot and parcel number, then swivelled the monitor to face me. ‘Es wird abgerissen,’ she said. It will be demolished. After an eighty-year absence, it looked like I had returned just in time to see the house be torn down.

  Leaving her office, I looked at the list of government departments hanging on the lobby wall. One caught my eye: Einsichtnahme in historische Bauakten und Baupläne. I knew enough German to understand that Bau meant building and historische had something to do with history. I headed upstairs, entered a long corridor filled with similar-looking white doors, chose one and knocked. Inside, I found two architectural
preservationists, a tall, thin woman in her forties, and a short, bearded man of the same age. Asking first if they spoke English, I told them the little I knew about the house, and the city’s plans to tear it down. Despite my sudden appearance, and my garbled explanation, they were polite and eager to help. The man grabbed a statute book from the shelf and leafed through the pages until he found the section that he was looking for. The ‘Castle Clause’, he said, holding the book out to me. If I didn’t want the house to be knocked down, he continued, I would have to prove that it was culturally and histor-ically significant.

  Before I left Berlin, I returned to the house. Could it really be saved? I wondered. It would be an enormous task, not to say expensive. I spotted new details – broken shutters on the ground, rusted gutters, trees growing through its brick terrace. I lived hundreds of miles away, and spoke little German. My life was busy enough. I had no time to take on another project and, in any case, it looked like I might be too late.

  But more than this, should it be saved? Standing before me it seemed so unimpressive, a fragment from some half-forgotten memory. It was nothing really, barely more than a shell. Yet, there was something about the house, something intangible, something compelling. Most of all, it had been the focus of my grandmother’s attention for as long as I had known her. It had meant a huge amount to her, and she had made clear that it should mean a lot to us, her grandchildren, too. It would have been so easy to walk away.

  This is the story of a wooden house built on the shore of a lake near Berlin. A story of nine rooms, a small garage, a long lawn and a vegetable patch. It is a story of how it came to be, how it was transformed by its inhabitants, and how it transformed them in turn.

  It is the story of a building that was loved and lost by five families. A story of the everyday moments that make a house a home – of morning chores, family meals around the kitchen table, summer-afternoon snoozes and gossip over coffee and cake. It is a story of domestic triumphs and tragedies – of weddings and births, secret trysts and betrayals, illnesses, intimidation and murder.