The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History

 

The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History by Thomas Harding, is a story that can be told thousands of times by thousand of families.  Harding grew up hearing stories of his family’s small a cottage just outside Berlin.  As Jews, they fled Germany in the 1930s and the cottage and all of their property was seized by the Nazis.

Harding traces the history of Germany through the fate of the house.  The house and the property are first stolen by the Nazis, then under Russian control, followed by East German jurisdiction; when the Berlin wall is constructed, the house is in the security zone, and the wall prevents the residents from using the lake.  When the wall comes down the house starts a long decline.  When the author is on the scene, it is derelict, inhabited by squatters and drug users.

The book ends with Harding exploring the possibility of renovating the house and making it a kind common property.  In the years since the book’s publication, he and others have done this; the house is restored to the way it looked in the 1930s.  The Alexander House website explains that the house is “a Centre for Education and Reconciliation.”

Most importantly, exhibits in the house and on its property do not turn a blind eye to the fact that it originally was stolen Jewish property, even, or despite the fact that the house is placed within the wider context of modern German history.