Clare Mulley

The house that Alfred built

Thomas Harding’s A House by the Lake chronicles the rise of Nazism through the story of one small summer retreat on the outskirts of Berlin

This is a book about boundaries — and relationships. At its heart is the eponymous house by the lake, which in 1927 was the first of many small wooden summer houses to be built in the village of Gross Glienicke. Both its situation, just outside Berlin in the lakeside area that would later abut Gatow airport, and its many occupants, from well-established German Jews to partying neo-Nazis, would expose the property to the more tidal waters of modern German history. But the house has not just provided a stage for human drama; arguably it has been integral to the action itself, helping to shape lives, just as it was itself transformed by Germany’s changing politics. A house is also a very personal space, and this is a history that is often poignant, sometimes heartening, and never other than intimate.

Five very different families fell in love with and lived in the house by the lake, and all were eventually dispossessed. The first were the Alexanders. Alfred, a distinguished doctor, built the place as a summer retreat and opened it with a Jewish prayer. The family wisely left in 1936, settling in England where Alfred’s daughter, Elsie, eventually inspired her grandson, Thomas Harding, to research this book.

In 1937, the composer and music publisher Will Meisel and his young family moved into the house as tenants. Meisel was an opportunist of the first order. Having built his fortune promoting mainly Jewish talent, he joined the Nazi party in 1933 to safeguard his business. While several of his composers were transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Meisel quietly employed a brilliant creative director, Hans Hartmann, who could not find work elsewhere, having refused to divorce his Jewish wife. Four years later Meisel pressed the expatriated Alexanders to sell the house at a knock-down price.

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