Vantage point
The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History. By Thomas Harding. Picador; 410 pages; $28. William Heinemann; £20.
IN 2007 Thomas Harding, an English journalist, began probing his German-Jewish roots after hearing an amazing story at a family funeral. The result was “Hanns and Rudolf”, a bestselling account of how his great-uncle, Hanns Alexander, tracked down and eventually captured the kommandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss.
Mr Harding was only beginning to mine his family’s history, it transpired. In “The House by the Lake”, a book acclaimed in Britain last year and now available in America, his gaze broadens to the century-long saga of five families’ fortunes and misfortunes. If “Hanns & Rudolf” was a sonata, “The House by the Lake” is a symphony, telling the story of modern Germany with one recurring theme: history as seen from the Alexander family’s lake house outside Berlin.
Alfred Alexander, Mr Harding’s great-grandfather, built the house at Gross Glienicke, 15km (nine miles) west of Berlin, in 1927. A prominent doctor who counted Einstein among his patients, Dr Alexander sought a calm refuge for himself, his wife Henny and their four children. That idyll came to an abrupt end in 1936, when the Alexanders fled Nazi Germany to England.
Thus “Aryanised”, their cottage would, by an extraordinary twist of fate, offer a ringside seat to the many convulsions of German history. This house not only endured seizure by the Gestapo and had the Berlin Wall built at the bottom of its garden, but was on the front-line of every other major event of Germany’s 20th century: the 1936 Olympics, Soviet conquest and mass rape, the Berlin airlift, the socialist republic, spies, sports doping, and finally, the Wall’s fall in 1989.
“The House by the Lake” skips between its varied occupants and these events to present an admirably clear and concise history of modern Germany. It’s an impressive feat of archival and investigative research. Fascinating revelations abound, such as the fact that the anthem of the Berlin airlift, “Berlin bleibt doch Berlin” (“Berlin is still Berlin”), was written in 1948 by Will Meisel, the composer who took over the Alexanders’ house in 1937 and vainly tried to reclaim it after the second world war.
Yet for all its detailed digging, the emotional side of the family’s loss remains submerged. Mr Harding is more comfortable with facts; with classic English reticence, he buries his family’s responses in footnotes and summaries. A greater willingness to explore the pain of this historic theft would have made this powerful book even more so.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Vantage point"
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