If These Walls Could Sprechen: The story of a small German cottage built by Jews, seized by Nazis, gifted to a Stasi informant, and taken over by punk rockers.

AuthorHazlett, Andrew
PositionBOOKS - Thomas Harding's "The House by the Lake" - Book review

A FEW MILES WEST of Berlin, a little house sits on Gross Glienicke lake, a quiet eye in the storm of Europe's worst century ever.

Nazi bureaucrats arrived at their Final Solution at nearby Wannsee. The Red Army poured through at the end of World War II. Churchill and Truman drove past on their way to meet Stalin in Potsdam. The Berlin Airlift rattled the cupboards as planes landed at and left Gatow airfield. Secret policemen lurked as the Berlin Wall rose. The house endured the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War, the fall of the Wall, and the reunification of Germany.

In 1927, during Germany's sunny Weimar interlude, Dr. Alfred Alexander, head of Berlin's Chamber of Physicians, commissioned a simple wooden cottage as a family retreat. When he tacked a mezuzah by the front door, it was a gesture to a faith worn lightly. Alexander and his family called themselves "three-days-a-year Jews": observant during high holidays, but thoroughly assimilated into Berlin's cosmopolitan upper middle class.

The Alexanders delighted in sun-drenched alfresco meals on the terrace. The children swam and rowed in clear, cool waters. Daughter Elsie was particularly fond of the peace and beauty of the lake house; she called it her "soul place."

But the rise of the Third Reich brought an end to those reveries. At university, Elsie had to display little yellow stars on her textbooks. Brownshirts demonstrated outside their city home. Whispered warnings circulated. Elsie and her sister pleaded with their father to leave Germany. He told Elsie, "I was a soldier and an officer in the war and I received the Iron Cross. Nothing will happen to me."

In the end, the Alexanders left for England, their valuables sewn into their coats, just before escape became impossible.

In 2013 one of their descendants travelled to Gross Glienicke to see the place his family had once treasured. British journalist Thomas Harding, Elsie's grandson, found an inauspicious hovel scheduled for demolition. "There was a sadness to the place," he writes, "the melancholy of a building abandoned."

He set about discovering the full, poignant history of his grandmother's soul place--the land, the house, and all who called it home. He uncovered remarkable stories, some forgotten to history, others deliberately concealed. And he shared them in his book, The House by the Lake.

SOON AFTER THE family's escape, the Gestapo seized their home and Alexander's medical practice. As Harding mentions in an...

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