It doesn’t always have to be fiction, right? And it doesn’t always have to be pure gold to get mentioned here, as this is definitely not the best book I ever read. But I do think many of you (who read my blog) might find this book interesting.
Thomas Harding, the author, was born in 1968 and is a British-American journalist and documentary maker, with also four non-fiction books on his resume. The House by the Lake was published in 2015 and tells the story about a house in Berlin. This house was originally built by his greatgrandfather as a vacation residence, which explains his interest in the house. In 2013, Harding goes back to Germany to visit its ruins and starts investigating what happened to the house after his Jewish family members fled to London around 1936.
The story begins in 1890 with the plot the house was built on: the great estate of Otto Wollank and his family. In his easy-to-read style, Harding describes a different time and world, with noblemen and farmers. The First World War hits the estate hard and the Wollank family never recovers economically, forcing them to look for different sources of income. As a result, they start leasing out several plots of their land to rich families from the city center.
One of the plots goes to the successfull Jewish doctor Alfred Alexander, who builts a beautiful vacation residence on the plot with a garden, a tennis court and a vegetable garden. The family of six spents a good deal of their weekends and vacations in their summer house, escaping city life, but more and more also escaping the growing anti-Semitism. Harding describes how Hitler and his nazi-party slowly turn daily life into a living nightmare for the Alexanders. More and more family members decide to leave Germany and by 1936, the family of six, now with husbands or wifes and their children, are reunited in London. This is where most Hollywood-movies would stop. But Harding doesn’t. He continues to tell the story – and as such, the history of Berlin – by focusing on the house and the daily life of its inhabitants.
In 1937, Will Meisel takes interest in the house and starts leasing it as his vacation home. Meisel is a great musician and composer and writes a lot of very popular songs in his heyday, laying the ground work for his still existing company. He also dances with the nazi-officials – as probably plenty business men did – to obtain the property for peanuts and to keep his business afloat. The Meisel-family gets through the Second World War without a lot of bruises, also because they leave the country in 1944 and flee to Austria for the remainder of the war, handing over the property to his employee Hanns Hartmann. Hartmann and his jewish wife take refuge in the house and live through the brutal ‘liberation’ by the Sovjets.
The end of the Second World War, however, is just the beginning of a new era for the house and its inhabitants. As the house is in East Berlin, that is in the hands of the Sovjets, the Meisels decide to have a housekeeper Ella Fuhrmann and her family living in the house. But more and more, Sovjet politics reign and shape the daily life in and around the house. Borders and walls start emerging until the Meisels are far away in a different reality, called West-Germany. By 1961, the – by now – two families living in the house could not even enter the lake anymore even though the house was right next to it: A wall is in the way. Harding keeps on going exploring the history of the house, ending in the now and with his and his family efforts to save the house.
Harding is clearly a journalist, not a novelist: He sticks to the facts and does not judge. And it works. Most of the time. If you want to learn something about Germany’s recent history without plowing through a boring history book, this is definitely a good start. I think it could have been even better though. In his book, Harding shows how all these people’s daily lifes and family lifes were affected by politics, but only in his interludes, talking about his own family, does he explore this relation further. A missed opportunity, I think. Maybe, I should go and visit the house sometime.