The House by the Lake

by Thomas Harding

  According to the files, it took almost two decades for the JCC’s claim to process. Finally, in 2011, a federal department acknowledged that the Alexanders had indeed been ‘persecuted by the Nazi Party’ and that their land in Groß Glienicke had been ‘illegally seized’. In compensation, the family was awarded a little over 30,000 euros.

  Leafing through the documents, I see that not only was this offer accepted but that my father and every single member of his generation – his brother, his sister and his cousins – had signed an individual waiver, nullifying any right to future claims. Looking to the top of the page I notice that the date the money was released was September 2012, just months before my first return to the house.

  I send an email to various family members asking if they might be interested in helping me find out more about the house in Groß Glienicke; in digging out old photos and letters, in trying to piece together our family’s story. To my surprise I receive several hostile responses.

  One cousin says that he wants nothing to do with the house. After all, he says, we were persecuted by the Germans in the 1930s, and then disappointed ever since by a succession of German governments and lawyers.

  One of the strongest reactions comes from my father. He asks, quietly, ‘Are you really expecting us to dip our hands in our pockets …’ In my head, I finish his sentence: ‘when the house was stolen from us in the first place?’

  18

  FUHRMANN

  1952

  IN THE AUTUMN of 1952, Ella Fuhrmann and her two children1, Lothar and Heideraud, packed up their belongings at the Munk house and moved to the lake house.

  For Ella Fuhrmann, it was only another trial to endure. Her forty-six-year-old husband, Erich, had died of stomach cancer the year before, and she was still grieving. She had liked living at the Munk house, but had known their stay there would only ever be temporary. A tall, thin, outgoing and energetic woman, Ella wasn’t worried about taking care of the Meisel property, or the large vegetable plot, which should, she hoped, provide more than enough for her family.

  In her conversation with Herr Meisel, it had been made clear that the Fuhrmanns would be caretakers, not tenants. This was still the publisher’s house. As such, he didn’t want anyone sleeping in the master bedroom and preferred that the living room not be used, and any belongings which he had left in the Blue Room – his piano, stool, posters and music – should remain untouched. Lothar, therefore, took the maid’s bedroom next to the kitchen, while his eighteen-year-old sister slept with his mother in the spare room by the front door.

  Despite the Meisels’ minor adjustments and improvements, the house’s interior looked as it had when the Alexanders had first moved in. The same high-backed wooden chairs standing to attention in the living room, the large red table and built-in benches, the wicker chairs on the veranda to the rear of the property and the cheerily painted walls. Some of the windowpanes had cracked and would have to be replaced, and with the house so long empty it took a couple of days to warm it up. Soon enough, though, it felt like home.

  Outside, similarly, almost everything appeared to be as it had been. The caretaker’s cottage – where Gerda Radtke’s brother still lived – the greenhouse and the pump house were all still standing, though they needed some attention. The tennis court, however, was barely recognisable, with the white lines marking the edges of the playing area only just visible through the long grass. The veranda, to the rear of the house, with its porch roof and beaded columns, along with the orange-painted wooden shutters had all survived the tumult of the preceding years. Though older, taller and more dominant, the willow and pine trees continued to tower over the land, casting a wide swathe of shade over the steps that descended gracefully to the shore.

  The other major changes were only evident at the foot of the garden. There was now a fence running along the lake’s edge, demarcating the border between East Germany and West Berlin. This fence was made of thin wooden posts and limp chicken wire. Also, the long white jetty that had jutted into the lake, and which had launched a generation of children into the water, had been removed.

  The border fence was so rickety that many of the posts had fallen over so it was easy for Lothar to clamber over and go for a swim in the lake. If spotted by one of the occasional border patrol boats, he might be shouted at, but this was a small price to pay for the enjoyment of a refreshing dip.

  Since his father’s death, Lothar had assumed additional responsibilities. At the new house, the worst involved emptying the septic tank. Each evening, he removed a metal sheet covering a large black hole in the ground, and then lowered a hose into the putrid-smelling liquid below. Walking down to the bottom of the garden, he would then check to make sure that the liquid was soon running out into the sandy ground next to the shore.

  While the Fuhrmanns enjoyed their first summer at the house – eating outside, swimming in the lake, building wigwams in the woods – Lothar was looking forward to the winter. Once the lake froze over, he could walk on the ice, exploring the hidden coves and woods of the lakefront. The border patrol guards, such as there were, didn’t seem to mind that he was on the wrong side of the flimsy chicken-wire fence – after all he was only a child. Indeed, they seemed to enjoy interacting with the local kids, given that fraternising with the adults was strictly forbidden. Nor was Lothar alone on the frozen lake that winter. Others from Groß Glienicke were there too, skating on the ice or sliding around in their boots like Lothar. There were also plenty of people close to the other, West Berlin, shore. The two groups didn’t mingle, seemingly separated by an invisible line that ran down the centre of the lake.

  Best of all were the winter storms which covered the steep slope between the house and the lake with snow. Lothar and his friends spent hours building ramps and jumps, and then, speeding down the hill towards the lake astride a solid wooden sledge. When they had grown tired of their races, they built giant ice caves, imagining themselves in some northern wilderness, or frozen forts, from which they threw snowballs, until, exhausted and chilled, they said goodbye and retired, each to their own coal-warmed house.

  Cold was the Fuhrmanns’ biggest problem. The house had been constructed as a summer residence and there was no insulation in the walls, cellar or attic. During that brutal winter, which sometimes fell to fifteen degrees Centigrade below freezing, Ella Fuhrmann covered the windows with blankets and the walls with newspaper. The living room had a chimney but Will Meisel had forbidden them from using this space. The fireplace in the cellar channelled hot air up to the master bedroom and the Blue Room, where Will Meisel had his music studio, but these rooms had also been decreed off-limits. The only heated room was the 2 × 3 metre-wide kitchen, which became the centre of their lives. All meals were taken here, with Ella cooking on the coal-fired stove in the corner which had two heating plates on which a large kettle constantly simmered. There the family huddled around the pull-down table, holding mugs of steaming tea in their hands, talking about their days, playing games or listening to the radio.

  One Sunday in early 1953, Lothar walked towards the Potsdamer Tor with his sister and mother. Dressed in his suit, he was on his way to the village church to be confirmed. This confirmation ceremony was a rite of passage in which he would seal his commitment to Christianity and his community.

  Lothar had turned fourteen the previous October, and consequently was one of the oldest children arriving at the church that morning. Inside, he was greeted by Wilhelm Stintzing2, the congregation’s tall, wiry, thirty-nine-year-old pastor. Over the previous year the village’s confirmands had studied Protestant rites and customs, and the catechism. Now, however, there were no more discussions of ethics or morality. Instead, a few Bible verses were read, a handful of hymns were sung, and then the pastor blessed the young boys and girls in front of him. With the service complete, Lothar would be treated as an adult member of the congregation. From this point on, when adults addressed him, they would use the more respectful word Sie, rather than the informal
du.

  Lothar’s was one of the last big groups to be confirmed in the village, for it was around this time that the politburo in Moscow passed the ‘Measures for the Recovery of the Political Situation in the DDR’, including a provision for a socialist alternative to the Christian confirmation ceremony known as the Jugendweihe. During this new ceremony the children would be asked to pledge themselves to the ‘great and noble cause of socialism’. Afterwards, they would receive flowers and a book, Weltall, Erde, Mensch (Universe, Earth and Man), which was stridently anti-religious. The first such Jugendweihe ceremony took place in East Berlin, and with political favour, its popularity grew exponentially. As a result, from a high point of more than thirty children per year in the early 1950s, the number of confirmations in Groß Glienicke fell by the end of the 1960s to less than three.

  Other traditions soon began to disappear: on Christmas Eve, for example, it was customary for the village to gather together to sing carols. Yet with the border now dividing Groß Glienicke in two, half the congregation were now unable to attend the service. While Pastor Stintzing had built a new church in Kladow – partly constructed of stones salvaged from the ruins of the schloss – for the villagers who now lived on the lake’s geographic eastern side (the political West), the community had been fragmented. As an expression of their faith, or perhaps as a protest, the parishioners who had been cut off from Groß Glienicke walked along the lakefront, candles in hand, singing carols. When their voices could be heard across the water in Groß Glienicke, a few of the villagers lit their own candles in solidarity.

  Late in the evening of 5 March 1953, the Fuhrmanns heard an announcement on the radio: Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Council of Ministers, had died. He had suffered a stroke resulting from high blood pressure and hypertension.

  In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s death sent shock waves through the political establishment and triggered a power struggle within the country’s ruling elite. For much of the DDR population, the news sparked hope. Only the year before, the ruling Socialist Unity Party had announced an intensification of Sovietisation within the DDR. As part of this policy shift, the government would impose a series of punitive new measures upon its citizens: taxes and work quotas were to be increased, and the price of food supplies and heating oil was to rise. Worse still, the political oppression had been ramped up, with Protestant youth groups now banned and ‘capitalist’ dissidents pulled off the streets and jailed.

  Three months later, on the morning of 17 June 1953, protests erupted across the DDR. The largest demonstrations were in East Berlin where over 100,000 people took to the streets. Marching along the main thoroughfare of Under den Linden, they sang the West German national anthem, demanding unity, law and freedom. One group of young men even climbed the Brandenburg Gate and tore down the Soviet flag flying there. Work stoppages and strikes were also declared in over 250 of the country’s towns and cities, with some estimating that as many as half a million people participated. In Potsdam, for instance, citizens occupied the district offices of the court, party and police. Unrest also broke out in various towns to the north of Groß Glienicke, including Kyritz, Wittstock, Neuruppin and Pritzwalk.

  Panicked by the uprising, the DDR government called on the Soviet military for support. Before long, Soviet tanks were rumbling through the Berlin streets, while the Volkspolizei shot at protesters near the Brandenburg Gate and the Potsdamer Platz. The protesters threw bricks and bottles at the police, and rolled cars over in an attempt to halt the tanks. By the end of the day, fifty people had been killed, over a thousand injured, and thousands more arrested and jailed. Trials were held over the next few days, resulting in the execution of more than two hundred people.

  The Berlin unrest did not, however, spread to the streets of Groß Glienicke. The few who were inspired to demonstrate had travelled to East Berlin and Potsdam, while the others, more cautious or more afraid, remained in the village. The following day they learned the official explanation for the unrest. According to the Neues Deutschland, the protests had been deliberately provoked by Western agencies with the aim of disrupting the progressive policies of the DDR. Such stories provoked a series of comments from the party’s senior leadership, who argued that the younger generation was being corrupted by Western culture, particularly through films and music that celebrated rebellion. These youngsters, they said, were becoming Halbstarke, or half-strengths. They would have to learn to support the socialist revolution and to embrace the opportunities offered by the East.

  Such statements were being made as the partition between East and West was becoming increasingly delineated. Berlin’s division, for instance, impacted on the services that had previously supplied the entire metropolis. Electricity and telephone systems were now separated, with each sector now managing its own network. Meanwhile, East and West Berlin’s water supplies were controlled independently, with the exception of the suburbs in the far west of West Berlin, whose supply was provided by a DDR water plant located in Groß Glienicke. The sewage system, however, which ran underneath the city irrespective of political boundaries was jointly managed; it would simply have been too expensive to create different tunnels and pipes.

  While buses and trams were operated separately, the trains were more complicated as many of the lines ran across the city. Most trains which had formerly traversed the capital now stopped and turned back at the border. Those few Western trains that continued to run through East Berlin did not stop. Later, the highly guarded empty terminals through which they whistled became known as Geisterbahnhöfe, or ghost stations.

  Throughout the division of Berlin, the city’s overground train system, known as the S-Bahn, was managed and maintained by the East Berlin authorities. Many of the workers who maintained the S-Bahn in West Berlin lived in East Germany, including Groß Glienicke. Each day, on his way to school, Lothar would see villagers cycle past, as they made their way to the border crossing at Staaken, ten kilometres to the north. There they had their identity documents inspected, before crossing into Spandau in West Berlin, and then taking an S-Bahn to whichever station or depot they worked at.

  In the summer of 1957, the lake house turned thirty. On the surface, the structure seemed to have weathered the years with grace. The wood siding was flawless and well varnished, the roof was smooth and unblemished, and the veranda to the rear of the property was level and free of moss. On closer inspection, however, there were signs that the house required attention. The windows needed a new coat of paint, the top bricks in the chimneys could do with a repointing, and with a family now living at the house year-round, the meagre kitchen was proving inadequate. And the deterioration was likely to continue, given that the Fuhrmanns were ‘caretaker’ residents only, and had neither the money nor the skills to renovate themselves.

  Ever since they had moved into the property, the Fuhrmanns had taken Will Meisel’s instructions seriously, occupying only one half of the house and avoiding the forbidden rooms. The publisher’s furniture remained covered with sheets. The cupboards, bulging with his film-star wife’s clothes, smelled of mothballs and stale air. The Edition Meisel sheet music that lay on the piano had curled at the corners, after long exposure to the sun pouring in through the large windows.

  The sense of abandonment and emptiness that filled the home became more palpable when Lothar’s sister left to live with her aunt in Potsdam. It is no surprise then, given the shortage of housing stock that had persisted since the massive property destruction in the Second World War, that the Gemeinde decided to find another tenant to share the house.

  19

  FUHRMANN AND KÜHNE

  1958

  ON 16 SEPTEMBER 1958, a van drew up to the lake house. In it were Wolfgang and Irene Kühne, their two children, and all of the family’s possessions.

  Irene was enchanted. Green and red apples hung ripe on the trees in the orchard at the top of the property. The garden was lush an
d the view across the lake was beautiful. As they approached the front door she saw a woman through an open-shuttered window. ‘Who’s she?’ She asked her husband. This was Frau Ella Fuhrmann, he explained, the woman with whom they would be sharing the house.

  Earlier that summer, Irene Kühne had had enough. For more than two years she had lived in a dark, damp basement apartment in Potsdam. The basement was bad for the health of her children, three-year-old Hartmut and one-year-old Rosita. Yet despite repeated promises, Wolfgang had failed to find them anywhere better.

  Even worse, her husband’s father and stepmother, who lived next door in a larger, cleaner and brighter apartment, were getting out of control. Every day, it seemed, they treated her more cruelly. It was easy to predict when they would erupt. As soon as they started drinking, typically around lunchtime, they became aggressive and combative, and would then begin to shout and criticise her. To make matters grimmer, Irene’s sister, Ursula, had recently left for a holiday in Dortmund in West Germany with her husband and children. A few days later, she had sent Irene a letter telling her that they would not be coming back, that they wanted to build a new life in the West. Irene felt depressed, unloved and trapped.

  It hadn’t always been like this. She had liked Wolfgang when they’d first met. She had also felt sorry for him. His own mother had died when he was a child and his stepmother would beat him for the slightest transgression. Then, during the war, though still only a young boy, Wolfgang had spent long, noisy, cramped hours, as an anti-aircraft auxiliary. The couple had met eight years after the war’s end at a dance in Potsdam. She was small, pretty, and training to become a nurse. He was a tall and angular young man, with a square chin and an infectious smile. As a builder, he had ample work, given Potsdam’s extensive bomb damage. In 1955, after dating for two years, they married. They were both twenty-one years old.