Will Meisel never saw this reply, however; nor did he visit the lake house again. For in April 1967, he caught an infection while attending a spa at Badenweiler, near the French border. He was taken to Müllheim Hospital but died from a stroke on Saturday 29 April4. He was sixty-nine years old.
The family was shocked by his death, for Will had appeared so healthy and had continued working until the very end. His wife and sons had been planning an extravagant seventieth birthday party for him that September.
The national newspapers carried effervescent obituaries that celebrated the great composer’s life. They listed his most famous songs, many of whose melodies people could still hum, if not sing, by heart. Yet their father’s death did not dampen his sons’ drive5. Over the next few years, they continued to publish Edition Meisel’s still popular back catalogue from the 1930s, 40s and 50s. At the same time, they nurtured and promoted new artists through the recording side of the company. At the German Song Contest in 1968, Meisel’s artists won each of the top six places. A year later, another of their artists, Giorgio Moroder, released ‘Looky Looky’, which went gold in France, Italy and Brazil. Soon they were attracting world-class acts, including Elton John, the Troggs, Boney M and Donna Summer. It wasn’t long before the Meisel Group was representing songs as varied as ‘Stand By Your Man’, ‘Sugar Sugar’ and ‘Rocky’, distributing the Beatles’ catalogue in Germany, and recording superstars such as David Bowie.
They had fulfilled their father’s wishes, except for one thing, to get back the old lake house. This is how, a little over a year after the Wall came down, fifty-five-year-old Peter Meisel found himself knocking on the front door of the house in Groß Glienicke. Peter explained to a startled Wolfgang and Inge Kühne that he was the son of Will Meisel, the former owner of the house, and said that he had spent many happy weekends and summers here as a boy. Peter said that the property was his, and that he wanted to tear it down and build a larger house in its place. A country retreat, he said, just like it was for my father. Promising Wolfgang employment in the West, Peter Meisel repeated his claim: ‘It all belongs to me.’
Leaving a card with the visibly shaken Kühnes, Peter Meisel walked down the road to the house of Burkhard Radtke, the boy he had played with at the lake all those years before. After a brief catch-up, Peter asked if Burkhard would be willing to sign an affidavit swearing that the Meisels had purchased the house and were the rightful owners. Baulking at the request, Burkhard said it was not how he remembered it. Hadn’t the Alexanders built the house, only to have it stolen from them by the Nazis?
Disappointed that he wasn’t walking away with a statement of support, Peter returned to West Berlin and, a short while later, instructed his lawyer to explore ways of repossessing the house. After all, his family’s purchase of the property from the state, including the land, building and furniture, was well documented. Their property had been unjustly seized, without recompense, by the DDR. It was only fair that the property be returned or, at the very least, that they be compensated.
The Meisels, however, were not the only family to make a claim on the house following German reunification. In the early 1990s, a lawyer lodged a claim on behalf of the Wollank family, arguing that their estate had been illegally repossessed in 1939. Included in their claim was the land under the lake house.
After Otto and Dorothea von Wollank’s tragic deaths and the estate’s forfeiture to the authorities, the Wollanks were now much diminished. The few heirs who remained had moved away from the area to rebuild their fortunes. Their case was quickly dismissed, however: the courts ruling that they had lost their estate through mismanagement. This was no cause for a claim under German law.
The spring of 1991 also saw the arrival in Groß Glienicke of Cordula Munk, the granddaughter of Professor Fritz Munk, a teacher who had lived in West Berlin all her life.
Born in 1944, Cordula had only the faintest memories of her family’s weekend house. Her parents told her that she had learned to crawl in the Groß Glienicke front garden, but of this she had no recollection. Her father and uncle had advised against her visiting;6 the house for them was irredeemably coloured by its dark history.
Parking next to the Potsdamer Tor, Cordula pushed through a gate and walked along the top section of her family’s lot. There she discovered four men living in little shacks, each no more than 4 × 4 metres wide. They were former border patrol guards, they told her, now jobless and otherwise homeless. Once she had explained her purpose, she walked towards the lake, eager to see the Munks’ old family house.
All she found of the old wooden cottage were a few yellow ceramic tiles from the kitchen, scattered and half-buried in the ground. She and the rest of her family had known about the fire from a newspaper article they had been sent by friends in the village, but she was surprised at the extent of the damage. Nothing of the house remained. The old lime tree was still there, however, now grown so big that someone had built a rickety tree house in its branches. There was rubbish everywhere – old tyres, abandoned building materials, plastic bags – and the garden was wildly overgrown.
Seeing a stranger next door, Wolfgang Kühne walked over to Cordula. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’ Cordula smiled and joked, ‘It’s OK, I know who owns this land!’
Having explained who she was, Cordula listened carefully as Wolfgang described the chimney-flue fire of 1970, about how slow the fire brigade had been to arrive, and how the Kühnes had watched distraught as the fire destroyed the Munks’ house.
Cordula was conflicted, heartbroken that the old house had burned down but also relieved. With nobody living in the house, it would be far easier to regain control of the property.
Back in Berlin she made a decision: she would build a new cottage in Groß Glienicke. Nothing too fancy; perhaps a small wooden house, like her grandfather’s. As to the four ex-border guards, and their huts at the front of the land, they could live there as long as they chose. She wouldn’t feel right throwing them off the land. The plot was big enough to share, so long as they allowed her to live in peace and quiet by the lake. They could be her tenants.
In the summer of 1991, almost two years after the first East Berliners had broken through the Wall and thirty years since he had first been woken by the sound of building work, Wolfgang once again heard the heavy rumble of mechanised wheels from the lake’s shore. Whilst the Wall had been torn down in Berlin’s city centre over a year before, much remained standing in remote villages such as Groß Glienicke, away from the lenses of the foreign media.
First the inner wall, nearest the house, was pulled down. The concrete fragments, now shattered and in pieces, were loaded onto dumper trucks and removed to Berlin, where they were heaped onto a massive pile that had been formed from the remains of the former Wall.
Next came the lamp posts, the watchtowers and the tripwires in the death strip. Each was methodically demolished, taking care not to harm any nearby building or injure any tree. The workmen then addressed the most intimidating of all the security structures, the high wall that ran along the lake’s edge. Reaching three and a half metres from the ground, the diggers pulled at the long horizontal concrete tubes from the top of the barrier. Each section thudded noisily to the mud below, forming a neat row of unconnected tubes, as if a gas pipeline was about to be laid. Once the tubes had been removed, the bulldozers set about dismantling the remaining wall. Surprisingly little force was needed. With its jaw clamped tightly onto the top of the wall, the machine hoisted the concrete panels vertically from the ground in three-metre-long sections. Beyond the outer wall, the workmen found a line of sharp metal spikes, as well as bundles of barbed wire, long rusted in the lake’s water, that had been pushed in after the first fence had been replaced in the 1950s.
Soon all that remained of the Berlin Wall was the narrow concrete border patrol path, which wound along the entire length of the Groß Glienicke Lake. Someone in authority had decided to leave it, perhaps as a reminder of the surveill
ance and security measures that had until recently dominated the village and the people who lived here.
All that remained of the lake house’s garden – the elegant terraced embankment, the cascade of steps, the pump house, the tennis court, the ornamental pond and the jetty – was a roughly landscaped slope, overgrown with brambles and thorny shrubs, a thirty-metre-wide strip of barren, wheel-rutted and muddy land, a small cluster of thin-trunked birch trees that hugged the edge of the lake, and then the lake itself: unchanging, calm, full of potential.
View of the house from the lake shore, 1990s
In the weeks and months that followed the Wall’s removal, the fog of euphoria gradually cleared. For many, the young mainly, the most immediate effect was that they could now travel to West Berlin, where they hoped to find new and better paid jobs, and diverse opportunities. For the rest, the older generations mostly, the impact was less dramatic.
Following the merger with West Germany, the DDR-era stores – Konsum and HO – that had served Groß Glienicke for more than three decades, closed down, unable to compete with the quality and range of items offered by those in West Berlin. In their place new shops appeared: a bakery selling French pastries and cappuccinos, a supermarket offering eight types of cereal as well as high-quality steak, two cafes, a Greek restaurant and a kebab shop. Equally significant, buses started to run again, taking villagers from the stop next to the Potsdamer Tor to Spandau, from where the passengers took an S-Bahn into the centre of Berlin.
Shortly after the Wall came down, the village experienced another loss when the Badewiese burned to the ground. It had been a cultural icon for over fifty years, providing a venue for many of the village’s most memorable social events. The official cause of the fire was never determined, though many suspected the owners of arson in an attempt to claim the insurance money.
More pressing was the spike in unemployment. Once the DDR collapsed, hundreds of villagers discovered that they were without jobs. The Max Reimann car parts factory, the border patrol barracks and the Stasi conference centre were closed. The villagers who worked at the government-subsidised companies in Potsdam, East Berlin and surrounding towns and villages also lost their jobs. Those retaining their jobs discovered that their work lives were profoundly altered. Unions were frowned upon, longer working hours were expected, and retraining was often required, something that the young quickly embraced, but the more mature workers both struggled with and found demeaning.
Worse still, many of the benefits of living in the DDR suddenly disappeared. Where working parents had previously enjoyed free childcare, many now had to pay. Anyone deemed ineligible for social welfare was obliged to pay for health insurance. And now that it was no longer subsidised by the government, the cost of food increased, with dramatic hikes for even the simplest items, such as potatoes and rice.
With its beautiful surroundings, proximity to Berlin, and relatively cheap housing stock, Groß Glienicke soon became known as an attractive place to live. As a result, the population quickly rose. Before long, over three thousand people were living in the village. Most of the newcomers had been born in West Germany or West Berlin. These new residents either settled into houses that had been quickly erected following the fall of the Wall, or reclaimed homes lost when Germany had been partitioned.
As part of the reunification treaty, which came into effect on 3 October 1990, it was agreed that property that had been expropriated during the DDR period would undergo a process of Rückübertragung, or retransmission. Seized land would be either returned to its previous owners, or they would be offered compensation. In practice, there were many exceptions. If the property had been sold fairly, or if the seizure had been in the public interest, then the current property owner might avoid retransmission. Most significantly, assets that had been confiscated during the Soviet occupation – between 8 May 1945 and 6 October 1949 – would not be returned. In these post-war years 3.3 million hectares of land had been redistributed, amounting to almost a third of the entire country.
In Groß Glienicke, numerous families were forced to give up their homes, often to families far wealthier than themselves, who would use the houses as holiday retreats. Some were able to delay their departure, claiming tenants’ rights, but even then DDR rents had typically been far lower than market rates in the West, and once landlords had increased the payments accordingly, most could not afford to stay. From the Westerners’ perspective, the houses were theirs, and while the tenants had benefited from decades of subsidised rent, they believed that they had every right to reoccupy their own homes. Given the housing shortages, many DDR residents unable to remain in their homes moved out of the village.
Following reunification, the villagers also found themselves with an unexpected leader. The local Social Democratic Party (SPD), whom many had expected to be elected to office, became distracted by internecine battles. Into this vacuum stepped the party which for fifty years had governed the DDR, now renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). Although it was able to muster only 2 per cent in the polls nationally, in Groß Glienicke the PDS thrived. Supported by many of the troops who had previously worked on the border, they had put forward a young candidate who articulated the ill feeling held by many in the village, frustrated about the changes that had taken place since the Wall had come down. His election pledge was that he would ‘shelter’ the village from the West and all the unwanted changes. That was how in 1994, Peter Kaminski, the former border regiment major, became the mayor of Groß Glienicke.
One of Kaminski’s first acts was to announce that the border patrol path that had previously run along the Wall would now be open to the public7. Of course, the owners of the lakefront houses had hoped that, following reunification, their houses would be reunited with the land that ran down to the shore. Now they would have to contend with cyclists and walkers, instead of border guards and military vehicles. The Wall had gone but, in Groß Glienicke at least, divisions remained.
29
KÜHNE
1993
ON A COLD April morning in 1993, a commanding voice could be heard from the end of the lake house garden. Walking down the sandy lane, past abandoned washing machines, tyres and broken furniture, came Elsie Harding.
She was wearing a black mink coat, a black-and-white scarf, thick black trousers and black pumps. Her curly white hair was cropped short and her lips were painted a bright red. In one hand she held a lit cigarette and in the other a black leather handbag. She was accompanied by six of her grandchildren1, all wearing long coats, woolly hats and scarves, one of whom was recording their arrival on a small video camera. As they approached the cottage, Wolfgang’s dog, Rex, barked loudly. A few seconds later, Wolfgang appeared, wearing blue work overalls, a thick woollen sweater and a fluffy Russian hat.
‘Good morning!’ said Elsie, in perfect German. ‘I have come to show my grandchildren where we once lived. We don’t want the house back or anything’.
‘This house is yours?’ asked Wolfgang.
‘Yes, this was our house …’ replied Elsie.
‘Are you one of the Alexanders?’ interrupted Wolfgang, his voice rising with excitement.
‘Yes, that’s right,’ said Elsie, handing him a large bottle of whisky.
‘Come in, everyone, come in, please,’ said Wolfgang, opening the gate and ushering Elsie and her family towards a front door with a diamond-shaped window.
It had been twenty years since Elsie’s previous attempt to visit the house, an attempt thwarted by the Wall and its security restrictions. Her husband Erich had sadly died of a heart attack in 1981 but, indomitable as ever, she had soon returned to work2, guiding German tourists around Britain’s castles and cathedrals, chain-smoking, recounting the island’s democratic and fair-minded values and, when she saw fit, letting her elderly clients off the bus for a toilet break. She had spent the following years by herself in a north London third-floor flat across the street from the house in which Sigmund Freud had lived, cultivating
her terrace garden and her memories on her days off.
Then in January 1990, Elsie received a surprising letter in the post. Her childhood sweetheart, Rolf Gerber, had invited her to visit him in South Africa. Rolf’s wife, Ruth, had died of lung cancer a few months earlier, and with his own health now failing, he was eager to see Elsie again. A few days after arriving, Elsie had moved into his house in Cape Town. After almost sixty years apart their relationship resumed from where it had left off in Berlin.
They now had time to catch up, quiet moments in which they talked about the old days, and shared their feelings for each other. He remembered the lovely times he’d had with the Alexanders in Glienicke in the 1930s. She told him proudly about the accomplishments of her children and grandchildren. They took walks together, visited museums and restaurants, and when Rolf grew too ill to leave his bed, Elsie sat by his side, reading stories, talking about the news of the day. During this time, Elsie returned home, to see her family in London. But, before long, she was back in Cape Town.
Rolf’s daughter Betty was glad that Elsie was there. ‘She really cared about him,’ she later recalled, ‘and he was very fond of her.’ Elsie kept him company, ensured he wore a jersey when he needed one, and that he had the food he liked to eat. ‘Thank God for Elsie, that’s all I can say,’ said Betty. Finally, the doctors wanted to move him to the hospital but Betty wouldn’t allow it. Elsie was in the house and supported Betty’s decision. Still conscious, though now in considerable pain and waning fast, Rolf retained his sense of humour. ‘I had a wonderful life,’ he said. ‘They put dogs down, why not me?’
Elsie was at his bedside when, on 17 January 1993, Rolf died. A few days later, her daughter, Vivien, flew out to South Africa to be with her mother. The memorial service was held at the Cape Town Reform synagogue. Elsie sat with Rolf’s family.
The House by the Lake Page 27
