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The House by the Lake

Page 29

by Thomas Harding


  Realising that it was time to become a little more serious, Marcel moved back home. After living at the house for a little over a year, the party, at least for Marcel, was over. Not long after Marcel left, Roland was dismissed from his apprenticeship. Without a regular source of income the house quickly, deteriorated.

  The stoves fell into disrepair. There was so much rubbish piled up on the floor that it was hard to walk around the house. Roland spent most of his time holed up in his bedroom under the covers. Yet when Marcel visited, often bringing two servings of döner from the kebab shop, he noted that the house was still structurally in good repair. It just needed a good clean-up.

  In early 2003, Roland was visited by representatives of the city of Potsdam’s property department. As the city had officially absorbed the village of Groß Glienicke earlier that year, the house was now their responsibility, they told him. The city planned to redevelop the site, they added. Roland could leave the property voluntarily, or he would be forcibly evicted.

  Roland realised that he had no choice. The house had been fun, but it was time to go. With the help of Marcel and some friends, he bagged all the rubbish in the house and arranged for the local council to pick it up. He sold what furniture he could, packed his belongings, and closed the windows and shutters. Unsure what to do with the front-door keys, he put them on the kitchen shelf, and walked out, leaving the front door unlocked behind him.

  PART V

  PARCEL NUMBER 101/7 AND 101/8

  February 2014

  Once again, I am back in the village. It is a freezing cold midwinter night. My researcher and I are sitting in my rental car next to a floodlit pitch a few hundred metres from the entrance to the Gatow airfield. From the driver’s seat, I can see a group of men chasing a white football across the green artificial turf. We are waiting for the game to finish and, hopefully, if he is willing, for one of the players to talk to us.

  I have known for a while that Roland was the last person to live at the house. But all efforts to locate him have failed. He has refused to respond to my messages on Facebook. A note left at his home address in Groß Glienicke goes unanswered.

  A contact in the village has agreed to speak to Roland on my behalf. I just want to talk, I say. I give the contact my mobile number, and a few days later, I receive a response. Roland is willing to meet. I am given the address of a Greek restaurant and a time. After four hours of waiting I realise he’s not going to show up. His elusiveness makes me wonder if it was Roland who was responsible for the house’s dilapidated condition.

  Now in the car by the football pitch I coach my researcher. ‘When it’s time, just try and get him to talk for two or three minutes,’ I suggest. Still smarting from being kept waiting at the restaurant, my researcher is wary. ‘At the very least we have to establish the basic facts,’ I continue.

  A little while later, the game finishes, and my researcher heads into the cold. From my rear-view mirror I follow her progress. At the mesh fence that encloses the field I see her stop in front of a tall thin man with dark short-cropped hair, wearing a red hoodie, black shorts and boots. I wait anxiously. Will he agree to talk?

  Then they walk together, slowly up the concrete path towards the car park, before stopping underneath a street light. I watch the clock: one minute passes, two minutes, then another. Soon they are beyond five minutes. At ten minutes, Roland’s friends, who have been patiently waiting in a nearby car, honk their horn. The conversation wraps up. It has been eleven minutes in all. Way beyond my expectations.

  My researcher returns to the car, closes the door and blows into her hands. ‘It’s freezing out there,’ she says with a smile. ‘And?’ I ask impatiently. ‘What happened?’ She tells me that Roland was eager to share stories from his time at the house. It is clear, she says, that he loved the place. His years there were the best of his life, he told her.

  At the end of the conversation, she reports, Roland apologised for not replying to our requests. ‘I just never got round to it,’ he told her. He even rejected her offer of fifty euros for his time.

  It has been a year since my first research trip to the family’s house. A year since the civil servants at the city of Potsdam informed me that the house was set to be demolished to make way for new homes.

  Since that time I have become friendly with many of the villagers, recording their testimonies, gathering their memories. I have visited numerous archives in both Potsdam and Berlin. Now, with the help of local historians, I submit an application asking that the state of Brandenburg register the house as a ‘Denkmal’, or protected monument. In my application, I share what I have learned: how the house was first built, the story of those who lived there, the history it has seen.

  A few weeks later I hear word. The specialist from the state of Brandenburg has visited the house but was unimpressed by its construction. Overgrown by trees and bushes, and filled with rubbish as it was, he didn’t enter the property to survey the interior (other members of his team looked inside, he says). In a letter, he explains that there is not enough of the original structure left to warrant preservation and that the house itself is of insufficient interest. Apologising for being the bearer of bad news, he informs us that our application to register the house as a historic monument is rejected.

  Bitterly disappointed, I turn to my friends in the village, asking for their advice. They suggest that I meet with the Groß Glienicker Kreis, the group dedicated to preserving the village’s cultural and natural heritage. Made up of historians, botanists and artists, both professional and amateur, the Kreis had already shown considerable interest in the history of the house (three years earlier, it turns out, they had published a booklet about the history of the Jews in the village).

  A few days later, I am sitting at the dining-room table of the Kreis’s president, Dieter Dargies, along with several of its members. Having explained my efforts, I ask for their support. I am surprised by their response. Not only do they believe the house to be of critical historic significance, but they are willing to work hard to ensure its survival.

  Over coffee and cake we discuss various options. They tell me that it will be hard to overturn the official’s report. To do so, we will have to demonstrate not only that the house has unique value, but the effort to save it has overwhelming community support. It will have to be something persuasive, something extraordinary, something that touches people’s hearts. They suggest we organise a day in which members of my family join with residents of the village to clean up the house and garden. They call this a ‘Clean-up Day’.

  31

  CITY OF POTSDAM

  2003

  BEFORE THE CONVULSIONS of 1989, the local council would have completed some basic renovations in the now vacant house and then offered it to a new tenant. Perhaps it would have gone to a young family like the Kühnes or the Fuhrmanns, or a professional couple like the Meisels or the Alexanders. But this was 2003, and the federal government was too busy restructuring the economy to worry about local housing needs.

  Complicating matters further, the lake house had been built by a Jewish family and seized by the Nazis. Such properties were considered toxic. Intractable problems that were best avoided. For now, nobody took responsibility for the house, known only to the local authority as parcel number 101/7 and 101/8.

  With the property abandoned, it became vulnerable to squatters. Sometime during the winter of 2003, a collection of Russians, or possibly Serbs, moved into the house. Nobody is clear where these people came from, or how they even found the house, considering it was located two hundred metres from the main road and invisible from any public spot.

  When Cordula Munk first spotted the house’s new inhabitants, she contacted the city of Potsdam. It took two or three calls, but eventually the city kicked the squatters out. Inevitably they returned. The winters were cold and the empty house had become an easy place to shelter.

  The squatters, however, had no interest in improving their living conditions. They smash
ed the bathroom sink, upended the bathtub, ripped the boiler off the wall and plugged up the toilet with paper and dried excrement. As a result, the bathroom became totally unusable. Even worse, they broke the glass in the ceiling window, allowing rain to pour into the bathroom. A ghostly trail of black mould started to spread underneath the room’s peeling wallpaper.

  Boys’ Room

  They also destroyed the kitchen. Inge’s washing machine now stood on its side with its door torn off. Dirty crockery was piled in one corner, an orange plastic shopping basket filled with old lamp fixtures in another. The pantry – its shelves lined with yellowed plastic paper dotted with blue and grey seashells – was left bare, save for a couple of pot lids and a flowery teapot.

  The squatters adorned the living-room walls with red and blue graffiti: ‘Fuck you man’ read one; ‘Seku is a wild boar’ declared another. Someone drew a hammer and sickle and the letters YPA1, standing for the Yugoslav People’s Army, onto a piece of drywall and discarded it on the rubbish-strewn floor. The small room next to the fireplace was completely filled with bottles, cans and other detritus.

  Next door, in what had been the spare room, they smashed the window; broken glass now littered the ground, along with various pieces of broken furniture. In a parody of the two-adult, two-children ideal, someone had drawn a sketch showing two stick figures, above which was written ‘Kinder T und K’ – standing next to a house with smoke curling out of its chimney, a little tree and a Trabbi car.

  They transformed the master bedroom into a drug den. Flimsy mattresses, piled high with unzipped sleeping bags, pillows, sofa cushions and clothes, all stained with beer, cheap wine, blood, ash and urine – now lay on the floor. Under the window, a small table stood caked in red, blue, yellow and white melted wax, a clay jar containing cigarette butts and a metal spoon stained by heroin’s oily residue.

  At the back of the cupboard by the front door, three ageing rock stars gazed out from curling posters that had been stuck, probably by Bernd, to the wood panelling. In front of them lay a sea of unpaired shoes, the top half of a plastic Christmas tree, more plastic bottles and scraps of wallpaper.

  In the spring of 2004, following further calls from the neighbours, the city of Potsdam finally took action, nailing rough-cut rectangles of plywood over the windows and doors. They also drained the plumbing and turned off the water supply, winter-proofing the property and preventing the pipes from exploding. Finally, they erected a fence around the property, and installed a wide metal gate marked with a large white ‘Private’ sign.

  32

  CITY OF POTSDAM

  2004

  THE PULSATING ELECTRONIC music and the drunken shouting of lyrics made it impossible to sleep. It sounded like the ruckus was emanating from the lake shore.

  Susanne Grunert, who lived in one of the modern brick homes that had been built next to the lake house, groaned and climbed out of bed. Telling her husband, Volker, that she would find out what was going on, she slipped on some shoes and headed out of the door. The beach parties had almost stopped since Roland had left the previous year, and she had hoped they weren’t going to start up again. She didn’t have a problem with young people enjoying themselves, but she had a meeting early the next morning, and she really needed some sleep.

  Opening the gate that separated her garden from the lake house, she walked down the bank towards the noise, her way illuminated by the light cast by the shoreside fire. Closer now, the lyrics were more distinct, and she was able to catch a few of the words. She heard ‘Germany’, ‘fighting’ and ‘Hitler’. Six bald men, all dressed alike in shiny black leather boots, green army trousers and leather jackets were standing round the fire.

  Seeing her approach, they quickly quietened. She asked them to ‘please keep the noise down’. They grunted their assent and she walked back up the slope to her house. A few minutes later the noise started up, louder than before. Sleep was impossible.

  Now furious, she rose from bed again, determined to put a stop to it. This time she brought her fierce-looking German Shepherd. As she approached from the trees, one of the men called out, ‘Oh, it’s Snow White!’ ‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘and her wolf!’ Seeing the snarling dog, the skinheads packed up their few belongings and staggered south down the shore.

  The next day when Susanne took her dog for a walk along the lakefront, she found white swastikas sprayed along the former border patrol path.

  The Grunerts had first visited Groß Glienicke in April 1999. At the time they were living in Mannheim, in the far west of the country near the French border. Volker had been offered a good job in a Berlin bank – Susanne could run her insurance business from anywhere – and they were looking for a place to live, ideally somewhere with plenty of space for their then one-year-old son and three-year-old daughter. Seeing an advert in the newspaper, they had driven out to the village and were shown the plot next to the lake house. ‘I felt it was a good place to live,’ Susanne later recalled. Working with a Berlin architect, they had built their house quickly, and by the summer of 2000 had moved in. It was close to Berlin and a great place for the family to hike, cycle and run.

  They had been relatively untroubled by Roland and Marcel’s parties, tolerating the noise and the mess of the garden. But they were less happy with the squatters who had moved in after Roland had left. One man in particular scared Susanne. He was tall, emaciated and painfully thin, with a dark brown beard and a tatty plastic bag clasped in his hand. He snuck in late at night, just before dark, and left very early in the morning.

  Like Cordula Munk, who lived on the other side of the abandoned property, the Grunerts had made numerous phone calls to the city. When the squatters had eventually been evicted, they were thankful. Since that time, Volker had observed the neighbour’s increasingly wild yard, which lay on the other side of his fence and only ten metres from their back door. It might benefit from a little attention, he had thought to himself, and, given that the place was abandoned, nobody would complain if his family made use of it.

  Shortly after Susanne’s encounter with the neo-Nazis, Volker took it upon himself to mow the lake house’s lawn. Soon, the family was taking picnics in its garden, letting their dog roam freely through the overgrown vegetable patch, walking down to the shore for dips in the lake.

  When he was four years old, the Grunerts’ son, Chris, was given a mini-motorbike – a Yamaha PV50. All he needed now was a circuit. Before long, Volker was clearing the steep bank between the lake house and the shore. Once the ground was free of bushes, trees and other obstacles, he watched as Chris learned to drive up and down the steep, muddy circuit. When he had mastered the loop, Chris and Volker added ramps1, jumps and other obstacles. The slope between the shuttered little wooden house and the lake was perfect for their off-road tricks. Over time, the tall metal gate between the two properties, made as it was from fencing reused from the Berlin Wall, was left permanently open. The garden next door had, in effect, become the Grunerts’ playground.

  On at least one occasion, Cordula Munk looked over her fence and saw the Grunerts’ son practising. ‘Stop this,’ she shouted. ‘This isn’t your property, it’s the Alexanders’.’ When Chris ran to his mother and said that Cordula had yelled at him, the two neighbours held an impromptu meeting in the no-man’s-land of parcel number 101/7 and 101/8. Susanne said that Cordula shouldn’t yell at her kids. Cordula said that she was being antisocial and that her kids shouldn’t be playing on land that wasn’t theirs.

  From that day forward the two avoided each other. Thinking that his family could benefit from the additional space, and that it might be a sensible long-term investment, Volker approached the city of Potsdam to ask if he could buy the land. He was told that it would be impossible, given that the owner of the property was unknown. Despite the city’s rejection, and the argument with the neighbour, he continued to mow the grass and to use the property for his garden furniture.

  The house itself remained untouched. It was around this time
that a new tenant moved onto the plot: a red fox who had found a way into the brick cellar through a crack in the foundation. There she gave birth to a litter of seven, emerging at night to scavenge, eager to feed her cubs, seemingly happy to have found a hideaway away from humans and their disturbances.

  Nature now took over the abandoned house.

  The vixen and her family continued to live in the cellar. A pair of raccoons moved into Wolfgang’s decrepit garage. From time to time, an owl perched on a high leafless branch of the dead silver birch, which threatened to fall onto the house.

  The flat ground between the house and the Potsdamer Tor became a meadow, filled with tall wild flowers and grasses. Ash-leaved maples and black locust trees spread across the slope beneath the house, reclaiming the thirty-metre-wide swathe that the border patrol guards had cut down forty years earlier. Their long branches now blocked off the view of the lake, their roots criss-crossing the stairs that had once so neatly led down to the shore. The brickwork to the rear of the house buckled with tree roots. Ivy snaked its way up the corners and into the gutters.

  Tree growing through bricks next to the lake house

  The lake house began to fall apart. The shutters’ rich orange paint was pale and stained, its surface cracked and flaking. The diamond patterns were now so faded that they were visible only from a certain angle. The paint on the soffit, which ran under the narrow eaves, bubbled up and peeled off, exposing the soft raw wood underneath. The pointing in the three chimneys installed by Wolfgang in the 1960s began to crumble. The roof, untended for more than a decade, cracked and was vulnerable to the winter storms. When it rained, a torrent of water funnelled from the rusted gutters into the foundations, and during cold periods formed an upside-down mountain range of jagged icicles.

 

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