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The House by the Lake

One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History
Sep 19, 2016
The Alexander family built, in 1927, a modest lake home near Potsdam, outside Berlin, as a weekend retreat. Their grandson, a British journalist, revisits it in recent years, finding it abandoned and ready for demolition. His book looks at those who lived there, but more interesting, writes a history of a small community just outside the Berlin Wall after World War II. Reading this book is wonderful social history. It reminded me of a book read a few years back, Simon Mawer’s 'The Glass Room,' which tells the stories of those who built and lived in Villa Tugendhat, designed by Mies van der Rohe, in Brno in the Czech Republic. Theirs is a story, like the Alexanders, of a Jewish family who had to abandon so much that they loved to escape the Nazis.