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The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History
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Published:
Picador 2016
Status:
Available from OverDrive
Description

A Finalist for the Costa Biography Award
Longlisted for the Orwell Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by
The Times (London)

  • New Statesman (London)
  • Daily Express (London)
  • Commonweal magazine
    In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been her "soul place," she said—a holiday home for her and her family, but also a refuge—until the 1930s, when the Nazis' rise to power forced them to leave.
    The trip was his grandmother's chance to remember her childhood sanctuary as it was. But the house had changed, and when Harding returned once again nearly twenty years later, it was about to be demolished. It now belonged to the government, and as Harding began to inquire about whether the house could be saved, he unearthed secrets that had lain hidden for decades. Slowly he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived there: a wealthy landowner, a prosperous Jewish family, a renowned composer, a widow and her children, a Stasi informant. All had made the house their home, and all but one had been forced out.
    The house had weathered storms, fires and abandonment, witnessed violence, betrayals and murders, and had withstood the trauma of a world war and the dividing of a nation. Breathtaking in scope and intimate in its detail, The House by the Lake is a groundbreaking and revelatory new history of Germany, told over a tumultuous century through the story of a small wooden house.

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    Format:
    Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read
    Street Date:
    07/05/2016
    Language:
    English
    ISBN:
    9781250065087
    ASIN:
    B0140NXXSI
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    Citations
    APA Citation (style guide)

    Thomas Harding. (2016). The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History. Picador.

    Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)

    Thomas Harding. 2016. The House By the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History. Picador.

    Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)

    Thomas Harding, The House By the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History. Picador, 2016.

    MLA Citation (style guide)

    Thomas Harding. The House By the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History. Picador, 2016.

    Note! Citation formats are based on standards as of July 2022. Citations contain only title, author, edition, publisher, and year published. Citations should be used as a guideline and should be double checked for accuracy.
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        • bioText: THOMAS HARDING is an author and journalist who has written for the Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, among other publications. He is the author of The House by the Lake (which was a shortlisted for the 2015 Costa Biography Award) and the #1 international bestselling book Hanns and Rudolf (which won the 2015 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, was shortlisted for the 2013 Costa Biography Award, and has been translated into many languages). He lives in Hampshire, England.
        • name: Thomas Harding
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    A Finalist for the Costa Biography Award
    Longlisted for the Orwell Prize
    Named a Best Book of the Year by
    The Times (London)

  • New Statesman (London)
  • Daily Express (London)
  • Commonweal magazine
    In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been her "soul place," she said—a holiday home for her and her family, but also a refuge—until the 1930s, when the Nazis' rise to power forced them to leave.
    The trip was his grandmother's chance to remember her childhood sanctuary as it was. But the house had changed, and when Harding returned once again nearly twenty years later, it was about to be demolished. It now belonged to the government, and as Harding began to inquire about whether the house could be saved, he unearthed secrets that had lain hidden for decades. Slowly he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived there: a wealthy landowner, a prosperous Jewish family, a renowned composer, a widow and her children, a Stasi informant. All had made the house their home, and all but one had been forced out.
    The house had weathered storms, fires and abandonment, witnessed violence, betrayals and murders, and had withstood the trauma of a world war and the dividing of a nation. Breathtaking in scope and intimate in its detail, The House by the Lake is a groundbreaking and revelatory new history of Germany, told over a tumultuous century through the story of a small wooden house.

  • reviews
        • premium: False
        • source: Financial Times
        • content:

          "A fascinating window on a tumultuous period."

        • premium: False
        • source: The Sunday Times (London)
        • content: "By tracing the lives of the different families who lived there, Harding sheds fresh light on the German 20th century, a tale of war, spies, murder and political, racial and social division. His account of the house is a superb work of social history, told with tremendous narrative verve."
        • premium: False
        • source: Clare Mulley, The Spectator (UK)
        • content: "This is a history that is often poignant, sometimes heartening, and never other than intimate... This is a gentle but rewarding book, carefully tuned into the marginal voices recorded in the history of one small house by a lake."
        • premium: False
        • source: Sunday Express (UK)
        • content: "Diamond-brilliant... If a webcam had been left on at number 101 Gross Glienicke for 90 years, the record could not have been more vivid or revelatory. Harding's research, from eyewitness accounts to the files of ministries, is jaw-dropping. This is an extraordinary book. Five Stars."
        • premium: False
        • source: Adam Kirsch, The New Statesman
        • content: "This emblem of tyranny [the Berlin Wall] was just another fact of life for those living in its shadow. And that is, perhaps, the most important lesson of Harding's book. History, which we learn about as a series of ideological abstractions, is lived concretely. This is why an ordinary house can serve so effectively as a symbol of the German experience."
        • premium: True
        • source: Publisher's Weekly
        • content:

          October 31, 2016
          Harding (Hanns and Rudolf), a British-American journalist and nonfiction writer, profiles five diverse families that over the course of nearly a century either owned or rented a single house on the outskirts of Berlin. Harding uses these families—the Wollanks, the Alexanders (Harding's ancestors), the Meisels, the Fuhrmanns, and the Kühns—as a prism through which to look at the history of 20th- and early 21st-century Germany. Given his Jewish family's experience, he pays particular attention to the house and the town in which it was situated, Grosß Glienicke, during WWII—French POWs were housed there, and Soviet forces subjected the town's women to mass rape in 1945—and in the Cold War, when the house and town were located in East Germany. Harding notes how the town prospered after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but the house itself fell into disrepair, housing squatters until Harding and his family, as well as some locals, made an effort to clean and reconstruct it. Harding's well-written, thoroughly researched work brings a long period of German history down to a local, human scale. Maps & illus. Agent: Patrick Walsh, PEW Literary.

        • premium: True
        • source: Kirkus
        • content:

          May 15, 2016
          The inhabitants of a summer house reveal Germany's political, economic, and social history.In 2013, journalist and biographer Harding (Hanns and Rudolf: The True Story of the German Jew Who Tracked Down and Caught the Kommandant of Auschwitz, 2013) traveled to the lakeside vacation home outside Berlin where his grandmother had spent a bucolic childhood. He was shocked by its condition: abandoned, in disrepair, its roof cracked, its chimneys crumbling, the once-beloved refuge was in possession of the city of Potsdam, scheduled for demolition. The only way to save it, he learned, was to "prove that it was culturally and historically significant." Harding's efforts to amass that proof have resulted in a well-researched, intermittently interesting overview of 20th-century German history, focused on five families who lived in the house. In the 1890s, Otto Wollank, a wealthy businessman, bought the property, adding to his already large holdings in Berlin. In 1927, his son-in-law, an early Nazi supporter, leased part of the land to Harding's great-grandfather Alfred Alexander, a prominent Jewish physician. After the Nazis took power, the Alexanders--including their daughter, who became Harding's grandmother--reluctantly fled to London. Although the author claims that "virulent nationalism and anti-Semitism...[were] a rarity in the Germany of 1929," he concedes that Jews could not serve in the army, secure a university professorship, or hold other state positions without converting to Christianity. The story he tells of Nazi persecution of Jews is, sadly, familiar. After the war, the house's residents included a working-class family whose access to the lake was cut off by the Berlin Wall. Surprisingly, Hardings' relatives responded with hostility to his pleas to claim and restore the house, eventually giving in and participating in a cleanup day. The house was saved, and Harding asks readers to contribute to its restoration. A personal and imaginative yet overlong perspective on German history.

          COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

        • premium: True
        • source: Library Journal
        • content:

          May 15, 2016

          Journalist Harding (Hanns and Rudolf) provides an absorbing account of a century of German history as it relates to a modest home located by a picturesque lake on the outskirts of Berlin. The author, who grew up in England, heard tales throughout his childhood of this beloved dwelling built in the early 20th century by his great-grandparents. In 2013, he visited the cottage and was saddened to find the building derelict and scheduled for demolition by the local government. In an attempt to save the structure, Harding decided to chronicle what happened to the house after his relatives were forced to flee owing to Nazi persecution in the days before World War II. Interviews with local townspeople and tenacious records research disclosed the stories of the house's residents who arrived after his kinfolk left. Remarkably, during the Cold War, a portion of the Berlin Wall was constructed right next to the property--thus placing the house on the communist side of the divided country. Works such as Christopher Hilton's The Wall have told how the division of Germany affected everyday life. VERDICT This personal saga centered on a family home will appeal to enthusiasts of German history, especially post-World War II division and reunification.--Mary Jennings, Camano Island Lib., WA

          Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

        • premium: True
        • source: Booklist
        • content:

          June 1, 2016
          Harding visits his family's former house, on a lake near Potsdam and Berlin. His middle-class Jewish ancestorsdoctors, lawyers, journalistslived in the house until they were forced by the Nazis to emigrate. For a long time, Albert Alexander, the author's great-grandfather, held out, like many Jews, believing the Nazi threat would subside. Harding recounts not only his family's story but also those of the others who inhabited the beautiful country house, most notably composer (and one-time member of the Nazi party) Will Meisel and, later, secret police informant Wolfgang Kuhne. In doing so, he also traces the complicated German history of the mid- and late-twentieth century. During the Cold War, ironically, the Berlin Wall separated the lake house from the lake; the house's destruction in 1989 and its aftermath provide the most dramatic sections of the book. Some may find the extensive detail supplied about the house and its owners a bit overwhelming, but the overarching notion of using a building to trace a family's and a country's troubled history is affecting and even, at times, inspirational.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

        • premium: True
        • source: Publisher's Weekly
        • content:

          July 13, 2020
          Harding adapts his adult memoir of the same name for younger readers, tracing the shadow of war as it falls across a one-story cottage and the people who share it. Harding’s great-grandfather built the house on the shores of a lake outside Berlin, where he lived contentedly with his wife and children before WWII: “The days went around like a wheel,” Harding writes. Eventually, “angry men”—Nazis—seize the house and expel the family. Other tenants arrive, then flee. Then “a man with a fluffy hat” occupies the house, and the wall that divides West from East Germany is erected through the backyard, “with tall towers and bright lights and barking dogs.” After the wall comes down and the man dies, time and nature take over. Decades later, Harding restores the house as a memorial to his great-grandparents, discussed in back matter. Ethereal collages by Teckentrup (My Little Book of Big Questions) capture the house’s clean lines; the light-filled summer foliage around it; and the grim, gray tones of war. Younger readers unfamiliar with the history of WWII and 20th-century Germany can meet them here at a safe, albeit uncontextualized, distance. Ages 7–10.

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    A Finalist for the Costa Biography Award
    Longlisted for the Orwell Prize
    Named a Best Book of the Year by
    The Times (London)

  • New Statesman (London)
  • Daily Express (London)
  • Commonweal magazine
    In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been her "soul place," she said—a holiday home for her and her family, but also a refuge—until the 1930s, when the Nazis' rise to power forced them to leave.
    The trip was his grandmother's chance to remember her childhood sanctuary as it was. But the house had changed, and when Harding returned once again nearly twenty years later, it was about to be demolished. It now belonged to the government, and as Harding began to inquire about whether the house could be saved, he unearthed secrets that had lain hidden for decades. Slowly he began to piece together...
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