The House by the Lake

by Thomas Harding

  The village seemed small to Alfred, a place from another time with its modest houses, stone barns and medieval church, so different from the tall apartment buildings, busy streets and sophisticated shops of western Berlin. From the village’s centre, he turned left at the fire station, went under the Potsdamer Tor, and parked a few metres down a dirt road. There they were met by an estate manager.

  The parcel of land that the manager showed them was rectangular in shape, thirty metres wide, running for two hundred metres from the outer wall of the Potsdamer Tor downhill to the shore of the Groß Glienicke Lake. It was a long narrow strip that was big enough to provide privacy, but small enough to be manageable. In all, there were three sections: a high flat area that had been part of the old vineyard, filled with twisted vines and bent trellises, which ran for about 150 metres and ended on a bluff overlooking the lake; a slope which dropped almost vertically, covered with stones and wild trees; and finally a flat sandy area at the bottom, twenty-five metres in length, where black alder and willow trees grew. Best of all was the lake, at the foot of the lot.

  Having stopped for a while to enjoy the view from the top of the bluff overlooking the lake, the Alexanders clambered down to the water. The lake was small, but it would be a wonderful place to swim in the summer. To the left, they could see the schloss, barely visible through the trees. To the right, at the lake’s centre, were two small islands covered with trees. If they had a boat, they could paddle out to them, and perhaps even camp.

  Groß Glienicke Lake

  Alfred John Alexander had started well enough. On 7 March 1880, he was born in Bamberg, a picturesque Bavarian town located on the banks of the Regnitz River in central Germany. His family was middle class, made up of doctors and lawyers. They were well regarded in the community, honest, hard-working, and were frequent attendees at the town’s synagogue.

  Despite this, Alfred’s early years marked him with a melancholia that he was never quite able to shake. When he was five years old his sister Paula had died of pneumonia. A few months later, shortly before Christmas 1885, he learned that his forty-four-year-old father, Hermann, had died of leukaemia. The next day Alfred was taken to see his mother, Bella. Her chestnut-coloured hair had turned white even though she was only thirty years old.

  Alfred was a kind but serious boy without a sense of humour. He worked hard at school, frequently gaining marks that put him top of the class. He was also sensitive, prone to crying at the smallest provocation, whether it was another child hurting him or a particularly beautiful piece of music. Above all else, he was desperate for his mother’s approval, and when she displayed her pride in the boy he was at his happiest.

  At the age of fifteen Alfred announced to his mother that he intended to become a doctor and find a cure for his father’s disease, leukaemia. Laudable as this was, his mother was disappointed. It was her intention that he would study to become a lawyer, like his father. When Alfred persisted, his mother asked her father and brothers to persuade him, but they were unable to change the boy’s mind. Reluctantly, she finally gave Alfred her blessing when he was seventeen, but, he later recalled, with one condition: ‘Promise me that you will be a good doctor!’ she said. By good doctor she had meant someone at the top of his profession, who works in general practice rather than research, and who helps all patients, no matter their financial status.

  So it was that, upon graduating from school, Alfred went on to study medicine at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin and then at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Of medium height, with wide shoulders, thick lips, dark curly hair and a narrow moustache, Alfred was not unpleasant to look at, though his intense gaze and serious demeanour proved to be a deterrent for most women.

  He worked hard and passed the first Physicum exam with top marks and completed his final Staatsexamen within three years. Bella was delighted with her ‘wunderkind’ son, and at 10.45 in the morning on 19 June 1903 a telegram arrived for Alfred at the Munich telegraph office:

  CONGRATULATIONS ON THIS JOYFUL SURPRISE, WARMEST GREETINGS – MAMA.

  Once qualified, Alfred took a job in Odelzhausen, a small town located fifty kilometres north-west of Munich, where he began his scientific research which he hoped might lead to the cure for leukaemia. As soon as he received his first pay cheque he handed his earnings over to his mother. Two years later, in 1905, the young Dr Alfred Alexander was offered the prestigious job as first assistant to the director of the Freiberg University Hospital. There was one stipulation: in order to accept the position Alfred was told that he must convert to Christianity. His only alternative was to take an inferior position with a far lower salary in Berlin. He took the Berlin job.

  The following year, Bella was struck down by severe heart and asthma attacks. She was fifty-one years old, and when Alfred heard the news he asked his supervisor for compassionate leave and hurried to his mother’s side. He was shocked by her condition: her breaths came in short gulps, her chest was gripped by pain, and she was profoundly weak. Having seen his mother, he went in search of her physicians, Dr Guntzberg, who he did not know well, and Dr Julius Kahn, who he had known for some time and trusted. Asking about his mother’s prognosis he was told that she was beyond hope. A few days later, his mother begged him for help. In his private memoirs Alfred later wrote:

  I put it to her medical advisers whether there was a chance of prolonging her life, which to me was the most precious thing on earth; but they merely shrugged their shoulders. Then I knew what I had to do. The love and gratitude which I felt for this wonderful woman and mother prompted me to beg my friend Julius Kahn to administer morphine, which I knew, on the basis of medical opinion of the time, would not only ease her pain but also end her life.

  Dr Guntzberg was outraged by this ‘damaging’ suggestion, but Julius Kahn gave her the injection which calmed her down very quickly and before long she went to sleep without suffering pain any longer. She looked at me in a way I shall never forget and said: ‘Thank you, dear boy.’ These were her last words, and though her death was a heavy blow for me, I have never regretted having made that decision and I am today even more grateful to my dear friend Julius Kahn. There was no possible way to save her, but I was able to tell myself that she died painlessly through an act of euthanasia. With her passing a most wonderful woman left this world.

  After his mother’s death1, Alfred resolved to give up his scientific research, and become the ‘good doctor’ his mother had wished. He returned to Berlin and began building a general practice. Three years later, in 1909, Alfred met Henny Picard during a visit to Frankfurt. Henny was a buxom woman with a round face and strong arms, who, though never slim or fashionable, cast an attractive figure with her sharp sense of humour and a sparkle in her eye. Where Alfred came from a middle-class family of doctors and lawyers, Henny was descended from two of Europe’s most successful Jewish families: her father, Lucien Picard, was a highly respected banker, a director for Commerz Bank, and the Swiss Consul in Frankfurt; her mother, Amelia, was a Schwarzschild, one of the most powerful Jewish families in Frankfurt, second only to the Rothschilds.

  Alfred and Henny fell immediately in love and, despite her concerns about his dark moods, they were married just months after meeting, after which Henny moved into Alfred’s small bachelor pad on the busy shopping street of Kurfürstendamm. A year later, she became pregnant, and the Alexanders moved round the corner to a large apartment which took up the entire first floor of 219/220 Kaiserallee, today called Bundesallee, one of the smartest addresses in western Berlin. The apartment had twenty-two rooms, including five bedrooms, three living rooms, one bathroom, two rooms for the maids and a large kitchen. The front room was the width of the whole apartment, large enough to comfortably seat forty people for dinner, and had two balconies overlooking the Kaiserallee.

  Then, on 18 March 1911, they had their first child, whom they named Bella after Alfred’s much-loved mother. Some twenty months later, on 3 December 1912, a second child was born,
whom they called Elsie. With Alfred working hard tending his patients and building his practice, Henny spent time with the children, establishing a home for the growing family. Soon she was managing a large staff, including a maid, a cook, a cleaner, a chauffeur, and even a man who came once a week to wind up the clocks.

  Despite her affluent upbringing, Henny remained an unspoilt, modest and self-possessed woman who exerted a calming influence on her more tempestuous husband. As Alfred wrote in his memoirs:

  My dear mother would have certainly approved of you and would, had she known you, given us her blessing. You are so very much like her in many ways, in your lovely eyes, your smile and in your whole being – that kindly understanding, this readiness to be of help not only to your family but to all who turn to you for assistance. You have such understanding for everything, so much patience, and I must confess that, although I do love you with all my heart, I have not always made it easy for you in view of my excitable and often short-tempered behaviour.

  Five years after their marriage, and following the outbreak of war in 1914, Alfred was conscripted into the medical corps of the German Army and deployed to the Alsace where he ran a field hospital for victims of gas attacks. Whenever he could, he took a train back to Berlin to see Henny and the children. During one of these brief wartime visits Henny again became pregnant and, on 6 May 1917, she gave birth to identical twins, Hanns and Paul – with Hanns fifteen minutes older than his brother. When Elsie and Bella saw the boys for the first time they mistook them for little red dolls, running up to their mother and grabbing the two babies as if they were toys. Elsie chose Paul and Bella chose Hanns and this sense of divided responsibility for the boys persisted for the remainder of their lives.

  Acknowledging his efforts during the First World War2, the army awarded Alfred the Iron Cross First Class, one of the few Jews to receive such an honour. With the war over in November 1918, Alfred returned to Berlin and set about rebuilding his business. Within a few years, he had established a thriving medical practice, becoming one of Berlin’s most prominent doctors. In 1922, he built a clinic at Achenbachstrasse 15, a four-storey building in western Berlin. Furnished with the very latest equipment, including X-ray machines, a laboratory and a roof terrace where clients could recuperate in the open air, the sanatorium’s beds were soon full. Alfred also had private consultancy rooms within the family apartment on the Kaiserallee, and his patients now included Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich and Max Reinhardt, the director of Berlin’s Deutsches Theater.

  By 1927, having navigated the turbulent years of the decade, with all of its hyperinflation and economic uncertainties, Alfred was exhausted. Still burdened by his childhood wounds, he longed for a place to rest.

  One day, in the spring of 1927, Dorothea von Wollank had come to see Dr Alexander at his consulting rooms in Berlin. After the medical examination was complete, Dorothea mentioned that her husband was leasing parcels of land along the shore of the Groß Glienicke Lake. She wondered whether the doctor might know of anybody who would be interested.

  That night at dinner, Alfred announced that he would like to build a lake house to the west of the city. It would be somewhere to visit at weekends, he told his wife and children, perhaps even over the summer. Alfred was not alone in his desire for a Weekend-Haus – many of his friends and associates already had country homes. The painter Max Liebermann had a massive stone villa next to the Wannsee, and the architect Erich Mendelsohn had a magnificent lakeside house a few kilometres to the north. What made Alfred’s choice special was that he wanted to build a small wooden cottage, rather than an enormous villa or chalet.

  Elsie and her siblings were familiar with the lakes near Berlin. In the summertime, when the temperature could reach thirty-five degrees Celsius, their parents would take them to the Wannsee Strandbad, the largest open-air lido in Europe. There, a sandy shoreline had been transformed into a family beach over a kilometre long and eighty metres wide – a Strand which played host to more than 900,000 Berliners each year: men in suits and women in long dresses taking tea in thatched shelters; children building sandcastles with their parents; short-skirted women bathing, scandalously, with topless men in the shallow waters.

  Alfred was looking for solitude, however, away from the colourful crowds of the Wannsee, as a respite from his hectic, noisy Berlin life. Elsie, now fourteen years old, was worried that this meant long, lonely weekends stuck with her parents – or worse, their stuffy friends – in some tiny cottage in the woods, far from city excitement.

  On 30 March 1927, a few days after the family’s first visit to Groß Glienicke, Alfred travelled to the village and struck a deal with Otto von Wollank: the Alexanders would lease the parcel of land for fifteen years. They would be allowed to build a house, use the lake and, it was understood, the Alexanders would have the first option to buy the land if and when Wollank decided to sell.

  At the lake that day, Alfred Alexander also met Professor Fritz Munk, who had leased the adjacent parcel. Like the Alexanders, the Munks had chosen their lot for the lake view, but also for the magnificent oak tree that stood at the edge of the bluff. Similar in age to Alfred, Fritz was also a renowned doctor. The director of the Martin Luther Hospital in Berlin, Fritz’s private patients included Otto von Wollank, himself as well as the politician Franz von Papen and the deposed Kaiser’s son, Crown Prince Wilhelm. Of medium height, with a round doughy face, bushy moustache and thin wire glasses, Fritz Munk was a man of great formality, accustomed to wearing suits at all times, even in the country. The doctors knew of each other, but had never met.

  Now, together in Groß Glienicke, the two men talked. They quickly realised that they shared a vision. They both wanted to build a weekend house, something that was different from the high-ceilinged opulence of their Berlin homes – a simple one-level structure, built of natural materials on the bluff, maximising the lake view.

  The two doctors agreed to attend the Wochenende exhibition that was then taking place in the fair grounds of Berlin. As part of the event, an array of wooden cottages had been built in neat rows. Designed by some of Germany’s most renowned architects and made from high-quality materials, these country homes had been priced to make them affordable to Berlin’s growing upper-middle class. Walking around the models, Alfred and Fritz discussed the various blueprints: Which model suited them best? How many bedrooms did they need? How would they heat their properties? What alter-ations should they make to the basic model?

  Having selected their preferred designs, they hired Otto Lenz, a Berlin-based builder who had established a reputation for the construction of attractive wooden cottages. On 28 May 1927, Fritz Munk’s application to build was approved by the county administration, which was located in Nauen, thirty-eight kilometres west of Berlin. The Alexanders’ planning application was approved a day later.

  In early summer 1927, a group of men arrived on the Groß Glienicke Estate. It was early, just after daybreak, and they wanted to put in a good start before the temperature climbed above thirty degrees, which it often did at this time of year. As was typical for members of the Brandenburg carpenters’ guild, the men wore black corduroy trousers, thick and tough to withstand hard labour; white hemp shirts, open at the collar; black woollen vests with white buttons; black-leather shoes; and wide-brimmed black felt hats to keep the sun’s rays off their faces and necks.

  They were soon joined by Otto Lenz, the builder. Though Lenz was the overall supervisor, the day-to-day construction would be overseen by the master carpenter3. While the men unloaded the tools from the horse and cart, Lenz and the master carpenter walked the property, discussing the peculiarities of the land and the Alexanders’ specific requirements. Once satisfied that his employee understood what was necessary, Lenz handed over the plans, wished the team good luck and returned to his office at Yorkstrasse 40 in Berlin.

  The builders’ first task was to clear the land, particularly the old vines that stretched in long rows down the spine of the property. Thi
s was back-breaking work. The roots of the vines were more than a metre deep and, after years of growth, had become thick and entangled. With pickaxes, shovels and long metal bars, the men strained to prise the fibrous roots from the sandy soil, then worked the land until it was smooth and free of large stones. It took a week to clear. Only the most mature trees on the lower section of the property near the lake were left standing: an oak, two pines and a willow.

  As with all such houses, the construction followed a predictable pattern. First the men laid out the house’s perimeter. Using a long coil of string tied to wooden pegs they marked out a rectangle nine metres wide and eleven metres long. Then they dug a trench with the help of pickaxes and shovels. Into this they poured a mortar mixture, made of sand mined from the shore, limestone which the workers had transported in sacks from Berlin, and water carried up in buckets from the lake. As one team of men poured the foundations, another excavated the cellar. Next, the men dug a large hole away from the north-east corner of the house, at least three metres deep and one metre across, which would serve as the house’s cesspit.

  Once the concrete of the house, cellar and cesspit had set, the men began laying the first course of pinkish-red bricks. These had been produced on the Estate and were waiting in neatly stacked piles to one side. After a few days of slow, methodical work, the foundations were in place, and along these were then laid horizontal pine beams and vertical posts. The builders next added the trusses, large triangular-shaped wooden wedges that would hold up the roof. They then framed out the internal walls, hammering in the openings for the doors and windows, and erected the joists that would support the ceilings. They also framed out the built-in cupboards, recessed bookshelves, and alcoves for the pull-down tables and beds, all of which had been specifically requested by the Alexanders.