After the day’s activities, Elsie returned to the Blue Room to change into evening clothes. She loved this room, which she and her sister had so carefully decorated. On the wall hung a large mirror, where they could check their hair and make-up. Next to each bed was a small pink side table, and a chair, often draped with clothes. As well as the two pull-down beds, there was an upholstered bench on which they read books, and a collapsible table where they wrote their letters.
Sitting on her bed, Elsie worked on the family photo album. Made of thick card and with a hessian-bound cover, there were pictures of waves lapping against the jetty, the family car parked on the rutted drive, her mother eating at the table, the chickens and geese on the lawn, the reeds in the water. At the front of this book Elsie wrote a few lines:
At the little house, life is happy
Time passes pleasantly by,
With sport and games and much laughter.
You can swim in the lake’s cooling waters,
So perfect after the heat of the day.
And when the bell sounds for supper
One feels refreshed, young and beautiful.
Enjoying life at Glienicke.
The house also provided the Alexander children with an attractive setting for birthday parties. Bella was the first to take advantage of this by inviting a select group of friends to celebrate her seventeenth birthday in March. Two months later, Hanns and Paul held their own party, with a crowd of boys arriving from Berlin. Theirs was a more rambunctious affair, with running races, swimming in the lake and games of cowboys and indians. As her birthday fell in December, Elsie would be the only sibling unable to hold a party at the lake house. Though she invited her friends to the family apartment, a more sophisticated venue, she wished she too could have celebrated her birthday in Groß Glienicke.
As the decade drew to a close, Alfred was appointed the head of the Berlin Chamber of Physicians, a great honour for the Jewish doctor from Bamberg. His reputation grew, and so did the number and notoriety of his patients. Elsie and her siblings now saw a dazzling line of people entering and leaving their father’s consultancy room located off the front hall of the family’s apartment in Berlin. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist James Franck came to see the doctor, as did the actors Paul Wegener, Max Pallenberg and Sybille Binder. Sometimes they saw the singer Sabine Kalter, or the poet Walter Hasenclever.
Such luminaries also visited the apartment for social occasions. On one evening, for instance, Albert Einstein and his wife came for dinner. Through the dining-room door, Elsie and her siblings could see that the professor was wearing his house slippers. The stories about him being an absent-minded professor appeared to be true. After dinner the men took coffee in the salon, where Alfred hoped to ask Einstein about the theory of relativity. When Alfred returned to his wife later that evening, he recounted that the two had become so engrossed in discussing the latest detective novels, a passion they shared, that he had forgotten to ask.
Many of Alfred’s patients and friends were also invited out to Groß Glienicke, to spend the day by the lake, and later dine on the terrace. Some, like Einstein1, had weekend houses of their own nearby. Others, with names like Leon and Ritscher, Mendelboom and Bergmann, Strauss and Levi, came by car from Berlin.
One visitor was the photographer Lotte Jacobi2, who had made a name for herself by taking pictures of famous actors and scientists. Like Alfred, she sometimes worked at the Deutsches Theater – he as a doctor, she as a photographer – which is where they probably met. On 12 June 1928, Jacobi took a series of pictures. In one of these, Henny’s father, Lucien Picard, is caught holding the Vossische Zeitung, the morning’s headlines declaring that a new cabinet had been formed. She took another picture of the lake, a serene waterscape in which not a house can be seen along the lake’s shoreline, only the village church, its steeple poking through the canopy of trees. The other photographs are of the house itself: inside the living room, a close-up of the house from the rear, and another from the shoreline, looking up the garden steps to the terrace. In her images, Jacobi captures a charming place, well-lived-in, relaxing, somewhere you would want to spend the weekend.
While the Alexanders prospered, so too did Berlin. By the mid 1920s, with the peace and security provided by price controls, currency exchanges and foreign loans, Germany’s economy had stabilised, and was beginning to boom. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the capital. Where Berlin had been a city of 1.6 million at the war’s end, by 1928 it was home to over four million. The expansion was partly due to a major annexation which had taken place in 1920, with the city absorbing suburbs such as Spandau, Charlottenburg and Neukölln. Indeed, the urban growth had been so rapid that the capital’s boundary now ran only one kilometre east of the Groß Glienicke Lake.
Berlin’s expansion reflected the city’s new-found economic wealth. Siemens had electrified the city’s railways lines, and in November 1928, the Berlin Transport Company was established, making it the world’s largest urban transport company. New canals were built, as were roads and factories, schools and parks. Out of this economic transformation blossomed a cultural renaissance. This was the period of dancing girls and jazz clubs, featured so colourfully in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. It saw the emergence of a new wave of film directors, such as Fritz Lang and his Metropolis, warning of the dangers of automation and modern cities. It was also the start of the Bauhaus movement, which promoted an unfussy, elegant and functional design over the ornate and opulent. Millions of marks were invested in cultural centres, such as the Deutsche Oper. The capital’s theatres became renowned worldwide for their experimentation, providing venues for both expressionism and works more grounded in reality, such as the plays of Bertholt Brecht. Berliners had their own dialect, spoken in clipped, abbreviated tones, and often with a heavy dose of irony. Some people even spoke of there being a ‘Berlin air’. These were the so-called ‘golden years’ of the Weimar Republic. Soon the capital’s streets were heaving with pedestrians and vehicles. The city’s main square, the Potsdamer Platz, was now the busiest traffic intersection in Europe.
As the economy continued to improve so did Alfred’s practice. The number of patients increased as did their willingness to pay on time. Yet, while he appreciated his good fortune, and enjoyed attending the theatre and the opera, Alfred found the city’s congestion and noise tiresome. Soon the Alexanders were spending entire summers in Groß Glienicke, away from the frenzy and suffocating heat of Berlin. As late autumn turned to winter, and winter turned to early spring, they counted off the days until they could pack their bags and drive west.
For the Alexanders, their Sommerhaus had become a refuge, a haven.
Alfred (front centre), Elsie and Bella (back row left) and friends at the lake, 1928
5
WOLLANK
1929
FOLLOWING ON FROM Otto von Wollank’s parcelling off of land, the Groß Glienicke Estate finances had now stabilised. The same could not be said for the landlord’s health. In the early months of 1929, Otto suffered a stroke. Unable to manage the estate he asked his son-in-law, Robert, to supervise the day-to-day operations.
That autumn Otto’s wife, Dorothea, also fell ill. A doctor’s appointment was arranged and, on 23 September 1929, they were driven by their chauffeur, Alfred Pohl, into the city, where Dorothea was dropped off at a clinic in Halensee. According to later newspaper reports, Otto collected his wife and a nurse, Augusta Riesel, at a little after three in the afternoon, and they then drove along the busy Kurfürstendamm towards the city centre.
The car then turned left onto Droysenstraße, a quieter street, taking them north into Charlottenburg and towards home. One block from Kurfürstendamm, and driving with extreme care, the car crossed into Küstrinerstraße (today known as Damschkestrasse), a road that joined at an acute angle. Halfway across the intersection the Wollank vehicle was struck by another car coming at speed towards them from the east. They were hit with such force that the car rolled over twice bef
ore crashing into a truck parked at the kerb.
With the Wollank car now stationary, all four occupants were buried under the debris. The nurse died at the scene, but the driver somehow crawled out unscathed, as firemen pulled Otto and Dorothea from the wreck, alive but terribly injured. Dorothea was taken to Dr Alexander’s clinic nearby, on Achenbachstrasse, but died at 8 p.m. For a while the doctors thought they could save Otto, who had sustained skull fractures, but his injuries were too severe to operate and, early in the morning of 24 September, he too was declared dead. Otto was sixty-seven, Dorothea only forty-eight.
According to Herr Miltmann, the police officer in charge of the investigation, there was no evidence that either car had tried to brake before impact. The driver of the second car was Otto Grojel, a charcoal company sales representative. When he had seen the other vehicle, Grojel had misjudged the distance between the cars and failed to brake. He was not taken into custody because the police did not believe he would flee. Both cars were transported to the police station for later examination. Somehow both drivers had survived and both were later charged with reckless driving1, convicted and imprisoned.
Given that it involved nobility, the crash attracted wide publicity. The Vossische Zeitung ran a front-page story2, under the headline ‘CAR CRASH IN CHARLOTTENBURG’, and another the next morning, ‘ESTATE OWNER WOLLANK DIES IN CAR CRASH’. Taking an editorial position, the newspaper pointed out that the corner of Küstrinerstraße and Droysenstraße had long been known as dangerous and they called for the government to solve the problem so that a similar accident would not reoccur. The article concluded by saying that Otto von Wollank lived in Groß Glienicke, where he had planted a vineyard along the north shore, and that his land was ‘one of the most beautiful properties located near Berlin’.
The Wollanks’ funeral procession, with Potsdamer Tor visible in the distance
A few days after the accident, on 26 September 1929, the coffins of Otto and Dorothea von Wollank were carried in two horse-drawn black coaches through the streets of Groß Glienicke. A large crowd watched as the funeral procession made its way, accompanied by a brass band. Among the mourners were Dr Alfred Alexander and Professor Fritz Munk. The men wore top hats and tails, the women long black dresses and veils. The lord of the manor and his wife were transported along Potsdamer Chaussee, under the Potsdamer Tor, to a burial ground in the woods next to the schloss. Later, a monument would be built to mark the loss of the Wollanks, with the engraved words: ‘We know not the place where our loved ones are – we know the place where they are not.’
On 1 October3, four days after the funeral, Otto’s three children gathered at Alexanderstraße 16, Berlin, at the offices of Dr Koch, the family’s lawyer, to hear their father’s last will and testament. Also present were Ilse Katharina’s husband Robert von Schultz and Horst’s wife Else; Marie Luise, having divorced three years earlier, had come alone. Each of the children brought with them a lawyer. The reading of the will would prove a tense affair; much was at stake, for their father had owned a significant amount of Berlin property in addition to the land in Groß Glienicke.
With the children seated in front of him, Dr Koch handed out copies of the death certificates. Once these had been read each child was handed a sealed copy of their father’s will, dated 30 June 1925. This was a lengthy and complicated document, dealing with numerous beneficiaries. A key point was that if Otto von Wollank died before his wife, which given that she was nineteen years his junior had been considered likely, then the vast majority of his wealth flowed to her. As Dr Koch explained, however, according to the times of death recorded on the death certificates, this was not the case. Otto had died a few hours after his wife. As a result, following the serpentine logic of the will, the inheritance would be split three ways: 2/12 to the child who lived in and managed the estate and 5/12 to each of the others.
Strangely, the will did not suggest which child should inherit the 2/12 share and the estate. Perhaps, Otto wanted his offspring to decide. After some discussion, it was agreed that Horst and Marie Luise would inherit the greater shares, while Ilse Katharina would live at the schloss. It is likely that Marie Luise was not interested in the estate given that she was not married and had no experience in running a farm. Why Horst chose not to take over the estate isn’t so clear. Maybe, concerned about his poor health, he worried that he might not be able to take on the estate management. Whatever the reason, the three children appeared satisfied with the will’s outcome4.
Ilse now owned the Groß Glienicke Estate. In practice this meant that the day-to-day operations, including the farmland, the forests and the heath to the west of the lake, as well as the lakeside parcels that had been rented to the settlers from Berlin, were now under the control of her husband, Robert von Schultz. And Robert von Schultz was a very different character from the kind-hearted, well-loved, if slightly disorganised businessman Otto von Wollank.
Where Otto had been steeped in the values of the Kaiser Reich – committed to the military, the royal family and tradition – Robert was a product of the street battles of the 1920s, believing in the violent overthrow of the government, the supremacy of the German people and the importance of race. Above all else, the Alexanders’ new landlord fostered a searing hatred for one group of people whom he blamed for all that was going wrong in his country: the Jews.
Robert von Schultz
At the time that he became landlord of the Groß Glienicke Estate, Robert von Schultz was a regional leader of the Stahlhelm Bund der Frontsoldaten, one of the many right-wing organisations then active in Germany. Meaning ‘steel helmet’, the Stahlhelm had been established in 1918 by Franz Seldte, a German officer who had lost his arm while fighting in the First World War and who demanded that his country be allowed to rebuild its military strength. Deeply conservative and a supporter of the monarchy, Seldte wished to see Kaiser Wilhelm II return from his exile in the Netherlands and regain his throne. By 1930, the Stahlhelm had over 500,000 members and was the largest paramilitary group in Germany.
Robert von Schultz had joined the Stahlhelm in 1926. As a member of a prominent local family, he had then been quickly promoted to the position of regional leader and placed in charge of recruitment and training of the young men in Groß Glienicke and the surrounding areas. As with all members of the Stahlhelm, his uniform included a grey woollen cap with a black peak, emblazoned with a ‘Der Stahlhelm’ badge; a grey jacket crossed by a leather strap which sported a buckle stamped with a miniature steel helmet; grey woollen trousers and black boots.
At the core of Robert’s ideology was a pride in the fatherland and its people. Critically, he wished to keep his country free of the Jews and communists whom he believed had forced the Kaiser to abdicate in November 1918, and had caused the hyperinflation and high unemployment of the Weimar Republic. One of those he particularly despised was Ernst Thälmann, the thirty-nine-year-old head of the Communist Party who, in 1925, had run as a candidate for the German presidency and then thankfully, as far as Robert was concerned, lost to the former Army Chief of Staff, Paul von Hindenburg. In their meetings and publications the Stahlhelm frequently conflated left-wing activism with being Jewish, often using the words interchangeably. An article published in the Der Stahlhelm newsletter in 19255, for instance, declared that ‘we tell our aims with an honest and brutal frankness6, and these aims are highly dangerous for the Jewish-Marxist rabble. We want nothing more than they already possess, that is to say the power in the state.’
Since becoming the Stahlhelm regional leader, it was quite common to see Robert von Schultz riding through Groß Glienicke in the back of a farm truck, standing alongside other volunteers, dressed in their paramilitary uniforms. Starting at the schloss, they would roll along the sandy road on the lake’s north shore, past the gates to the Alexander property, through the Potsdamer Tor and down the Potsdamer Chaussee, shouting slogans and waving their guns in the air. There were rumours of abductions, midnight interrogations and even torture.
Most of the villagers didn’t want to have anything to do with Robert’s mob. The violence scared them. Yet there were some local young men who were attracted by the uniforms and the ideology, not to mention the drinking and the brawling, and as a result, the size of the Groß Glienicke Stahlhelm brigade continued to grow.
In their spare moments, Robert von Schultz and his Stahlhelm comrades crowded into the local pubs, particularly the Drei Linden, the imposing two-storey stone-faced inn that stood two hundred metres south of the Potsdamer Tor and the entrance to the Alexander property. For centuries the Drei Linden had served as the village’s watering hole, providing rooms for travellers, and a large courtyard in front for their carriages. It was here, in the wood-panelled bar, that Robert’s men banged out a tune on the piano while others half shouted, half sung the old street-fighting songs. Later, holding aloft oversized glasses of beer, they cried ‘Kick out the philistines!’ and ‘Sharpen the knife!’, referring to the politicians then in power, as well as various anti-Semitic slogans, such as ‘Germany for the Germans’ and ‘Foreigners and Jews have only guest rights’.
Robert was often at the centre of these delinquencies. Sometimes, such gatherings moved from the Drei Linden to the schloss. Labourers who lived close to the estate spoke of hearing ‘Prunk-und Zechgelage7, rauschende Feste,’ or drinking and rough feasts, taking place at Robert’s house. There were also reports of firearms being let off and late-night excesses which disturbed the calm country environs.
The virulent nationalism and anti-Semitism professed by Robert von Schultz and his comrades was a rarity in the Germany of 1929. Though pogroms against Jews had taken place in the early nineteenth century, such attacks had mostly died down by this time. The improved status of the Jewish population was symbolised by laws that guaranteed their rights and privileges. In 1812, Prussia had passed an emancipation law, followed by Hanover in 1842. Then, in 1871, full emancipation for the Jewish population was enshrined with the introduction of the first ever German constitution. Nevertheless, anti-Semitism did still exist in Germany. Jews could not become officers in the German Army and it was difficult to become a university professor, or hold other state positions, without first converting to Christianity. Notoriously, in 1916 the German military had conducted a count of the Jews in their ranks (the Judenzählung, or Jewish census), after persistent accusations that Jews were not pulling their weight and that Jewish soldiers were avoiding front-line service. Yet, such instances of anti-Semitism were the exceptions rather than the rule. After all, over 100,000 Jewish soldiers had served in the German Army during the First World War, and more than 30,000 – including Alfred Alexander – had been decorated for their bravery. Which is why, for the first two decades of the twentieth century, most Jewish families who lived in Germany, such as the Alexanders, considered themselves to be Germans by nationality, and Jewish by religion; their daily lives unhindered by ethnicity or prejudice.
The House by the Lake Page 6