From time to time, it does you good to read something that is not medieval. For me, that always tends to be modern German history, mainly because some of it I have lived through and some of it I have heard from good and caring people from Germany and the UK who are sadly no longer with us. So I recently bought Thomas Harding’s book ‘The Lake House’ as ‘light reading’. The plan didn’t go all that well as I became ill shortly after buying it and for a while I thought I would never finish it. But now, several months on, I have.
And, as Quakers say, it speaks to my condition in this post Brexit vote and pre Trump presidency world. Briefly, Harding’s writing the story of a house near Berlin which his family owned in the early twentieth century. Because of its location – Gross Glienicke, which ended up in the GDR – the story of the house is a proxy for the story of Berlin, in much the same way as ‘The Hare with the Amber Eyes’ uses a set of Japanese netsuke to tell the history of a Jewish family from Vienna. At the beginning, a wealthy family chooses to build a holiday home in an idyllic lakeside setting; at the end, a descendant of that family rediscovers the house and negotiates the post war minefield of tracing the ownership of properties once owned by Jews well enough to gain local and national support to restore the house as a memorial to Jewish history.
But the real interest for me is not the building, but the way the dramatis personae cope with change. The inhabitants of the house in November 1989 had mixed feelings. Whilst feeling brave enough to bash a hole in their bit of the Berlin wall so as to show your son the lake beyond was fun, choosing to actually go and live on the other side of it was a different matter altogether. Whilst noticing that the border guards had gone was liberating, the fear that fact engendered as to what might replace them was real and palpable. The book’s earlier chapters form (one of the many) contemporary accounts of how the rise of the Nazis represented a very different kind of change – not one you could sit and watch on your television. Because of the time span of the book, and because of its geographical location you can almost turn it into a graph showing spikes of upheaval and periods of apparent calm.
And in the end, the ordinary people do much the same things in both. They adapt, they love, they disagree, they suffer personal losses, they enjoy personal triumphs. Disruption happens and the generations born in the West after 1950 will just have to get used to it.
PS Both books come highly recommended.
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