Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Thomas Harding
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Family Trees
Maps
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Prologue
Part I: Glienicke
1. Wollank, 1890
2. Wollank, 1913
3. Alexander, 1927
4. Alexander, 1928
5. Wollank, 1929
6. Alexander, 1930
7. Schultz, 1934
8. Alexander, 1934
Part II: The Lake House
Interlude, August 2013
9. Meisel, 1937
10. Meisel, 1937
11. Meisel, 1942
12. Hartmann, 1944
13. Hartmann, 1945
14. Hartmann, 1945
15. Meisel, 1946
16. Meisel, 1948
17. Meisel, 1949
Part III: Home
Interlude, December 2013
18. Fuhrmann, 1952
19. Fuhrmann and Kühne, 1958
20. Fuhrmann and Kühne, 1959
21. Fuhrmann and Kühne, 1961
22. Fuhrmann and Kühne, 1962
Part IV: Villa Wolfgang
Interlude, January 2014
23. Kühne, 1965
24. Kühne, 1970
25. Kühne, 1975
26. Kühne, 1986
27. Kühne, 1989
28. Kühne, 1990
29. Kühne, 1993
30. Kühne, 1999
Part V: Parcel Number 101/7 and 101/8
Interlude, February 2014
31. City of Potsdam, 2003
32. City of Potsdam, 2004
33. City of Potsdam, 2014
Epilogue
Postscript
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
Picture Section
Copyright
Hanns and Rudolf
Kadian Journal
1. The lake house, July 2013 (Thomas Harding)
2. Otto Wollank (Wollank Family Archive)
3. Dorothea von Wollank (Ullstein/ Topfoto)
4. Groß Glienicke Lake, photograph by Lotte Jacobi, 1928 (Alexander Family Archive)
5. The lake house, photograph by Lotte Jacobi, 1928 (Alexander Family Archive)
6. Henny Alexander on the lake house veranda (Alexander Family Archive)
7. Alfred Alexander in the garden at Glienicke (Alexander Family Archive)
8. Alfred (front centre), Elsie and Bella (back row left) and friends at the lake, 1928 (Alexander Family Archive)
9. Otto and Dorothea von Wollank’s funeral procession, 1929 (Groß Glienicke Chronik)
10. Robert von Schultz (Landesarchiv Berlin)
11. Joseph Goebbels calls for Jewish boycott, Berlin, 1 April 1933 (USHMM/National Archives, College Park)
12. Fritz Munk with Alfred and Henny Alexander, Groß Glienicke (Munk Family Archive)
13. ‘Jews are barred from entering’ sign, Wannsee, 1935 (SZ Photo/Scherl/Bridgeman Images)
14. Will Meisel (Edition Meisel GmbH)
15. Eliza Illiard in Paganini (Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek Museum für Film und Fernsehen)
16. Will Meisel at the lake house (Edition Meisel GmbH)
17. Hanns Hartmann (WDR/Liselotte Strelow)
18. Gatow airfield, with Groß Glienicke Lake visible (top left) (National Archive London)
19. Wolfgang Kühne (Bernd Kühne)
20. Lake house 1960s (Bernd Kühne)
21. Berlin border fence, Groß Glienicke Lake, 1961 (Groß Glienicke Chronik)
22. Berlin Wall layout (Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik)
23. View of Berlin Wall from Groß Glienicke Lake (Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik)
24. Thälmann Pioneers meet soldiers, Groß Glienicke (Groß Glienicke Chronik)
25. Berlin Wall with view of Groß Glienicke Lake and islands (AKG)
26. Intershop, East Berlin, 1979 (AKG)
27. Delft tiles in lake house living room (Thomas Harding)
28. Scene of Ulrich Steinhauer murder with Steinhauer’s body visible, far left (Der Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicher-heitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik)
29. Border crossing opens at Groß Glienicke, 1989 (Andreas Kalesse)
30. Bernd Kühne’s child on border path, 1989 (Bernd Kühne)
31. View of the house from the lake shore, 1990s (Alexander Family Archive)
32. Inge Kühne, Elsie Harding and Wolfgang Kühne (left to right) at the lake house, 1993 (Alexander Family Archive)
33. Lake house, 1990s (Alexander Family Archive)
34. Marcel, Matthias and Roland (left to right) (Marcel Adam)
35. Boys’ room (Thomas Harding)
36. Tree growing through brick terrace (Thomas Harding)
37. Clean-up Day, April 2014 (Sam Cackler Harding)
38. Denkmal ceremony, August 2014 (Sam Cackler Harding)
39. Groß Glienicke Lake (Thomas Harding)
In the sand of Brandenburg the springs of life have flowed and still flow everywhere, and every square foot of ground has its story and is telling it, too – but one has to be willing to listen to these often quiet voices.
Theodor Fontane, 2 December 1863
TO TELL THE story of the house by the lake, I have relied primarily on the accounts of Zeitzeugen, or time witnesses – people with a knowledge of the house and its history, as well as Augenzeugen, or eyewitnesses – those who personally experienced the events described. Every effort has been made to corroborate and confirm each statement.
Throughout I have used the place names and spellings that would be most familiar to an English-speaking audience. This is, however, a story of Germany, and so I have made a few important exceptions to this rule – most notably ‘DDR’ and not the anglicised ‘GDR’ to describe East Germany, and ‘Groß Glienicke’ rather than ‘Gross Glienicke’ to describe the village at the heart of the book.
IN JULY 2013, I travelled from London to Berlin to visit the weekend house my great-grandfather had built.
Picking up a rental car at Schönefeld Airport on the city’s southern edge, I set off round the ring road, taking an exit next to a radio mast that looked a little like the Eiffel Tower. I continued on, past signs pointing towards the old Olympic stadium and the suburb of Spandau, and then left by a sprawling petrol station, and into the countryside. My route took me through a thick birch forest. Occasionally the trees broke to reveal flat, open farmland. Somewhere to my left I knew the River Havel flowed parallel to the road, but it was hidden behind the trees. It had been twenty years since I had last visited this place and nothing looked familiar.
Fifteen minutes later, I turned right at a traffic light and saw a sign welcoming me to the village of Groß Glienicke1. A few metres beyond, another sign marked what had once been a border crossing between West Berlin and East Germany. I slowed to a crawl. Half a kilometre further, I spotted the landmark I had been looking for, the Potsdamer Tor, a cream-coloured stone arch standing opposite a small fire station. I drove under the arch, and parked.
From here I wasn’t sure where to go. I didn’t have a map of the area, and there was nobody around to ask for help. I locked the car door, and walked a few paces down a narrow lane, overgrown with weeds and brambles, until I saw a green street sign for Am Park. Was this it? Hadn’t the lane been sandy? I vaguely remembered a vegetable patch and a kennel, a neatly ordered garden and tidy flower beds. Fifty metres on, the lane suddenly stopped at a wide metal gate marked ‘Private’. Although wary of trespassing, I ducked under a strand of barbed wire and pushed my way through a field of shoulder-high grass, heading in the direction of what I guessed was the lake.
To my left stood a row of modern brick houses. To my right stretched an unkempt hedge. And then, there it was, my family’s house. It was smaller than I remembered, not much larger than a sports pavilion or double garage, hidden by bushes, vines and trees. Its windows were patched with plywood. The almost flat black roof was cracked and covered with fallen branches. The brick chimneys seemed to be crumbling, close to collapse.
The lake house, July 2013
I picked my way round it slowly, touching flaking paintwork and boarded-up doorways, until I found a broken window. Climbing through, my way illuminated by my iPhone, I was confronted by mounds of dirty clothes and soiled cushions, walls covered in graffiti and crawling with mould, smashed appliances and fragments of furniture, rotting floorboards and empty beer bottles. One room looked as if it had been used as a drug den, littered with broken lighters and soot-stained spoons. There was a sadness to the place, the melancholy of a building abandoned.
After a few minutes, I clambered back out of the window and walked towards the house next door, hoping to find someone to speak with. I was lucky, for a woman was working in the garden. I hesitantly introduced myself in broken German, and she responded in English. I explained that I was a member of a family who used to live at the house. Did she know, I asked, what had happened to it? Who owned it now? ‘It has been empty for over a decade,’ she told me and then pointed towards the shore. ‘The Berlin Wall was built there, between the house and the lake,’ she said. ‘It’s seen a lot, but it’s an eyesore now.’ Confusingly, I appeared to be the focus of her anger. I only nodded, staring back to the house.
I had been told about the lake house, or ‘Glienicke’, all my life. It had been an obsession for my grandmother, Elsie, who spoke about it with wonder, evoking a time when life had been easy, fun and simple. It had been, she said, her soul place.
My family, the Alexanders, had flourished in the liberal years of 1920s Berlin. Affluent, cosmopolitan Jews, theirs had been the values of Germany: they worked hard and enjoyed themselves, attending the latest exhibitions, plays, concerts, and taking long walks in the surrounding countryside. As soon as they could afford it, they had built themselves a little wooden lake house, a symbol of their success. They had spent every summer at Glienicke, enjoying a rustic, simple life, gardening, swimming in the lake, hosting parties on the terrace. In my mind, I kept an image of the house, compiled from the sepia-tinted photographs I had been shown since childhood: a glistening lake, a wood-panelled room with a fireplace and rocking chair, a manicured lawn, a tennis court.
But with the rise of the Nazis, they had been forced to flee, moving to London where they had struggled to establish a new life. They had escaped when so many had not, but they left with next to nothing. In my family, this was Glienicke’s story: a place once cherished, then stolen, located in a country now reviled.
For as long as I can remember, my family had eschewed all things German. We didn’t purchase German cars, washing machines or fridges. We holidayed across Europe – in France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy – but never in Germany. I learned Spanish and French at school, even Latin, anything but German. The elder generation – my grandmother and grandfather, my great-uncles and -aunts – did not speak of their life in Berlin, of the years before the war. It was a closed chapter. Any emotional connection to their lives in the 1920s had been severed. Reluctant to explore the past, they chose instead to focus on their new country, becoming more British than the British, sending their children to the best schools, encouraging them to become doctors, lawyers and accountants.
As I became older, I realised that our relationship with Germany was not as black and white as I had been led to believe. My grandfather refused to speak another word of German from the day he arrived in England, but my grandmother kept up her German, regularly chap-eroning coachloads of German tourists around the country, pointedly eulogising Shakespeare, the Magna Carta, and what she called ‘British fair play’. From her memories, her comments, jokes occasionally, I caught traces of a life now lost.
It was in 1993, four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that I had last seen the house. I was twenty-five years old, on a weekend trip to Germany with Elsie and my cousins. She was ready, at last, to show us her childhood city. For us, the younger generation, it was a fun family excursion, a walk down memory lane with our grandmother. It was only on the aeroplane to Berlin that I began to see what the trip really meant – what this other life was. Halfway through the flight, my grandmother walked down the aisle and sat on my armrest. ‘Darling,’ she said in her thick German accent, ‘I want you to see this,’ and handed me a brown envelope. Inside were two olive-green Nazi-era passports belonging to her husband and father-in-law, and a piece of yellow fabric emblazoned with a black J. I knew that the Nazis had forced the Jews to wear such marks. The message was clear: this is my history, and this is your history. Do not forget.
And I didn’t forget. Upon returning to London, I began asking questions, seeking information about our family’s past, and why it had been so carefully covered up. It was an interest that never abated. Which is why, two decades later, I had booked a flight to Berlin and was now back at the house, to find out what had happened to my grandmother’s ‘soul place’.
The next day, I drove from Groß Glienicke to the local government offices in Potsdam, twenty minutes south of the village. There, in the basement of the courthouse, I found an information desk staffed by an elderly woman busy at her computer. Pulling out my phrase book, I haltingly asked for a copy of the house’s official land records. The woman informed me that I needed permission from the property owner to view the documents. When I explained that my great-grandfather had died in 1950 she only shrugged. I attempted to plead, and after I had produced my passport and credit cards, and sketched out a rough family tree, the woman finally relented and disappeared into a back room. Eventually she reappeared with a sheaf of papers. Jabbing her finger at the top page, she explained that the house and the land on which it stood were now owned by the city of Potsdam. I asked what that meant – what was to become of the house? She turned back to her computer, typed in the lot and parcel number, then swivelled the monitor to face me. ‘Es wird abgerissen,’ she said. It will be demolished. After an eighty-year absence, it looked like I had returned just in time to see the house be torn down.
Leaving her office, I looked at the list of government departments hanging on the lobby wall. One caught my eye: Einsichtnahme in historische Bauakten und Baupläne. I knew enough German to understand that Bau meant building and historische had something to do with history. I headed upstairs, entered a long corridor filled with similar-looking white doors, chose one and knocked. Inside, I found two architectural preservationists, a tall, thin woman in her forties, and a short, bearded man of the same age. Asking first if they spoke English, I told them the little I knew about the house, and the city’s plans to tear it down. Despite my sudden appearance, and my garbled explanation, they were polite and eager to help. The man grabbed a statute book from the shelf and leafed through the pages until he found the section that he was looking for. The ‘Castle Clause’, he said, holding the book out to me. If I didn’t want the house to be knocked down, he continued, I would have to prove that it was culturally and histor-ically significant.
Before I left Berlin, I returned to the house. Could it really be saved? I wondered. It would be an enormous task, not to say expensive. I spotted new details – broken shutters on the ground, rusted gutters, trees growing through its brick terrace. I lived hundreds of miles away, and spoke little German. My life was busy enough. I had no time to take on another project and, in any case, it looked like I might be too late.
But more than this, should it be saved? Standing before me it seemed so unimpressive, a fragment from some half-forgotten memory. It was nothing really, barely more than a shell. Yet, there was something about the house, something intangible, something compelling. Most of all, it had been the focus of my grandmother’s attention for as long as I had known her. It had meant a huge amount to her, and she had made clear that it should mean a lot to us, her grandchildren, too. It would have been so easy to walk away.
This is the story of a wooden house built on the shore of a lake near Berlin. A story of nine rooms, a small garage, a long lawn and a vegetable patch. It is a story of how it came to be, how it was transformed by its inhabitants, and how it transformed them in turn.
It is the story of a building that was loved and lost by five families. A story of the everyday moments that make a house a home – of morning chores, family meals around the kitchen table, summer-afternoon snoozes and gossip over coffee and cake. It is a story of domestic triumphs and tragedies – of weddings and births, secret trysts and betrayals, illnesses, intimidation and murder.
It is also the story of Germany over a turbulent century. A story of a building that withstood the seismic changes that shook the world. For, in its own quiet and forgotten way, the house was on the front line of history – the lives of its inhabitants ripped up and remade again and again, simply because of where they lived.
Above all, it is a story of survival, one that has been pieced together from archival material and building plans, recently declassified documents, letters, diaries, photographs, and conversations with historians, architects, botanists, police chiefs and politicians, villagers, neighbours and, most importantly, its occupants.
This is the story of the house by the lake.
SITTING ASTRIDE HIS horse, Otto Wollank made his way slowly through a narrow avenue of ripening vines, towards a lake, shimmering in the early-morning light. The way was sandy and treacherous, he had to be careful that his mare did not slip on one of the many stones, or brush up against the gnarly, twisted branches that marked his path. But there was no rush, for Otto was in a contemplative mood, considering whether he should acquire the estate through which he rode.
Of average height, and with a round chin and unimposing physique, the twenty-seven-year-old would have made scant impression, were it not for the enormous moustache which he sported below a white fedora, tilted gamely to one side.
From a bluff at the vineyard’s edge, he looked out at the land around him. At the estate’s centre lay the beautiful Groß Glienicke Lake. Two and a half kilometres long and five hundred metres wide, the lake was large enough to sail a dinghy, but smaller than most of the other waterways which dotted the Brandenburg countryside. There was good fishing here, Otto had been told: one could catch carp and eel, or – with some skill – a pike, up to one and a half metres in length, which swam through the lake’s deepest sections.
Otto Wollank
To the east and west of the lake a thick forest hugged the shore: a mixture of black alder, towering trees, with thin dark trunks, whose green triangular crowns blotted out the sky, and willows, whose branches reached out over the lake’s edge. Below, growing in the sandy soil, spread a sweet-smelling blanket of ground elder, lilac and irises. In the lake’s shallows, tall grasses swayed, alternating with a patchwork of lilies from whose pads pink, white and yellow flowers erupted.
To the north of the lake lay marsh, and then an ancient woodland filled with oak and Scots pine. These woods contained a rich variety of wildlife – deer, wild boar and red fox – each an attractive target to a hunter. Beyond these woods, to the west, stretched out the Döberitzer Heide, a wide-open heath that had been used by Prussian soldiers as a training ground for over a hundred years.
The lake’s margins went undeveloped, without a single house, jetty or dock along its shore. Unsurprisingly, the area was a haven for birds: giant white cranes, who passed through from Siberia and Scandinavia on their way to Spain; bitterns with their loud calls booming out from the dense reeds; swans swimming in pairs on the water; and woodpeckers, drilling the trees nearby.
Advertised as one of the largest parcels in the state of Brandenburg, the estate contained some of its prettiest and most productive land. And while decidedly rural in nature, it was only a morning’s ride to two major cities, Berlin and Potsdam. The property itself had many names. To some, it was known as the ‘Ribbeck Estate’ after the renowned Ribbeck family who had owned it from 1572 to 17881. But the Ribbecks had not lived at the property for more than a century and, it having changed hands so many times since, most of the locals now called it the ‘Groß Glienicke Nobleman’s Estate’, or more simply the ‘estate’. For the past sixty years the land had been owned by the Landefeldts, a local family with farming in their blood. But after years of mismanagement and falling profits they had been forced to sell.
On offer was four thousand Morgen of land, a Morgen being equal to that area which one man and one ox might till in a morning, roughly equivalent to two-thirds of an acre. In all, the estate was two and a half kilometres long and four kilometres wide. In addition, the sale included an array of farm buildings, plus the cattle, pigs, goats, geese and horses that populated the fields and barns, the farm machinery, and that year’s harvest.
Otto turned his horse round and retraced his steps back towards the village of Groß Glienicke, on the northern end of the western shore. It was an ancient settlement, one of the oldest in the region, dating back to 1297, and an insular place, populated by families who had lived here for generations, who knew each other’s business, who feared strangers. With the exception of one Catholic couple, all of Glienicke’s three hundred or so villagers were Protestant2. The little stone houses were built along the Dorfstraße, or village street, a road that ran along the lake’s western side, constructed a hundred metres from the water’s edge. There was a grocery and a baker’s, a small stone-faced school, and a windmill. At the village’s centre was the Drei Linden Gasthof, a two-storey inn that for centuries had served as a local watering hole, and which was fronted by three lime trees. In Germany, as in other European countries, the lime was a sacred tree, whose presence protected against ill luck.
At the lake’s northern tip, two hundred metres from the lake shore, stood the schloss, or manor house. Three storeys high, the schloss was built of white brick, with a shallow-pitched roof and tower, and contained more than twenty bedrooms and sixteen fireplaces. Inside, the living and dining rooms had floors of wide oak planks, the stairs rose in steps of polished marble and the walls were covered with the finest plaster. Its front hallway ceilings were adorned with colourful frescos: one showed a scantily clothed man firing an arrow at a flock of flying cranes; another depicted a bare-breasted woman looking coyly aside, as angels showered her with petals and serenaded her with a golden harp.
As he continued on around the estate, Otto saw the workers busy with their labours. White-scarfed women, in clogs and long grey dresses, pulled large square-shaped tins from the oven, providing endless loaves of bread for the village. A line of labourers knelt in a wide muddy field next to round-bottomed wooden baskets, placing small potatoes in long rutted rows. Grey-capped men, in shirts and vests, walked behind horses, encouraging their charges with long whips, as they ploughed one of the many fields. Meanwhile, others bound giant bushels of wheat with twine, the windmill behind them, its four sails beating the air. Each of their faces appeared old, weather-beaten, unsmiling.
This land appealed to Otto. It was a gentle place, full of potential, yet uncrowded, unhurried and steeped in tradition.
Groß Glienicke lay fifteen kilometres west of Berlin’s city boundary. While life had changed little for this small Brandenburg village, the same could not be said of Berlin, for, by 1890, it had established itself as the most important city in Germany.
Nineteen years earlier,3 Berlin had been declared the capital of a new German empire. Until that time, Germany had been a fragmented country, without an effective central economic, military or political structure. Since 1871, Germany and its twenty-five kingdoms, principalities, grand duchies and cities, had been joined together as a single empire, overseen by Kaiser Wilhelm I.
It was also in 1871 that Berlin had been chosen to host the empire’s Reichstag, or parliament. The members of this Reichstag were directly elected by men over the age of twenty-five and it was led by a chancellor appointed by the Kaiser. As the seat of government, the city attracted powerful interests, supported by legions of professionals, each with their own retinues, families and domestic staff. Then there was the military, with its influential officer class, whose presence was felt everywhere in Berlin. Almost every day a troop of soldiers was seen parading or marching through the city streets. Military uniforms were worn both on and off duty, and they had become a statement both of fashion and social standing. With barracks located in Berlin and the nearby city of Potsdam, tens of thousands of soldiers lived in or around the city.
Meanwhile, Berlin had established itself as one of Europe’s centres of intellectual and cultural excellence. Its Friedrich Wilhelm University boasted an impressive list of former students and academics4, including Arthur Schopenhauer, Georg Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Similarly, Berlin’s Kaiser Friedrich Museum was one of Europe’s finest, exhibiting extraordinary Byzantian and Egyptian antiquities, as well as paintings from the masters: Raphael and Giotto, Rembrandt and Holbein.
In 1888, Kaiser Wilhelm was succeeded by his son, Friedrich III, who died of cancer of the larynx after ruling for only ninety-nine days. Friedrich’s son Wilhelm II then took the throne, aged only twenty-nine. Since that time, Wilhelm II had ruled from an enormous white-stoned baroque palace on the banks of Berlin’s River Spree. Forming the hub of royal patronage and command, the palace was serviced by thousands of courtiers and bureaucrats, accountants and engineers, artists and bankers.
Following these momentous changes, the imperial city was transformed in a few short years from a sleepy provincial town into one of Europe’s leading metropolises. Attracted by the rapidly expanding economy, and the opportunities that it provided, a rush of newcomers entered the city. Berlin’s population doubled, from 800,000 in 1871, to over 1.6 million by 1890.
As part of this expansion, large tracts of land on the city outskirts were developed. The vast majority of these new buildings were apartment blocks, often hastily and inexpensively built, and before long, two-thirds of the city’s residents were tenants. Many of the developers came from the middle classes, and were soon amassing vast fortunes. One of these developers was Otto Wollank.
Born on 18 September 1862, in Pankow, a northern suburb of Berlin, Otto was the eldest son of five children. Tragedy struck early when his thirty-four-year-old father, Adolf Friedrich Wollank, died when Otto was only five years old. Luckily for the family, Adolf left a large inheritance, having purchased hundreds of acres of land in Pankow during the middle of the nineteenth century, before Berlin’s massive population explosion, when prices were still cheap.
After graduating from school in 1881, Otto enrolled in agricultural college in Berlin, undertaking work experience on various farms in northern Germany. He also travelled to France, Italy, North Africa, Greece and Turkey during this period. At the age of twenty, Otto began his military service, enlisting with the 1st Dragoon Guards regiment, with whom he perfected his riding skills and practised basic military techniques. He then joined the Danzig Death’s Head hussars, known to include some of Germany’s best horsemen and to produce military advisers to Kaiser Wilhelm.
After leaving the cavalry, Otto took over his father’s property business, growing it rapidly over the next few years. It was relatively easy to make money. All Otto had to do was find willing buyers, a simple matter given the city’s shortage of new homes. Within a short while, he was turning a massive profit. The question was: how to invest it?
Otto was an ambitious man. He wished to progress beyond his father’s status as a tradesman. During his time as an officer in the army, and while selling property in Berlin, Otto had learned that the corridors of power were controlled by the aristocracy. No matter how much wealth was accumulated, it was close to impossible to find political favour unless one was a member of the nobility. To fix this problem, he would have to purchase a rural estate, with the hope that this would make him suitable to marry into a noble family. Which is why Otto Wollank had ended up surveying the estate in Groß Glienicke.
On 18 February 18905, apparently satisfied by what he found, Otto Wollank made an offer to purchase the estate, which was accepted. So it was that four days later, on 22 February, the landowner, Johann Landefeldt, and the purchaser, Otto Wollank, met at the Spandau courthouse located ten kilometres north of Groß Glienicke. There, at quarter past eleven in the morning, they signed their names to the purchase contract: in exchange for 900,000 marks, Otto Wollank was now the Rittergutsbesitzer, or landlord, of Groß Glienicke.
Over the next few years, Otto worked tirelessly, throwing himself into modernising the estate. Keen to apply the scientific methods he had learned at college, he reorganised the manor farm. Using fertilisers and pesticides he increased crop yields. He built a new steam-powered mill to grind the wheat more efficiently. He introduced pasteurisation to milk production, extending its shelf life, and then developed a chain of shops in Berlin in order to sell the milk. Next, he built a brickworks, diversifying the estate’s income beyond those of a traditional farm, providing bricks for houses on his estate, as well as the village beyond.
Along the lake’s sandy northern shore, he planted a vineyard. Young vines were laid out in long rows, held up by trellises that stretched from the estate’s entrance, at the Potsdamer Tor, down to a bluff overlooking the lake. Once the vineyard was established, labourers picked the grapes, which were then crushed and juiced, before being fermented in large metal vats that Otto had installed in one of his barns.
Concerned for the welfare of his workers, Otto converted an old farm building into a nursery. As the labourers’ children grew up, the nursery added on a kindergarten and then a school. Initially, the local landlords remained unsure of this Berlin interloper, who had purchased his way into their rarefied circle, but the villagers warmed to their new landlord. In an unpublished family history, a member of the Wollank clan later recalled that Otto was a good landlord who cared for the workers. More than this, he was viewed as ‘gütig und mitfühlend6,’ or ‘kindly and compassionate’.
On 15 June 1894, four years after arriving in the village, and now aged thirty-one, Otto married Katharina Anne Marie, a twenty-three-year-old local girl from an established Brandenburg family. A year later, they had their first child, Marie Luise, and then, eleven months later another, Ilse Katharina. A third daughter, Irmgard, was born almost exactly a year after that, but she died when only two days old. Finally, they had a son, who was born on the twenty-third day of the first month of the new century. He was baptised at the schloss, and given the name Horst Otto Adolf. Otto was thankful that at last he had a male heir.
The schloss was a wonderful place to grow up. Educated at home, Marie, Ilse and Horst had plenty of time to play in the fields and woods. Their father built a wooden playhouse for them, an ornately carved structure that was tall enough for an adult to stand, and wide enough to host a tea party for their friends.
As soon as they were old enough, the children were allowed to swim and sail on the lake, exploring its islands, hidden beaches and coves. Although Horst was often unable to participate in the more arduous recreational activities due to his persistent ill health, he was taught to ride a horse, and to shoot with an air pistol, and later with a hunting rifle. The girls, meanwhile, contented themselves with singing lessons in the front parlour.
Every October, the villagers and the Wollanks came together for the Erntedankfest, or Thanksgiving festival, to celebrate the gathering of the harvest and the good fortune of the village. Assembled in the schloss’ courtyard, the villagers awaited the landlord’s arrival. The men were dressed in their Sunday-best suits; the more affluent wore fedoras and ties, others sported peaked caps. The women wore formal dresses and were accompanied by boys in lederhosen and girls in frocks. Also present were the men of the fire brigade, their belts and buckles gleaming, the village pastor, and the nightwatchman, who lived in a house next to the Drei Linden and who provided security to the village in the absence of a police force.
After some time, the landlord’s family joined the crowd on the front steps of the schloss, greeted by the villagers. A few moments later, children were pushed forward carrying the Erntekrone, large wreaths of wheat and flowers tied to long poles from which hung multicoloured ribbons. After the landlord had thanked everyone for coming, he led them away from the schloss, with his family at the head, marching along the sandy lane which ran around the northern tip of the lake, past farm buildings and the new vineyard. At the end of the lane they walked under the Potsdamer Tor, the stone arch that marked the entrance to the schloss and its manor park, and upon which was carved the Wollank family crest: the head of a black wolf and a crown painted in the red and white colours of Groß Glienicke. Now on the Potsdamer Chaussee, the procession turned left at the fire station, and down to the fourteenth-century stone church.
While the rest of the party entered the church through the large wooden doors on the nave’s northern face, the Wollanks arrived via the landlord’s personal door, on the eastern side of the building. Inside, the church gleamed following the renovation recently paid for by Wollank: a crown of gold-fringed alabaster hung above the colourfully decorated pulpit – painted in rich greens, blues and reds; an enormous oil painting of Christ was placed behind the altar, on which were inscribed the words Ecce Homo; an oil painting portraying the Last Supper featured a former owner of the estate, Hans Georg Ribbeck, as one of the disciples; and at the ceiling’s centre, the sun appeared through a hole in the painted clouds, on which was written the Hebrew word for God, 
.
As to Otto Wollank himself, his situation appeared stable and secure. The estate was developing nicely. The harvest had been good. His villagers were well fed and his wife and three children were healthy and happy. Sitting in the lord of the manor’s box, located to the left of the altar and above and in front of the rest of the pews, its side emblazoned with the family crest, and singing the harvest festival songs, Otto’s life had never seemed better.
BY 1913, THE estate had become a place of note, a model farm that was finally making money.
Impressed by Otto’s tireless efforts, the acres of productive land, his fine-looking herds of cattle and the beauty of the estate itself, the regional landowners now paid Otto grudging respect. He and his family began to be invited to dinner parties and other social events. His teenage daughters were courted by the local gentry. His son was educated at the gymnasium in Potsdam, destined to join the officer corps and, perhaps later, the civil service.
Before long, word of Groß Glienicke’s transformation, and the achievements of its landlord, had filtered through to Berlin. Otto Wollank’s farm, it was said, had become a ‘Mustergut’, an exemplary estate. On 16 April 1913, Otto Wollank wrote a direct petition to Kaiser Wilhelm II requesting that he be given a knighthood. This was typical of the time, in which up-and-coming young estate owners promoted themselves to the royal court. As part of his application, Otto provided a summary of his biography and then, under the heading of ‘Political Views’, explained that he was ‘raised in a thoroughly conservative family’ and was loyal to the Kaiser, ‘to the deepest inner conviction’. He went on to say that ‘despite the incitement of local workers by agitators from Spandau’, he believed that he had ‘successfully served the [Kaiser’s] cause in my vicinity’.
The knighthood petition was first processed by the office of the president of the state of Brandenburg, based in Potsdam. In their report, they confirmed that Otto had been truthful in his application. They also listed his assets, which included the thousand-hectare Groß Glienicke Estate (1.5 million marks), three houses in Berlin (418,638 marks), various property holdings in the Berlin suburb of Pankow (645,667 marks), and other capital assets (2,127,250 marks).
Three days later, on 19 April, Kaiser Wilhelm instructed his officials to ennoble Otto Wollank1, the one condition being that he pay 4,800 marks for his knighthood. Five months later, on 1 September, Otto received confirmation of his ennoblement through the issue of a diploma by the Heraldry Office. The official announcement was made in the state publication, the Staatsanzeiger, as well as the Gothaer, a periodical on the German nobility. Though no ceremony was held with the Kaiser himself, Otto celebrated the occasion with friends and family at home in the schloss.
From this point forward he would be known as Otto von Wollank. Not only did this bring him respect and status, it brought responsibilities. For, as a member of the local nobility, Otto was now expected to show leadership to the citizens of Groß Glienicke. He didn’t have to wait long.
On the morning of 29 June 1914, Otto von Wollank sat in his dining room, reading the cream-coloured broadsheet that had been delivered earlier that day. Unlike the more liberal Berliner Tageblatt and Vossische Zeitung, Otto’s Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was a conservative newspaper, a staunch supporter of the Kaiser.
Otto was stunned. According to the front page, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife had been shot the previous day by a Serbian nationalist in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Austria–Hungary was considered one of the Kaiser’s most important allies; many would view an attack on the Austro-Hungarian royal family as an attack on Germany. The Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reported that ‘the Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been associated with our emperor in mutual affection’ and that the Duchess was ‘well known to the Berlin court … so our imperial house is hit by the painful passing of the Archduke and his wife’. The article concluded that ‘the warmest compassion turns to the three children who are orphaned’ by the killing, reporting that Kaiser Wilhelm would be attending the funeral in Vienna.
Over the next days and weeks, Otto read the news with increasing trepidation: journalists demanding the assassins’ arrest, governments threatening ultimatums, troops being mobilised. On 28 July, Austria–Hungary declared war on Serbia; on 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia. By 5 August 1914, Otto’s newspapers carried ominous headlines: ‘Britain Declares War on Germany’ and ‘Now Against the Russians, the French and English!’ The First World War had begun.
According to the newspaper reports, Germany would likely soon be victorious. With an overwhelming number of troops, unsurpassed military training, and modern techniques, it was hard, wrote the editorials, to imagine a prolonged conflict. To a firm patriot and supporter of the Kaiser like Otto, such arguments would surely have been convincing. Though even Otto, the trained cavalry officer, must have wondered about the certainty, given war’s unpredictability, the number of countries involved and their, as yet, unknown military strengths.
By the middle of August, the German Army had expanded from 800,000 to more than three and a half million soldiers. This surge mostly comprised army reservists, but also included 185,000 volunteers. At this time, there were a little over 120 men living in Groß Glienicke of working age. Of these, eighty were enlisted, thereby reducing the male working population by two-thirds. Soon, the estate was suffering a labour shortfall. The women were forced to fulfil the roles of their husbands, brothers, fathers and sons, and gathered the bulk of the harvest that summer. The decline in the village’s male population became still more apparent at the Thanksgiving celebration that took place in October, two months after the war’s start, with row upon row of empty pews.
At fifty-two, Wollank was too old to fight. Eager to serve his country, however, he volunteered for the Third Central Horse Depot in Potsdam, taking the rank of captain. Later, he was transferred to the High Command in Berlin, where he was responsible for the distribution of food and provisions to hospitals.
Given Otto’s military background and loyalty to the Kaiser, it was assumed that his fourteen-year-old son, Horst, would enlist as soon as he was able. Horst had already seen two of the classes above him graduate and be conscripted directly into the army. A few classmates, some as young as fourteen and fifteen, had volunteered. But, despite all this, Horst, continued with his education.
From the newspapers, and through his contacts in Berlin, Otto kept up to date with the war’s progress. Since December 1914, a major front had developed in France, with Germany’s Fifth Army, made up of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, facing off against French forces. Intending to break the deadlock, the German Army initiated a major assault near the city of Verdun in February 1916. After early gains, the battle ground to a bloody stalemate, resulting in over 300,000 casualties on the Kaiser’s side. It had become clear to Otto that the war was unlikely to end any time soon.
Conservative in nature, Otto von Wollank did not send his daughters to school, nor did he involve them in the estate’s management. Instead, the young women sat at home with their mother, practising their needlework, reading and entertaining guests. While Horst would, health permitting, attend agricultural college and then serve an apprenticeship on the farm, the only plan for the girls was to find them suitable husbands.
Although social engagements were less frequent, the occasional afternoon tea or Sunday lunch still took place, attended by elderly neighbours and their younger female charges. The problem, as far as arranging a wedding for Marie Luise and Ilse was concerned, was that most of the eligible young men were away, either being trained at the military academies or already serving at the front. Such thoughts were thrown into disarray when, on 11 November 1916, Otto’s wife suddenly died. She was only forty-five years old. The cause of death is unrecorded. After a short service that was held at the church, and which was attended by much of the village, Katharina was buried in the park next to the schloss.
Otto spent the remainder of the war trying to run the estate as best he could. Then, on 29 January 1918, he married Dorothea Müller, a noblewoman from Berlin nineteen years his junior. All of Otto’s children attended the wedding, including Horst, who, though now graduated, had avoided conscription due to his general ill health.
After his bride moved to the schloss, to help manage the domestic staff and to care for the three children, Otto’s mood lifted. According to villagers who remembered her, Dorothea was a friendly woman, with a warm personality, who quickly became beloved. Her arrival brought with it a hope that things were about to take a turn for the better.
Finally, on 11 November, word arrived in the village that the war had ended. A German delegation made up of two military officers and two politicians had met their counterparts from England and France, and signed an armistice. Otto’s relief soon turned to anxiety when he learned that, following a series of worker and soldier revolts that had erupted around the country, the Kaiser had been forced to abdicate and fled to the Netherlands with his family. With his patron now gone, Otto worried what this would mean, not only for the estate, but for his standing within the community.
Dorothea von Wollank
In November and December 1918, politicians from the Social Democrat Party (SPD) worked together with members of the armed forces to fill the political vacuum. But the provisional government was unable to maintain order for long. The push for parliamentary democracy was countered by left-wing groups inspired by the Soviet revolution of the previous year. The protests culminated in the so-called Spartakus uprising, starting on 4 January 1919, in which protesters erected barricades in the streets of Berlin and seized several newspaper offices, including the organ of the SPD. To support the action, the German Communist Party called a general strike. Over half a million protesters surged into Berlin. One of the radicals’ key demands was the redistribution of land, particularly of the estates owned by those recently ennobled, such as Otto’s. Over the next few days, the protesters brutally clashed with bands of former veterans on the city streets, and hundreds were killed. It was the veterans who emerged triumphant, however – recapturing the city centre with support from government forces. A shaky equilibrium was established.
Otto’s fear abated somewhat when, following elections held on 19 January 1919, a national assembly was convened in the small town of Weimar, three hundred kilometres south-west of Berlin, intent on stabilising the country. Out of this assembly, a new constitution was approved, including significant changes to Germany’s power structures. Women could now vote, as could all men over the age of twenty (the minimum age had been twenty-five). Also for the first time, the country would have a president, who would serve as the new head of state. Critically, the president would be able to appoint, or dismiss, the chancellor – who would run the government – and, under Article 48, would have the power to suspend civil liberties, including habeas corpus. In another broad change, a supreme court was established and the imperial flag of red, white and blue was replaced by a tricoloured black, red and gold. Finally, the constitution laid out a set of ‘basic rights’ for its citizens; for instance, Article 115 declared that ‘a German’s home is an asylum and is inviolable’.
With a new constitution, flag and parliament, the politicians announced a new era: a German republic. Later this period would become known as the ‘Weimar Republic’. The Kaiser Reich, which had commenced with the unification of Germany in 18712, with its system of royal patronage, was officially over. Gone with it were the nobility. From this point forward, Otto was informed, he could no longer call himself a knight. Nonetheless, he could use the ‘von’ before his surname, and keep his estate.
The politicians’ efforts to maintain order were undermined by the agreement they signed with the Allied powers on 28 June 1919100000