cover image The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History

The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History

Thomas Harding. Picador, $28 (464p) ISBN 978-1-250-06506-3

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%E2%80%94the Wollanks, the Alexanders (Harding's ancestors), the Meisels, the Fuhrmanns, and the K%C3%BChns%E2%80%94as 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, Gros%C3%9F Glienicke, during WWII%E2%80%94French POWs were housed there, and Soviet forces subjected the town's women to mass rape in 1945%E2%80%94and 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. (July)