January 23, 2019
The Big Pond #12: A House for Reconciliation

Alexander Haus
Courtesy Alexander Haus

Five generations have lived at the Alexander-Haus on Groß Glienicker See over the past century – enduring fascism, war, the division of Germany, and the Fall of Communism. Now, the former family home has undergone yet another transition into an educational center.

After being forced to flee Germany from the Nazis, the family of Elsie Alexander had to abandon their lake house in Groß Glienicke, a village close to Berlin. While the Alexanders built a new life in the UK and the US, their former vacation house was situated right next to the Berlin Wall during the Cold War – “You’d look out at the view and the wall was right there. You couldn’t see the lake,” as interviewee Debora Harding points out.
 
When the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down, the villagers of Groß Glienicke began researching the Jewish families who had made up 25 percent of the village before World War II. They contacted Thomas Harding, a writer and the grandson of Elsie Alexander, who had mentioned his family’s lake home in a previous book. Convinced by the acknowledgement of history by the people of Groß Glienicke, he traveled there to discover that the house was in terrible shape.
 
Against some other voices inside their family, Harding, a few of his relatives, and the villagers of Groß Glienicke came up with a plan to save the little home. They are now building a museum not only about the past, but also a workshop where people from different backgrounds can spend time and connect with one another – as Thomas Harding puts it: “It’s not just focusing on the Jewish history, but also on the East German history, focusing not just on those Nazis but also the Stasi. But also, it talks about what happens today. How are we going to deal with a million newly arrived refugees in Germany? How do we learn the lessons of the past so that the Muslim population is not persecuted the same way the Jewish population was?”

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