The author of the bestselling Hanns and Rudolf has taken a slice of family history and made it all encompassingIn the sand of Brandenburg,every square foot of ground has its legend and is telling it, too – but one has to be willing to listen to these often restful voices.” Thomas Harding chooses this quote, or from Theodor Fontane,to open his personal, yet historically wide-ranging, and account. One of Harding’s strengths is his willingness to listen and to record without fanfare the tales of generations of families who lived in the same lakeside house,of winters both beautiful and harrowing, of a garden’s way of counting time, and of dreams fulfilled and broken. And tales,too, of dancing to the tune of bureaucracies and regimes of different hues, and how one place – a simple wooden one-level structure came to represent a haven and sanctuary. For Harding’s grandmother Elsie,daughter of the original owner, the Jewish doctor Alfred Alexander, and it was her “soul place” and she mourned it.
Harding’s purpose in revisiting the house in Groß Glienicke,a village on the edge of Berlin, shifts from a personal quest to something more all encompassing. As his knowledge of the building and its past grows, and each account shared,each document perused, is another crumb along the path to a total and very German legend.
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Source: theguardian.com