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

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Synopsis
A Finalist for the Costa Biography AwardLonglisted for the Orwell PrizeNamed a Best Book of the Year byThe Times (London) • New Statesman (London) • Daily Express (London) • Commonweal magazine In the summer of 1993, Thomas Harding traveled to Germany with his grandmother to visit a small house by a lake on the outskirts of Berlin. It had been her “soul place,” she said—a holiday home for her and her family, but also a refuge—until the 1930s, when the Nazis’ rise to power forced them to leave.The trip was his grandmother’s chance to remember her childhood sanctuary as it was. But the house had changed, and when Harding returned once again nearly twenty years later, it was about to be demolished. It now belonged to the government, and as Harding began to inquire about whether the house could be saved, he unearthed secrets that had lain hidden for decades. Slowly he began to piece together the lives of the five families who had lived there: a wealthy landowner, a prosperous Jewish family, a renowned composer, a widow and her children, a Stasi informant. All had made the house their home, and all but one had been forced out.The house had weathered storms, fires and abandonment, witnessed violence, betrayals and murders, and had withstood the trauma of a world war and the dividing of a nation. Breathtaking in scope and intimate in its detail, The House by the Lake is a groundbreaking and revelatory new history of Germany, told over a tumultuous century through the story of a small wooden house.
Copyright:
1945

Book Details

Book Quality:
Publisher Quality
Book Size:
464 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781250065087
Related ISBNs:
9781250065063
Publisher:
Picador
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
music authority, it is probable that it was written much earlier. Meisel spent little time in the village after the war and, given the brutal Russian occupation, it is unlikely that he would have been motivated to write the song after
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
History, Nonfiction, Self-Help, Biographies and Memoirs
Submitted By:
Bookshare Staff
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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