Frank Harding's letter to his family on Alexander Haus

By Frank Harding, grandson of Dr Alfred Alexander

8 April 2014

Dear family

As many of you will know, I was somewhat cool on the proposed Glienicke project – that was until this last weekend. I decided to join 13 other members of the family in Berlin for the clean-up day on the so called Alexander Haus and am very pleased to have done so.

I arrived somewhat late for the Saturday morning exercise as I only flew to Berlin that morning and got to the site of the house at 10.30. By then much of the inside furnishings, clothes, equipment that had lain rotting in this empty house for some years had been removed and placed in the largest industrial skip I have ever seen. A gang comprising family members and neighbours, members of the Groß Glienicke (GG) community, were busy emptying the house, cutting down and clearing saplings and shrubbery from the garden and generally tidying up the place. In between the work, there was an opportunity to meet and talk to those members of the community.

Frank Harding pushing wheelbarrow during Alexander Haus Clean-up Day, 5 April 2014

I spoke to a number of people, and they all had  similar objectives – to clean up the house and garden, obtain approval from the Potsdam local authority, which owns the plot of land and thus the house, to have it restored for future use as a

Community facility and a building to commemorate those in GG and elsewhere who had suffered at the hands of the Germans – probably both those who suffered under the Nazis and those who had suffered under the regime of East Germany. However we all  seemed to recognise that the project provides the opportunity to show that this is a time for reconciliation, whereby the members of the local community could recognise the ills that were meted out by previous generations and the Jews, as represented by  the family, could come closer together and look to a better future with a greater understanding of how to live and work together for that future.

In the afternoon there was a meeting of members of the GG community, some 60-80 being present.  It was addressed by a senior member of the local council who, before explaining what had been happening at the house that morning and introducing Thomas, put the project in context by playing recordings of some of Hitler’s and Himmler’s speeches castigating the Jews. He then went on to say that the Alexander Haus, and others in the area, had been vacated owing to their occupiers fleeing to save their lives. Thomas then gave a short history of the family in Berlin, in English but well translated by Moritz, a very keen supporter of the project, and their use and enjoyment of the Haus, their flight from Germany and their arrival in England. An extract of the 1933/36 cine film recently found by Peter was then shown. At one stage it stopped. A member of the group asked who the person then on screen was and I answered, in German, that it was my mother. That lead to my being asked a number of questions to which I was able to respond that I had been born in London and that, although my parents spoke English as much as possible and certainly outside the home, I had picked up the language from hearing it spoken between them at home. I was also able to explain that Papi, having been a leading doctor in Berlin, had to requalify in Edinburgh in his late fifties in order to continue to practise. I think that these responses brought home to the group, many of whom would have been in their fifties or sixties themselves, what it was to lose one’s homeland, career etc. They became, I think, even more supportive of the project.

It became clear as the day progressed that the politicians present were themselves increasingly persuaded and they said that they would seek and obtain the support of their colleagues which should, it is hoped, lead to the house and at least some of the land on which it sits, being given by Potsdam to the foundation which Thomas has established to own, refurbish and run the building in the future.

There is a website www.alexanderhaus.org on which information and pictures of the weekend can be found.

As you may have guessed, I am now a supporter.

Frank

Reconciliation and Transformation. Nothing substitutes for personal experience

By Amanda Harding

 Writing on the 20th anniversary of the Rwanda Genocide and just one month after commemorating 25 years after the chemical bombings of Halabja and the Anfal campaign against the Iraqi Kurds, peace and reconciliation, so easy to say and yet so hard to attain, are phrases yet again being bandied around. Division and conflict, difference and exclusion, discrimination and injustice dominate our lives. Having worked in many conflict zones, been close to communities and families as they live through and emerge from conflict; seen and accompanied thousands as they uproot and flee with what they can carry; been deeply moved and privileged to see families reunited with lost children; facilitated the re-integration of child soldiers back into their villages years after they left; seen political leaders struggle to transit from rebel movements to legitimate representative powers … Reconciliation and transformation has been my bread and butter.

Yet this weekend I experience it for the first time.

This weekend I was privileged to be part of the (re) birth of a community. This was a coming together of different groups, each with their own very legitimate and complex baggage that has been pulling them back over generations, extending difference, guilt and ambivalence, preparing the land for further division and conflict, exclusion and hatred. It was a collective coming-out of sorts. A time to pause, reflect and re-set the direction. A time to re-wire and re-programme.

I would like to think that we’re turned the corner for good. At least at the very local and personal scale where each of us that is involved and is able to operate. My idealism makes me wonder if we’ve even started the shift for and with future generations. There is no doubt that the potential is there.

So what is this all about?   My great grandfather Dr Alfred Alexander, a highly educated, cultured and successful Berlin doctor in the 1920s decided he and his family needed a “country” house to get away from their sophisticated and frenetic city life. On the banks of Gross Glieneke Zee they were the first to build a simple, elegant weekend house. They invited their friends for tennis, picnics, boat trips and swimming – until 1936 when the family fled Germany leaving behind not only their property but also a life, culture and memories impossible to re-assemble. Since then the property has past from Nazi hands to the East German State and then to the City of Potsdam. The Berlin Wall traversed the garden separating the house from the lake, families crowded in when housing was scarce and in more recent years the house was squatted, by junkies and finally last summer by a family of foxes.

This weekend was billed as the “clean up” weekend. The community of Gross Glieneke worked alongside members of the Alexander family (spanning three generations) filling an enormous city skip with years of accumulated junk left in the house, clearing the land around the house, making it safe, clean and prepared for the possibility of a new existence. While we worked, shared coffee, snacked on chocolate and cake, we were visited by both local and national media, cameras in the air, excited by a story that moves beyond retribution and historical sign-posting to forward looking reconciliation and creativity. Local politicians, curious yet doubtful, shifted from their normal sceptical stance with an eye on land values to enthusiasm for a project where their political capital can only increase. We uncovered the original floor boards, the Delft tiles imported in the 1920s above the fireplace, the rare inbuilt cupboards, wood-panelled walls and crazy paving from the terrace overlooking the lake. Newspaper pages, used to insulate the house, from each of its periods of habitation have been kept.

And yet more astonishing than the hard physical work and the sense of camaraderie was the mutual recognition of past pain and anger, guilt and separation alongside the desire to acknowledge the past and create for the future. This could not have been more evident than during the singing of Friday night Shabbat prayers in the Abraham House, a beautifully restored 1927 Jewish House in the village. For the first time in 75 years candles were lit, wine blessed and bread shared, again across generations and communities. The following day the local village cultural and historic association inaugurated a new exhibition, integrating a presentation and discussion of the Alexander family and the house. Again, with Alexander family members present a room packed to capacity, the combination of radio clips of both Hitler and Himmler declaring the Final Solution; the extraordinary journey of the Alexander torah that dates from the 1790s, arrived from Berlin in London wrapped in a carpet in 1937 to then be read as continuing rites of passage from childhood to adulthood and membership of community by today’s generation; and the gasp of astonishment when the community heard German spoken from this “foreign family” describing both life in Berlin in the 1920s but also what it was like to grow up in London with the memories of Germany fresh in his parents’ minds.

This notion of one community, despite geographical dislocation and language barriers, was able to identify not only a common past but more importantly a common future. In making ourselves vulnerable, a willingness to take risk, to expose ourselves and be prepared to share what is clearly intimate and deeply personal we moved collectively from what a local project with historic possibility to a social project with an assured future. This future is still fragile, trust is still to be gained but the foundations have been built.

Clean up day 2014!

The Clean Up Day was a huge success. Over 30 people from the local community, 14 members of the Alexander family flew from England. The local and national newspapers covered the event, a documentary crew was there to film it. At the start of the day the house was filled with garbage, at the end of the day, after heroic efforts, the Alexander House was clean.

Thank you everyone for your help! For more photos click here

Jewish families in Groß Glienicke booklet

The Culture and History Association (Kreis) of Groß Glienicke have published a booklet on the Jewish families who lived close to the lake. From their research in archives they found that over 25% of the local population before the Second World War were Jewish.

You can find more information on this booklet and the research at their website

Clean up day confirmed - 5th April

It is now confirmed that there will be a Clean Up Day of the Alexander Haus on 5 April 2014 starting at 10am. 

Attending the clean up will be thirteen members of the Alexander family who are flying from the UK to take part. They will join members of the Groß Glienicke History and Culture Kreis as well as members of the local community. 

Everyone is invited to join. 

After the event, Winfried Sträter, deputy mayor of Groß Glienicke, will make a presentation on the history of the house. A film taken in the 1930s will also be shown by the Alexander family.