The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany [Hardcover]

Katie Hafner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 1995

An American descendant of its wealthy German-Jewish owners tells the human story of a house near Berlin, revealing its Nazi occupation, use as a child-care center, and the building of the Berlin Wall fifty feet from the front door. 25,000 first printing. Tour.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1938, within days of the Nazi orgy of violence called Kristallnacht, German banker Paul Wallich, an assimilated Jew who considered himself Christian, drowned himself to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. His widow, Hildegard Rehrmann, a non-Jew, fled to the U.S., abandoning the family estate, a 19th-century villa in Potsdam. This once elegant, now dilapidated house, which East Germany converted into a combination boarding school/child care center in 1950, is the focus of freelance writer Hafner's memorable, poignant story, which grew out of an article for the New York Times Magazine. Christine Wallach, daughter of Paul and Hildegard's banker son Henry (who emigrated to New York City in 1935), developed a strong attachment to the lost villa during her Connecticut childhood, viewing it as a symbol of a time when her scattered family was together. In 1992, Potsdam authorities' preliminary decision restored the house to the Wallich family, whose efforts to sell it, amid a wave of xenophobic and anti-Semitic violence, have thus far been unsuccessful. The Wallich house, which survived Allied bombing during WWII, serves in these pages as a prism of modern German history. Teachers in the child care center witnessed the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, and saw the Wall torn down in 1989. They also observed East-West spy exchanges on nearby Glienicke Bridge, including the 1986 release of Soviet Jewish human rights activist Anatoly Shcharansky, exchanged for five Eastern Bloc agents. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Hafner, an American journalist, uses the history of a "once elegant, now dilapidated nineteenth-century villa in Potsdam" as a device to examine the social life of post-war Germany and the tensions created by reunification. Located by the Glienicke Bridge (which was known as the "bridge of Spies" in the 1960s), the house belonged to the Wallich family, which was headed by an influential Jewish banker. The rise of the Nazi regime led to death or exile for the Wallichs. Hafner tracks the postwar activities of family members who returned to Germany and the fate of the house, which became a "Kinderwochenheim"-a weekly home for children. She parallels her story of the house with accounts of political changes (centered around the construction and destruction of the Berlin Wall) and the legal claims by the Wallich grandchildren for the house. This fascinating story reveals the impact of postwar politics on ordinary Germans. A greatly abbreviated version appeared in the New York Times Magazine in November 1991. Recommended for public libraries and for academic libraries with strong German collections.
Thomas A. Karel, Franklin & Marshall Coll. Lib., Lancaster, Pa.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Printing edition (February 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684194007
• ISBN-13: 978-0684194004
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #812,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subtle But Worth it, July 31, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany (Hardcover)

Having lived in Germany before, during and after the wall went down,
The House At The Bridge encapsulizes succinctly the emotions of change
that I, and others, saw and felt during Germany's paradigm shift of
politics and society. This story isn't just about a house, but of
families and a country in transition. Ms. Hafner cleverly uses the
house as a common thread to tell the history behind the house's
inhabitants and the political changes that effected them. The
comparisons between (former) East and West Germany are poignant and
real. Any history lover, travel buff or architect(professional or
amateur) will be pleasantly surprised by the story this house tells.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Helluva book, October 17, 2000

By 

Richard in Rhinebeck (Rhinebeck, NY) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany (Hardcover)

If you're interested in getting to the belly of the beast, in this case, the finger-nail crud of unification, look to Katie's absolutely bottom-line insights into the east German perspective. The house is still there, hard by the two-taxi stand as you come across the bridge, ironically just down the wooded lane from where they signed the Potsdam Agreement, and, in its crumbling, grafitti-stained magnificence, it can be seen, if you wish, as some sort of symbol, of what's gone wrong, and what's gone right. with the "new" Germany. The book tells a wonderful tale of brick and mortar and the dreams and ambition it contained. Rarely does the door to a complex turning open so joyously and so widely. Read it and learn how it is.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heimat, January 2, 2006

By 

Mary E. Sibley (Carneys Point, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The House at the Bridge: A Story of Modern Germany (Hardcover)

The property is located in Potsdam. It was the summer house of the Wallichs. After reunification the house still stood. Hermann Wallich had been a banker and an assimilationist. By 1911 the fortune of the Wallichs was thirty one million reichmarks.

Hermann's son Paul and his daughter-in-law became enchanted with the house at Potsdam. During World War II the house served as a library for the Nazis and later as a hospital for wounded Russian soldiers. Paul Wallich committed suicide in 1938. The house was in the Russian sector. During the war three servants stayed in the house. Afterwards, in East Germany, the remaining servant was ordered to leave.

Next the house was used as a kindergarten, such use lasting for some forty years. There were five day a week boarders, the children of socially irresponsible citizens. After the wall went up, the director of the kindergarten began to scheme to leave the country. In 1961 barbed wire went up, seemingly overnight.

The bridge, the Glienicke Bridge, near the house became famous for the exchange of spies. The bridge had first gone up in 1660. Structures near the house were torn down to give the guards a better view in the border zone. The East German childcare system became vast as childbirth was encouraged and it was necessry for mothers to work.

The books shifts its focus from the kindergarten director to a young teacher, Ulrike. Ulrike was friends with Wolfgang, a Marxist dissident who followed a sort of socialist third way. (In East Germany a third of the citizens had Stasi files.)

The night the wall fell Ulrike and her husband were at home with friends playing Irish music. The following day Ulrike walked to her school amid euphoric people. Afterwards the first few weeks were dreamlike. Ulrike and her husband visited the West. Reunification took place in October 1990. Earlier there was a currency union. There were Trabi jokes. Ossies and Wessies were not getting along with each other.

Return of property became a central and contentious debate after unification. Claims started to arrive by the tens of thousand for property lost between 1933 and 1945. What belonged to whom became a matter of central importance. One of the Wallich sons, Henry, had been at Yale and had been on the Federal Reserve Board. His daughter, Christine, was interested in the house at Potsdam. Land registries became artifacts of a capitalist past in East Germany after 1950. The Nazis had kept meticulous records of the deportation of Jewish families.

There were very old trees on the property of the Potsdam house. A scholar sought information on the gardens' original design. The scholar of landscape architecture found the plans of Gustav Meyer. Dirk Heydemann published a one hundred fifty page paper on the garden's design. The Wallich heirs did get their property returned to them. The house is in a state of extreme disrepair. The Wallichs are considering offers to sell the property to developers. The go-go time of real estate fortunes in the early nineties in the vicinity of Berlin has passed.