for Ingrid

 

Today, 80 years after the end of the bloody Second World War and the final liberation of Germany from disgusting and miserable fascism, I would like to write about a peaceful place with a special history. The fact that peace has prevailed in the heart of Europe for so long is, historically speaking, not really a self-evident matter. And unfortunately, one war often leads to another. This has been the case in Europe for centuries, with hundreds of wars in the last 500 years alone. And the current war in Ukraine is just as much a part of this, because it can also be seen as a direct successor to the Second World War, at least the Russian war narrative provides daily proof of this with the abstruse claim that the only thing being fought in Ukraine is against Nazis, while the current Ukrainian President Selensky is a Jew!

But here in the garden and in the whole country there is peace today, what happiness! But it’s not just a biotope like this that needs looking after. And this peaceful green idyll has been maintained for decades by a still very sprightly enthusiast called Ingrid, who is now 87 years old. However, she can no longer do as much as she used to, so things are getting wilder and more pristine here in her beloved garden. A storm knocked down birch trees in the garden many years ago, but there is nothing left to see of the old trunks and branches, as they have since been completely overgrown by all kinds of moss, grasses and plants, so that they have become one with the earth from which they once grew. So everything here has taken its usual natural course to the delight of insects and birds, who are offered a beautiful retreat with all kinds of hiding places in the very eastern part of Berlin.

In the 19th century, this was still a completely rural area, and for a long time this land also served as a gypsy camp far from the gates of aspiring Berlin. Towards the end of the 19th century, a senior forestry official of the Prussian government acquired this area and built a country house here, where he also carried out botanical experiments and planted rare trees on a trial basis, for example. This country house for the summer has survived all the historical turmoil and still stands here today. Probably for financial reasons, the forestry official then sold the property and house to a Jewish family in the early 1920s, who found a new home here for a while.

Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany in 1933 and the associated inhuman anti-Semitic rage of the Nazis in the country forced the Jewish family into exile in the USA and England. Fortunately, they did this very quickly in 1933, when it was still relatively easy for Jews to simply turn their backs on Germany. Ingrid’s parents, who were friends with the Jewish family, now moved into the old country house as tenants and also took care of all the formalities associated with the house. They acquired part of the property which today forms this fascinating garden. The country house itself was confiscated by the Nazis at some point and sold to a German master baker.

During the GDR era, this was then managed as a special asset and was only under communal administration (in the absence of the Jewish owners). In 1958, the Jewish family once again visited Germany, their old no-longer-home and also their friends here in the old country house. There was later still some correspondence across the ocean, which eventually dried up, but Ingrid’s family continued to live here on a rental basis until the early 1990s. Then, after the end of the GDR, the house was transferred back to the descendants of the Jewish family from the USA, who also came back to Berlin to the house of their ancestors for all the formalities. Thanks to legal documents and papers from the Weimar period that were kept here by Ingrid’s family, the restitution was relatively easy. However, the garden had been legally sold in 1933 and therefore remained in the possession of Ingrid’s family.

Here in the garden you can still find all kinds of relics of times long past, which are slowly disappearing into a new jungle. Today, there is a stumbling block on the sidewalk in front of the old country house, which commemorates the former Jewish residents of the house who were forced to seek their fortune in the big wide world far away.