neglect

I.
I woke up yesterday morning to the sound of steady rain, sighed, and pulled out my laptop and books.  All my plans for a day off seemed dashed.  When, in the early afternoon, the sky cleared, I grabbed my bag and ran.  You can't waste these moments in a Berlin summer.  I took the train down to Wannsee, the lake town at the very outer limits of the city, and stepped out of the station under a blue sky.

For a long time now, I'd intended to visit the House of the Wannsee Conference, but somehow never got around to it, either last year or this summer; and so I went, yesterday, out of a sense of professional obligation and interest.  Independently, I had heard of the Liebermann Villa on a few gardening websites.  These are two interests - the Holocaust and gardens - which I have had for many years; but certainly I never expected them to coincide in any way.  But while I was on my way to the House of the Wannsee Conference, I saw that the next stop was the Liebermann Villa, so I impulsively pushed the button and got off the bus.




II.
In 1909, Max Liebermann - painter and a founder of the Berlin Secession - bought land in Wannssee and built this house and garden.  Fittingly, perhaps, he was an outsider (by religion if not by class) who became a member of the city's elite, and in that sense expressed succinctly the position of so much of the Weimar-era Jewish community.  An early challenger to the artistic establishment, he then became the president of the Prussian Academy of Arts and was made Honorary Citizen of the city of Berlin in the late 1920s.  He and his wife, Martha, also owned an apartment on tony Pariser Platz, perpendicular to the Brandenburg Gate.

After many years of relative neglect, in which the house was used as a hospital and by a scuba-diving club, and the front garden was paved over for parking, it's now run by the privately-financed Max Liebermann Society.  The city of Berlin has owned the property since 1958, but the establishment of the villa as a museum and restoration of the garden are very much a testimony to the passion of private citizens and organizations.

And it's lovely.  Simply lovely.  The garden, which Liebermann designed with the help of Albert Brodersen and Alfred Lichtwark, is sweet and cheerful and surprisingly inventive.  So much has been done with the space without it ever feeling cramped. Vegetable beds full of sturdy tomatoes and artichokes are placed charmingly amongst annuals and boxwood, and so defy their somewhat drab, industrious American cousins.

The lot is fairly narrow but quite long.  In the front, two long mixed beds of annuals and perennials stretch toward the street, lined with low boxwood to tidy the sprawl, and echoed by lines of fruit trees on either side.  Splashes of white temper the brighter colors (and made me reconsider my dislike of red flowers).  Toward the house, shorter beds intersect these borders, parallel to a row of pleached trees that shields the upper half of the house like a screen.  It has been a long time now since I've seen anyone from home, and I was delighted to recognize so many familiar plants - the stock and bee balm beloved by my mother, the rudbeckia grown by my uncle, the cleome that bursts from a neighbor's yard, my great grandmother's hollyhocks, the large round boxwood and peonies like those which I moved to my sister's house - so happily and inventively arranged here.

Dusty green-blue shutters set off the coffee-colored facade of the villa, and French doors open front and back, so that a breeze entering off the lake may flow through the house.  Within, the ceilings are perhaps 12 feet high, the pale herringbone floors surprisingly undamaged.  One room has a small exhibit on Liebermann's art, which some people dutifully studied; but most people entered for the small cafe, then drifted back outside to the long, wide terrace to eat pastries and sip from generous bowls of cappuccino while admiring the lake.  On this Sunday afternoon, the garden and villa were filled with pensioners, parents with toddlers, clusters of teenagers lounging lazily on the front stairs, a lone American.

I wandered around back, past a reconstituted birch grove, down toward the water, where twenty-somethings lay barefoot on the grass and sang American songs, and white-haired couples sat on benches and watched sailboats cross the lake.  Pink liatris grew at the water's edge.  To the right a series of square enclosures, built from clipped beech hedges rather than from brick, and arranged in quiet compositions of red or green, led from shore to house.  From a distance, the red planting beds appeared surprisingly fresh, and the crowd on the terrace surprisingly glamorous.  A few lilacs clustered at the edge of the lawn, one still partially in bloom, a fragrant pink-and-white sprig waving at me in the breeze as though to say: I was waiting for you.

III.
The sky darkened as I walked down the street to the House of the Wannsee Conference, and I quickened my stride.  At the House's enormous iron gate, I hesitated, but an unseen person buzzed me in, so I entered before I was ready and stood there dumbly.  To the right was a sort of gate-house, to the left a path into the woods; straight ahead, the drive led to a bed of lilac flowers in front of a severe stone villa.  There had been a large tour bus parked on the street, and as I walked toward the house I could see that a group of teenaged students was there on a school trip.  "Or you could pose like this," one girl said to another, sticking out her hip in exaggeration as I walked by, and they both giggled, peering at a smartphone.

Briefly, the House of the Wannsee Conference is where, on 20 January 1942, senior German officials met to discuss a plan by Reinhard Heydrich for the "Final solution to the Jewish question" in Europe. Popular history treats it as the place where the Holocaust was "planned," but that is not quite true - both because death by shooting was already underway in the Generalgouvernement; and because exigencies of the war made unfeasible the original plan: to use Jews mostly as forced labor until they died.  Like the Liebermann Villa, it was not treated as a site of any importance for many decades after the war.  Though survivor and historian Joseph Wulf had argued for its historical importance and the need for a museum since 1965, only in 1992 did the memorial center open.

"Right, so you start here, then go around that way, to the left, and then continue on to the right," a British teacher was instructing some students, and so I did, too.  The left side of the exhibition touches all the bases of contemporary Holocaust scholarship and pedagogy: the presentation of prewar Jewish life in Weimar Germany, both in big cities like Berlin and small towns like Wendecken, so as not to reduce vanished communities to their ends; the long-denied role of the Wehrmacht in carrying out the killings in the East; Jewish resistance movements; non-German nationalists who murdered Jews in countries like Lithuania; even a brief mention of Leni Riefenstahl.  It's the sort of dispassionate, scholarly exhibition that one sees also at the Topography of Terror - the latter, not coincidentally, also a site where the Holocaust was planned rather than executed.  The rooms are hung with black-and-white photos, figures, maps, and mimeographed documents, and you can sit and listen in German or English to the testimony of survivors and perpetrators.  If this exhibition provides general context, the right side more specifically focuses on the bureaucrats who helped plan the Holocaust, in this very building and elsewhere.  Walls are hung with photos and figures explaining the role of the Foreign Office, the Reich Ministry for Occupied Territories, the Office of the Plenopotentiary for the Four Year Plan.  One may leaf through books of photocopied documents, while others, under glass, have been translated into English.  Another room examines the extermination and death camps, and the controversial Jewish councils and police in the ghettos.  One exits through a narrow hallway hung with musings on the burden of history by survivors and émigrés (Ignatz Bubis, Primo Levi, Fritz Stern and others) and the descendants of both perpetrators and victims.

Aside from a tour group of earnest Germans in their sixties, it was just me and 1,000 British teenagers.  Some of them picked up the taped interviews and held them for a few seconds, or awkwardly studied the photos, but many of them seemed bored, and even the most interested of them seemed uncertain of how to behave.  The House of the Wannsee Conference is an historic site that rigidly disavows any sort of theatricality, even at the cost of being interesting.  This is no Holocaust Memorial Museum with piles of shoes.  It is as though here, at this place of planning, the curators felt the need to hew close to the bone, to make the history as dry as possible, to say: Yes, you've seen the sexy, emotionally exploitative movies about violence and suffering.  Here's the infrastructure, the engineering, the facts.  - And of course, such history is dead to these students.  I thought, What will they remember on the bus ride back to the hotel, let alone in five years?

After I had viewed the exhibit, I walked around the side of the house.  It had not rained, after all, though the clouds had settled in comfortably and the villa and lake were doused with a grey gloom.  To the south, a formal garden seemed neglected and colorless.  Most of the large trees were unpruned, their canopies untidy like a woman who has not brushed her hair.  A path led through the woods down toward the lake, where sailboats minded their own business and ignored the clouds above.  A large tour boat chugged steadily along.  Looking back at the house, I noticed how from most angles it half-hid behind a tangle of shrubs and trees and weeds grown tall. But then, I thought, I suppose there is a question of how inviting you want to make the gardens of a place like this, even were money no object.  It is not meant to be a place of beauty, is it; and one senses that only grudgingly do they fulfill their debt to historical accuracy by having a garden at all.

A separate path, through a shade garden of ferns and rhododendrons, took me back up to the entrance and out the gate.  As I walked, I could hear the light clanging of the sailboats moored in a nearby marina.  Only when I left did I notice the rather inappropriately-named "Sanssouci" biergarten and restaurant next door, beckoning passers-by to come in and enjoy the view.

IV.
With the Nazi ascension to power, Liebermann was a member of no elite.  It must have been a sour end to his life, and he died early in 1935.  In 1940, Martha Liebermann, his widow, was forced to "sell" the villa to the German Post; she received no money for it.  By that time, of course, there remained in Berlin mostly those Jews who could not leave, often because they were too old to get visas.  In early March 1943, Martha was informed that she was to be deported to Theresienstadt, the "model city" to which many children and elderly Jews were sent, thence to be deported again to a death camp if they did not first die from neglect.  From the villa at Wannsee, it is not 20 minutes to Grunewald Station, to which she would have been told to report, and from which, beginning in 1942, most of the remaining Jews in Berlin were deported.  She was also informed that she must pay a "flight tax" for the privilege of leaving.  Destitute and desperate, we are told, she instead chose to take an overdose of sleeping pills and Barbital, and died a few days later.