One House, Five Families and 100 Years of German History
In The House by the Lake: One House, Five Families, and a Hundred Years of German History, Thomas Harding* tells the history of twentieth century Germany through the lens of a small vacation home, located on a lake near the outskirts of Berlin, and the five families who owned it.
Harding is not an impartial observer in the tale.
In 2013, he traveled to Germany to visit a small lakeside vacation home that had belonged to his family until the 1930s, when they fled from the Nazi rise to power. He had heard stories about the house his entire life. Now the house that his grandmother has described as her “soul place” was an empty eyesore, scheduled for demolition. The local architectural preservationists told him that if he didn’t want the house to be knocked down, he would have to prove its cultural and historical significance.
The House by the Lake is the outcome of Harding’s attempt to piece together the history of the house and the people who live there. Thanks to the lake house’s location and the nature of the families who occupied it, the history of the house allows Harding to consider the scope of Germany’s history through the intimate details of individual lives. (The construction and demolition of the Berlin Wall, for instance, take on a new immediacy because the wall ran through the land that connected the house to the lake.) The result is a compelling new look at familiar territory.
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
50 Years Before Hilary Clinton: Indira Gandhi
Fifty years ago, on January 24, 1966, Indira Gandhi was sworn into office as India’s third prime minister. She was not the first elected female head of state–that honor goes to Sirivamo Bandaraniake of Sri Lanka. But she was the first woman elected to her country’s highest position who played a visible role on the international political stage.
Like many women who assumed political power in the twentieth century, Gandhi followed in the footsteps of a powerful male relative.* As the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and a major player in India’s independence movement, Indira was active in politics from an early age. When Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri died unexpectedly of a heart-attack, Gandhi was appointed to office as a consensus candidate because the various male contenders for office could not agree among themselves. They assumed Gandhi would be easy to manipulate, but she proved to be anything but a docile place-holder. For three terms and twenty years, Gandhi was a powerful and controversial figure in Indian politics.
Whatever your political preferences, it is worth being reminded that the United States is a relative latecomer in terms of electing a female head of state.
*Not Mahatma Gandhi! Gandhi was her married name.
Photograph by unknown photographer from the Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 bekijk toegang 2.24.01.04 Bestanddeelnummer 929-0811, CC BY-SA 3.0 nl, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37190788
Brunelleschi’s Dome
The architecture book is done. While I was working on it, I wouldn’t have said it was fun. (My Own True Love will corroborate this.) I put in a lot of late nights. I struggled to find a simple way to describe how an arch works.* But along the way I re-read some old favorites, I looked at some gorgeous pictures, I learned some new stuff, and found a book that I want to share with you.
Brunelleschi’s Dome: How A Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture by Ross King combines biography, art history, and clear writing about thorny technological issues to tell the story of how Fillipo Brunelleschi solved a long standing architectural conundrum.
Begun in 1296 by Arnolfo de Cambio, Florence’s cathedral was under construction for 150 years. It was 1418 before the council responsible for constructing the cathedral approved a plan for completing the huge dome that tops the cathedral. The original design called for an enormous dome built using stone rings buried in its masonry rather than external buttresses. The ideal was a dome that would rise above the cathedral with no visible means of support, like the Roman Pantheon.
The man who won the competition, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446), was a goldsmith by training, like many other Renaissance artists and architects, including Michelangelo. Brunelleschi had spent years measuring classical Greek and Roman monuments; he used those lessons in designing the Duomo.** Renaissance Florence being what it was,*** he also got in pissing matches with other Florentine architects and the powerful mason’s guild, which had him arrested for not paying his annual dues.
Whether you’re interested in architecture, the Renaissance, geniuses, or just a well-told story, I recommend Brunelleschi’s Dome. In fact, I enjoyed it enough that I intend to take it on our trip to Florence this fall and re-read it, without the pressure of writing 250 words about building the Duomo.
*Actually, how an arch works wasn’t so bad. How a solar panel works? Yikes!
**In addition to his work on the Duomo, Brunelleschi is known for rediscovering the science of perspective, which allows artists to draw three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional page.
***That is to say, genius, scandals, corruption, politics and poisons–not to mention the Medici.
Photo courtesy of Fczarnowski via a Creative Commons license on Wikipedia.