Berlin's Lake of the Unimaginable

BERLIN -- The sun has risen over the Wannsee, the lake here in this leafy section of the German capital. The day will be hot and the sky a deep blue until afternoon, when the expected thunderstorms arrive. I am writing in the gatehouse of the old Hans Arnhold estate, which is now the American Academy in Berlin. The Arnholds left behind the lakeside vista, the boat basin, the bucolic setting, the imposing house and a prosperous banking business. They ran for their lives.

This is one of my many visits to Berlin, my second to the American Academy, and I still find the history of the city -- the reality of the place -- almost impossible to comprehend. Oh, sure, you know of the Holocaust and the murder of the 6 million. It happened. It's a fact. And we live with it as we do the influenza pandemic of 1918, something that also killed millions -- now, please, can we go on with our lives?

The Arnholds and their neighbors had huge houses, gated like castles in some cases. They were prosperous Jews in a land where Jews were Germans and Germans were Jews -- so intermarried and so much a part of the creative, financial and intellectual leadership of the country that it took the best brains the Nazis had to pry them apart and decide who should live and who should die. The great painter Max Liebermann lived nearby in the house that his widow, Martha, was forced to sell -- Martha, who committed suicide shortly before the police came to arrest her. The house is now open to the public.

So, too, is the much more famous mansion at Wannsee where, in 1942, top Nazis met to devise the "final solution" -- the murder of Europe's remaining Jews. The villa is across the lake from the one where I write. It, too, is open to the public and is now a center for the study of genocide and such matters. The other day, a conference was held there on original testimony, the firsthand accounts of the murder of Jews. That house, too, was once owned by Jews.

Because of its historical significance, there is no more important lake in the entire world than Wannsee. For the same reason, there is no more important neighborhood than this one. There is no more chilling story than that of Germany's Jews and what happened to them. There is no more crashing silence than the gleeful sounds no longer made by children, by shooing nannies, by parents gone and businesses expropriated and houses stolen and people marched here or there, allowed at first to flee, then not, and finally killed.

This is something that happened and you can, if it comforts you, assign it to a category called "Germans" or "Jews" and relate it to nothing else. Or you can dwell on it, wonder about it, and conclude that madness can strike anyone anywhere -- that one day's permanence is the evanescence of the next: Here today, gone tomorrow. You can relate it to today, to the threats coming from Iran or North Korea, to the menace of radical Islam, to the miniaturization of terror, the digitization of warfare -- the combination of ideology with technology. The world -- our world of Paris Hilton silliness -- can change in an instant.

The war in Iraq will take its toll. We rightly question authority and expertise. We increasingly subscribe to what could be called "the privatization of life" -- the worthy notion, once unheard of, that the government has no unquestioned call on the lives of young men. In Iraq, about 3,500 deaths appall us. But before coming to Berlin, I went to Normandy, where Allied forces invaded during World War II and where, by the end of that battle, the United States alone had lost about 30,000 lives. Could we do that today? I wonder. I don't wonder, though, about the possible need to do so.

The sun climbs. Birds dart in and out of the trees. The Arnholds and others must have had a wonderful life here. They had a culture, an identity that was sunk with roots as deep as those of the trees on their estates. It was rich, plump, thick with achievement. I see them and others -- the bankers and writers, the playwrights and composers and the ordinary workers -- swimming in the lake, sunning on the beach, picnicking or maybe just napping. This is Berlin's unparalleled tourist site.

Come here to see what no longer can be seen.

cohenr@washpost.com