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“In the sand of Brandenburg, every square foot of ground has its story and is telling it, too – but one has to be willing to listen to these often quiet voices.” Thomas Harding chooses this quote, from Theodor Fontane, to open his personal, yet historically wide-ranging, account. One of Harding’s strengths is his willingness to listen and to record without fanfare the tales of generations of families who lived in the same lakeside house, of winters both beautiful and harrowing, of a garden’s way of counting time, of dreams fulfilled and broken. And tales, too, of dancing to the tune of bureaucracies and regimes of different hues, and how one place – a simple wooden one-level structure – came to represent a haven and sanctuary. For Harding’s grandmother Elsie, daughter of the original owner, the Jewish doctor Alfred Alexander, it was her “soul place” and she mourned it.

Harding’s purpose in revisiting the house in Groß Glienicke, a village on the edge of Berlin, shifts from a personal quest to something more all encompassing. As his knowledge of the building and its past grows, each account shared, each document perused, is another crumb along the path to a complete and very German story.

From the last years of imperial Germany, through the Weimar Republic and the heyday of Berlin in the 1920s, the story goes on to the Wall Street crash and the strain of war reparations and the Third Reich. It continues through Soviet occupation and communist rule, then reunification and the new “Ortsfremde” (“incomers”), thanks to whom the lake is once again used as a weekend retreat. In some ways, this book is the companion piece to Jenny Erpenbeck’s 2011 novel, Visitation, a superb fictional portrait of another Brandenburg house. Both are treasure troves of detail, narrated with a calm dignity.

A love of the land was shown by (almost) all the residents and caretakers of the “Alexander House”: they enjoyed the peace it provided far from the city bustle, and, even in its East Germany days, with border fences and the wall nearby, its quality of being a refuge, a place of ancient rhythms existing underneath the human drama. This was the experience of Otto Wollank, the first owner of the estate at the end of the 19th century, as he contemplated his future: “a thick forest hugged the shore: a mixture of black alder, towering trees, with thin dark trunks, and willows … growing in the sandy soil spread a sweet-smelling blanket of ground elder, lilac and irises. … It was a gentle place, full of potential, yet unhurried and steeped in tradition.” His house was duly built, his farm a model in pioneering agriculture.

The Alexanders leased their parcel of land from Wollank in the 1920s. The doctor, whose patients included Albert Einstein and Marlene Dietrich, was exhausted and wanted some means of escape from Berlin life. Alfred described his family as “three-days-a-year Jews”, who attended synagogue on the two days of Rosh Hashanah and the one day of Yom Kippur, but he resisted all professional pressure to convert to Christianity, and before entering the lake house for the first time he put up a mezuzah in the doorway.

When eventually forced to flee by the Nazis, the Alexanders handed the key to their lawyer, who leased the house to the successful music publisher and composer Willy Meisel and his film star wife. Operettas were created there, many hits of the 1930s, and the radio waves thrummed to Meisel’s tunes. The chapters relating to his time in the lakeside retreat are full of detail on the cultural life at the time, particularly the burgeoning film industry and cabaret scene. When Meisel was forced into exile in 1944, his creative director Hans Hartmann moved in, relieved to have a refuge for his Jewish wife, an opera singer, a “privileged case” who was nonetheless living in great fear. After the war, the keys passed to local village families, who had to adapt to the terrors of Soviet occupation and settle into the rhythms dictated by the newly established country of East Germany.

Yet some aspects of life in the village were shared by all its occupants through the decades – the freezing winters, for instance, with winds blowing from Siberia. According to the Meisel family one winter, “the lake had frozen thick … they could walk safely across its surface, dusted with sparkling icy crystals, amazed by the beauty of the place”. In the 1950s children “built giant ice caves, imagining themselves in some northern wilderness”.

Another theme in the book is the joys of childhood, even in the days of the Berlin airlift, when supplies were flown into the city by western allies: “If they were lucky, as they followed the plane’s last few hundred metres to Gatow, parcels would rain down, each slowed by a tiny parachute.” In a different episode, Bernd, a child of the 1960s when the lake was off-limits, smiles as he watches his son put on his swimming shorts, tear off his shirt and leap into the water, which can now be enjoyed by everyone.

So much has happened to the place Wollank first surveyed, back when land was still measured by the Morgen, the area one man and one ox might till in a morning. It is Harding’s great achievement that he has painted a large canvas of history, but done so with glinting individual stories. He has persevered in listening to those “quiet voices”.

To order The House by the Lake for £16 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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