Whenever I have time, I go to the countryside to look at old houses. It seems that every house has it’s story. This house, I found in Grube in the beautiful Prignitz. Last summer
I sat in the park of Grube castle, having a piece of cake and a cup of tea, enjoying the peace and silence of this wonderful village. My eyes wandered over the village green with it’s old half-timbered church and the small, lovingly renovated brick houses that surrounded it. There only was one house, that still waited to be brought back to life by some wealthy prince, who would come and fall in love with it. In the past, it might have been a farm worker’s or day laborer’s house, now it was used to store gardening tools. In the front there even was an old hand pump. I imagined a family living there, the parents working hard on the fields at the manorial estate. There probably were many mouths to feed, some children might have died young of consumption, those surviving were to serve their masters, either in the manorial house or as farm workers. Or maybe they had left for Wittenberge, to work in a factory, building the famous Singer sewing machines? At the end of World War II it must have hosted German refugees from what is now Russia and Poland. And one day, those who lived there, could afford to move out, maybe build a house of their own or move into an apartment with a bathroom and central heating. And the house was abandoned…..
If this house could tell it’s story…..