Alfred Wegener: Difference between revisions
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Later, Alfred Lothar Wegener was born in Berlin, 1 November 1880. Alfred was the fifth and youngest child of Richard Wegener and Anna Schwarz. His birthplace was a converted Austrian embassy at 57 Friedrichsgracht, a scant few blocks from the Imperial Palace, facing the Spree Canal, on the southeastern side of the island. This structure was home to Schindler Orphanage that housed the Wegener family, the thirty or so orphans in their charge, Richard Wegener's assistants in the teaching and daily supervision of the orphans, and the resident domestics under the direction of Anna Wegener.
=== Zechlinerhütte ===
The Wegeners had by now been in Berlin for sixteen years and had directed the orphanage for eleven of those years. Now they were successful Berliners, in their forties and with a family. They had a grand residence and access to the parks and immense cultural resources of a great capital city. But when all was said and done, they lived in an institution. The Wegener family needed a true home.
Richard and Anna back to rural Brandenburg, to the hamlet of Zechlinerhütte, where Anna had been born. It took them to a plain but spacious house with extensive grounds, fronted by Linden trees and facing a lake. The Wegeners purchased the house, the barn and some adjacent fields for 20,000 marks. The money was provided by Richard's brother Paul, who had taken over the family's uniform factory in Wittstock, as he was pleased to have his brother closer to home again. Built of oak logs and chinked with masonry, the house had been the manager's house of a crystal glass foundry. An undertaking attracted there in the early 18th century by the plentiful fuelwood from the surrounding forests. But the enterprise eventually failed altogether, no longer able to compete with the industrial-scale economies of burgeoning Berlin, leaving the town to eke out a marginal existence concocted by subsistence farming, woodcutting, fishing and catering to the wants of vacationing urbanites and their seasonal homes.
This place, "die Hütte" as Alfred and the other children called it ,was the family home ever after. It was their vacation and summer residence. When the Wegeners set out for "die Hütte", they traveled out of Berlin by train through industrial suburbs with their smoke-belching stacks and furnaces, out into the surrounding farmlands as far as Gransee, 60 kilometers north of Berlin. From Gransee, the parents proceeded through country lanes with the baggage wagon, while the children hiked the final 20 kilometers from the Gransee Station to Zechlinerhütte through the Menzer Forest, passing only scattered farms and lakes and the minuscule hamlet of Menz on the way.
The children loved the succession of stages in the journey. To leave the bustling train station in Berlin with a mountain of luggage and provisions, to disembark two hours later at the village already "at the end of the line" and from there just to walk away out of the town, and keep walking until the road diminished into a sandy cart track with a grassy median and disappeared into the depth of the Menzer Forest. This great wooded tract, completely cut over in the 18th century to feed the glassworks, had sprung back with the dense character of second-growth evergreen forest.
=== Cöllnische Gymnasium ===
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