IN SEPTEMBER 2018, the fashion designer Maria Koch sent her husband, the magazine editor Joerg Koch, the real estate listing for a two-story, Alpine-style house at the eastern edge of Berlin’s Grunewald forest. From the street, it resembled something out of a Bavarian fairy tale: exposed wooden beams, decorative wrought-iron window grids and a white stucco facade with a gabled roof. Compared to the other houses in the wealthy neighborhood of Schmargendorf — “white palazzos, really tacky stuff,” says Joerg — this one stood out.

But inside, wall-to-wall cream carpeting and silk curtains made it look more like a stage set from a 1980s soap opera. The 7,500-square-foot, four-bedroom home, which was constructed in 1935, had been vacant for over a year following the death of its most recent resident, the 103-year-old matriarch of a furniture-dealing family who’d owned the place since the 1950s. There were dark spots on the wall where Flemish Renaissance paintings once hung, and most of the tiles on the first-floor indoor pool had fallen off. Joerg, 49, who was raised about 300 miles west of Berlin in the city of Wuppertal, recalls the property manager who showed them around saying, “The house has an interesting history. It was built for a German filmmaker. You work in the creative industry — maybe you know her.” He and Maria, 48, who is from Göttingen in central Germany, could think of only one person it might be. After confirming their suspicions — that the first owner was Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Nazi propaganda films “Triumph of the Will” (1935) and the two-part “Olympia” (1938) — they realized that an infamous photo of her posing next to Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler was taken in the backyard garden during a tea party.

ImageIn the living room, a pair of Konstantin Grcic chairs face a window onto the garden.Credit...Mikael Olsson

The first-time buyers were torn. On the one hand, after nearly two years of searching, they’d finally come across a house that fit their needs and budget. On the other, the building’s anachronistic charm was a permanent reminder of its unsettling past; had Riefenstahl not lived there, the property, which has been classified as a historical monument, probably would have been destroyed, like so many other old houses in the neighborhood. And while Riefenstahl herself didn’t design it, as Maria is quick to point out, the architects who oversaw the project, Hans Ostler and Ernst Petersen, were given strict orders to make something that reminded their client of the mountains, which she’d loved since childhood.

The couple says that neither of them is especially interested in the work of a director known as much for her cinematic genius as for her stubborn refusal to express remorse. “I never joined the Nazi party,” she says in the documentary “The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” (1993). “Where does my guilt lie?” After the war, though, she was certainly seen as having been a Nazi sympathizer. She sold the house in 1953 for about $7,000 and devoted the latter part of her career to photography; in 2003, she died at age 101 in her home near the Bavarian Alps. “I can’t really detach my feelings [about her] from the work,” says Maria. “We have friends who even collect some of her photographs. I could never.”

ImageNext to the 40-foot-long indoor pool, “Calypso,” a 2019 work by the Berlin-based French Swiss artist Julian Charrière.Credit...Mikael Olsson. Artwork on floor: Julian Charrière, “Calypso,” 2019 © Julian Charrière and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, Germany

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