Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Mathias Doepfner, the chief executive officer of Axel Springer AG, drives past Villa Schoeningen twice a day -- once on his way to work in Berlin and again on his way home to Potsdam.

For a long time, the run-down, empty house by Glienicke Bridge, which connects Potsdam to Berlin over the Havel River, wasn’t for sale. Doepfner, 46, kept asking. Then one day in 2007 the owner called to say that the villa was on the market and that another buyer was ready to sign the next day.

“I was sure of one thing: If I didn’t seize the chance now, I would be annoyed twice a day for the rest of my life,” Doepfner writes in the catalog for the house, now open to the public as a museum of the Cold War. “Once in the morning on the way to Berlin, and once in the evening on the bridge back to Potsdam’s dreamy landscape of palace gardens.”

So Doepfner jumped in, saving the villa from demolition, and enlisting Leonhard Fischer, CEO of Brussels-based financial investor RHJ International SA, as a partner in the venture. The museum is financed purely with private funds and the owners say they aren’t expecting it to be profitable, though they hope to cover some costs with an admission fee.

After renovation, the roomy villa casts a rich, creamy reflection onto the calm Havel, which here has the proportions of a lake. Doepfner and Fischer this month opened the museum on the ground floor to the public and a gallery for contemporary art upstairs. At the opening, they said they wanted to turn the house into what it has never been: “a place for happiness and freedom.”

Spy Swaps

Glienicke Bridge was on the border between East and West during the Cold war and the site for nail-biting spy swaps between the Soviet empire and the West in 1962, 1985 and 1986. Agents crossed a white line in the middle of the bridge marking the border that has since been erased by 20 years of traffic.

It’s a historic spot, and also a beautiful one. The villa has a garden also open to the public, a cafe and views across the Havel to the forests and villas at the edge of Berlin.

The house was built in 1843-1845 by Ludwig Persius, the architect of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. The king aimed to turn parts of Berlin and Potsdam into a big garden, and the landscape is a Unesco-protected World Heritage site.

Banking Family

For 100 years, the villa was owned by the Wallich family of Jewish bankers, who lived there until 1939. Under Nazi persecution, Paul Wallich was forced to sell the bank and committed suicide shortly after Kristallnacht, the night of the pogroms against Jews, in November 1938. His children were already abroad and his wife managed to escape.

The Nazis used the house as a library and military office during the war, and the Soviet Red Army seized it in 1945. During the years of the Cold War, the villa was a children’s home, located directly on the “Death Strip” surrounding West Berlin. In 1992, it was restituted to the Wallich family, and has been uninhabited since 1999.

A multimedia exhibition shows videos of interviews with former leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush. A particularly fascinating film tells the story of the spies swapped on the bridge, through interviews with former CIA chiefs James Schlesinger and William Colby, KGB officers, the exchanged agents themselves and archived footage.

Upstairs is a temporary exhibition of contemporary art called “1989,” with bright, big paintings by Neo Rauch and intriguing snowscapes with glimpses through the ice into another world by the dissident Soviet artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. These are joined by Josephine Meckseper’s critical musings on the capitalist world and Marcel Odenbach’s video art dealing with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The show runs through Feb. 14.

Before Villa Schoeningen opened to the public, there was nothing except a commemorative plaque for tourists at Glienicke Bridge, though the name resonates with anyone who remembers the Cold War. Villa Schoeningen is a focal point, a place to relax in nature, reminisce and marvel at how much the world has changed, not only in 20 years, but over the past century.

For more information, see http://www.villa-schoeningen.de.

(Catherine Hickley is a writer for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Catherine Hickley in Berlin at chickley@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 18, 2009 19:00 EST