The lake is a relic of the last glaciation, one of thousands of shallow basins the retreating ice scraped into the sandy Barnim upland and then filled. It sits inside the Barnim Nature Park, between the villages of Wandlitz, Prenden and Klosterfelde, about fifteen kilometres beyond the Berlin city boundary. The surrounding land came to the city in 1919, when Berlin bought up the estates of the Lanke manor, and that purchase is the reason a lake in Brandenburg is the property of a city in another state. Ecologically it is unremarkable and, precisely because nothing was ever built on its banks, quietly intact: reeds, alder carr, a nature trail with information boards, and forest in every direction.

In 1936 the Berlin city administration made Goebbels a present for his thirty-ninth birthday: lifetime use of the Bogensee and 496 hectares of forest around it. A blockhouse came first. Then, in 1939, the architects Juergen and Heinrich Schweitzer, working with Hugo Constantin Bartels, put up a main house of 1,600 square metres on a natural stone base - thirty private rooms, forty service rooms, a hundred-square-metre cinema, sixty telephones, its own waterworks and treatment plant, air conditioning, a guest house with quarters for the SS, and from 1944 a bunker of its own. UFA, the film company his ministry controlled, contributed 1.5 million Reichsmarks toward the cost. Film stars came out for the weekend: Zarah Leander, Emil Jannings, Heinz Ruehmann. The house has since acquired a tabloid reputation as the place Goebbels entertained actresses whose careers depended on him. The plainer description is that the man in charge of Nazi propaganda had a private cinema in the woods, paid for by the industry he controlled.

The Soviet Military Administration took the property in 1945, and in April 1946 the Free German Youth opened a school there; in 1950 it was named for Wilhelm Pieck. From 1951 Hermann Henselmann, later East Berlin's chief architect, designed a lecture building and dormitories in the heavy classical manner the state then favoured, and a second phase after 1980 added a sports hall and more accommodation. The main auditorium was fitted with the second-largest simultaneous-interpretation system in East Germany: eighteen language booths and five hundred and sixty seats, because by the 1970s the students being trained here came from Chile, Greece, Grenada and Denmark as well as from the socialist bloc, and West German communists came too. For forty-four years this quiet lake in the pines was where the East German youth movement made its functionaries. The school closed in 1990.

After that, tenants came and went - an international social work association from 1991 to 1999, then Berlin's forestry administration - and since about 2005 most of the buildings have stood empty and deteriorating. They are listed monuments, so knocking them down is neither simple nor cheap; the demolition figure quoted publicly runs to around fifty million euros, while simply keeping the site standing costs the city on the order of a quarter of a million euros a year. In May 2024 Berlin's finance senator, Stefan Evers, offered the property to anyone prepared to take on its restoration, for nothing. Applicants are vetted, because the one outcome the city will not tolerate is the complex passing to the far right. Earlier that year a false story circulated on social media claiming that Volodymyr Zelensky had bought the place; he had not. A forest school still runs in one of the side buildings, taking children out among the trees, which is the only part of the estate doing anything useful at all.