Endpapers E-Book

Alexander Wolff

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

'Remarkable lives in extraordinary times - a gripping and exceptional literary journey.' Philippe Sands 'Alexander Wolff is keen, after a generation of silence, to follow the untold stories wherever they might lead.' Claire Messud, Harpers Magazine 'As riveting as the fiction the Wolffs themselves have published, and deeply affecting.' Newsweek In 2017, acclaimed journalist Alexander Wolff moved to Berlin to take up a long-deferred task: learning his family's history. His grandfather Kurt Wolff set up his own publishing firm in 1910 at the age of twenty-three, publishing Franz Kafka, Émile Zola, Anton Chekhov and others whose books would be burned by the Nazis. In 1933, Kurt and his wife Helen fled to France and Italy, and later to New York, where they would bring books including Doctor Zhivago, The Leopard and The Tin Drum to English-speaking readers. Meanwhile, Kurt's son Niko, born from an earlier marriage, was left behind in Germany. Despite his Jewish heritage, he served in the German army and ended up in an prisoner of war camp before emigrating to the US in 1948. As Alexander gains a better understanding of his taciturn father's life, he finds secrets that never made it to America and is forced to confront his family's complex relationship with the Nazis. This stunning account of a family navigating wartime and its aftershocks brilliantly evokes the perils, triumphs and secrets of history and exile.

Leseprobe

ENDPAPERS

Also by Alexander Wolff

The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama

Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure

Raw Recruits (with Armen Keteyian)

First published in the United States of America in 2021 by Grove Atlantic First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © Alexander Wolff, 2021

The moral right of Alexander Wolff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

Excerpt from Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell, translation copyright © 2001 by Anthea Bell (Hamish Hamilton 2001, Penguin Books 2002). Used by permission of Random House, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Same excerpt, copyright © The Estate of W. G. Sebald, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.

Excerpts from ‘Kurt Wolff Tagebücher, October 23, 1914, to June 28, 1915,’ used by permission of Deutsches Literaturarchiv-Marbach.

A portion of this book appeared in different form in Sports Illustrated and on SI.com.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 645 3

E-book ISBN 978 1 61185 889 1

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press UK

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

For Frank and Clara,American, German—citizens

Every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it’s all white, how do the squirrels know where they’ve buried their hoard? . . . How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what is it we find in the end?

—W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

CONTENTS

Prologue

Introduction

One: Bildung and Books

Two: Done with the War

Three: Technical Boy and the Deposed Sovereign

Four: Mediterranean Refuge

Five: Surrender on Demand

Six: Into a Dark Room

Seven: A Debt for Rescue

Eight: An End with Horror

Nine: Blood and Shame

Ten: Chain Migration

Eleven: Late Evening

Twelve: Second Exile

Thirteen: Schweinenest

Fourteen: Turtle Bay

Fifteen: Mr. Bitte Nicht Ansprechen

Sixteen: Shallow Draft

Seventeen: Play on the Bones of the Dead

Eighteen: The End, Come by Itself

Epilogue

Acknowledgments and Sources

Bibliography

Image Credits

Notes

Index

PROLOGUE

Ajab of his elbow, and my father: “It’s like the Gestapo!”

For me, a teenager during the seventies in suburban Rochester, New York, access to what my father called “the Glot zo fon” was strictly limited: a sitcom on weekend evenings, a game on Saturday or Sunday, nothing on school nights, until the great exception, that stretch during 1973 when, weekdays in prime time, public television rebroadcast hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate.

Until that point I had suffered my father’s interests. At sixteen, I hardly wanted a place on his turf of chamber music and kit radios and things to be found under the hood of a car. Nor would he edge toward mine, where British art rock and the fortunes of the Knicks ruled. But Washington blood sport engrossed us both. We followed our team and scouted out theirs, memorizing rosters of names with Rs and Ds attached. And we agreed that some cosmic casting director had had a hand in Senator Sam Ervin’s jowls and John Dean’s wife and a witness named Anthony Ulasewicz, who was Runyonesque relief to American viewers but to my father the kind of cop with a conscience that the Germany of his youth had failed to sufficiently produce.

I would come to understand what drew my father to the TV each evening. Born into the Weimar Republic, not quite twelve when Adolf Hitler came to power, he was now a citizen of another country and savored this second chance to stand up for democracy. Homework could wait. On school nights I found a place on the couch next to him, to share the first thing over which we really connected.

Until one day our weeknight miniseries spilled into the weekend, with what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre. First one Justice Department official, then a second, was dismissed for failing to carry out President Nixon’s demand to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Nixon’s assault on the rule of law helped lead the House to pass the articles of impeachment that led to his resignation.

For my father this all came more than thirty years too late. But he kindled to the thrill of it—the thrill of watching public servants of this country to which he now belonged refuse on principle to follow orders.

ENDPAPERS

Cover of 1927 Almanac of Art and Poetry, published by Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich Woodcut by Frans Masereel from the graphic novel Le Soleil, published by KWV in 1920 as Die Sonne

Street scene in Lübeck, August 1936Photograph by Nikolaus Wolff, age fifteen

INTRODUCTION

In the Footsteps of Kurt and Niko

This is a story that spans the lives of my grandfather and father, two German-born men turned American citizens. It recounts the fortunes of each—the first an exile, the second an emigrant—based on a year I spent in Berlin, taking the measure of blood and history in the midst of rising rightist populism on both sides of the Atlantic.

My grandfather was a book publisher who commanded the German literary landscape before World War I. Kurt Wolff had been born to a mother of Jewish descent, but it was his eye for das Neue, the new, that would put him at odds with the times, as Adolf Hitler and his repressive and hateful politics grew more and more popular. A balky peace, hyperinflation, and social turmoil conspired to undermine the Kurt Wolff Verlag, until he was forced to shut down his publishing house in 1930. Three years later Kurt fled Nazi Germany, eventually landing in New York, where in 1941 he founded Pantheon Books. He left behind my father, Nikolaus Wolff, who served in the Wehrmacht —the armed forces of the Third Reich—and wound up in an American POW camp before emigrating to the United States in 1948.

From my birth in 1957 until my father’s death fifty years later, the prevailing winds of assimilation kept his eyes trained ahead. I contented myself with a seat in that boat, facing those calm waters. The fresh-start conformism of postwar America did nothing to encourage him to glance backward, and if he didn’t look back, I was hardly moved to do so. I joined him in making our way through the world with purpose and hard work. Germans call this therapy by industriousness “taking the Arbeitskur.”

But a decade after my father’s death, having just turned sixty, I found myself being pulled back through the years. I wanted a better sense of the European chapters in the lives of my forefathers and the bloody period in which they unfolded. I was moved more than anything by a nagging sense of oversight—a feeling that I had failed somehow in not investigating my family’s past. Germans of my generation grilled their elders about National Socialism, asking parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, what they had known and what they had done. In Germany the convulsions of the sixties and early seventies came with dope and rock and civil unrest, to be sure, but also with the belief that the Wirtschaftswunder, the West German economic boom, had been enabled by a corporate and political establishment studded with ex-Nazis. A younger generation charged its elders with suspending accountability and remembrance and indulging in an Arbeitskur writ large. A broadly held willingness to take up and work through questions of guilt, shame, and responsibility, known as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, or “working off the past,” has since become a marker of modern Germany.

A German cousin—my father’s godson and his namesake, exactly my age and a fellow journalist—asked me pointedly why we decided to up and move to Berlin. You, I replied, took up the whole “working off the past” thing long ago. As an American, I never did. Cousin Niko understood right away. He had spent his youth brandishing his countercultural sympathies, taking part in the “purification ritual for the sins of the fathers.” But surely I could be excused for being late to that work. Our family —the Wolffs of Wilmington, Delaware; Princeton, New Jersey; and Rochester, New York—was hardly German anymore. What historical stocktaking I’d done dealt with American evils, slavery and Jim Crow, sins that implicated my mother’s ancestors. Though my father arrived in the United States as a twenty-seven-year-old speaking only basic English, his new country’s integrative ways ensured that he was quickly regarded as no less American than the Connecticut-raised WASP he would marry.

So it was, after thirty-six years on the staff of Sports Illustrated, that I took a buyout and wired the severance payment to a German bank. My wife, Vanessa, gave notice at the agency where she worked as a visiting nurse. We found a couple to move into our old farmhouse in Vermont and look after our dog and cat, and enrolled our teenage children, Frank and Clara, in an international school on the outskirts of Berlin. We signed a year’s lease on an apartment in Kreuzberg, where our neighbors would hail from more than 190 countries and gentrification hadn’t entirely sanded down a gritty, Levantine edge. Berlin is infested with coworking spaces, so it was easy to find a desk only a few doors away, in the AHA Factory, whose very name seemed to promise that tenants would push out some kind of revelation every few minutes.

When our plane touched down at Tegel Airport on an August afternoon in 2017, I knew only the vague contours of the European lives of the two men to precede me. Kurt Wolff left Germany for good on the night of February 28, 1933, fleeing Berlin as the ashes of the Reichstag fire still smoldered. Over the next six and a half years, before war broke out, he shuttled between Switzerland, France, and Italy with a soon-to-expire German passport he was struggling to renew. My grandparents’ divorce, finalized in 1931, had left my father and his older sister, Maria, then eleven and fourteen, in Munich with their mother, whose family owned the Merck pharmaceutical empire, and her second husband, Gentiles both.

The Nazis likely objected less to Kurt’s mother’s Jewish ancestry than to his authors, many of them Jewish, like Franz Kafka, or Expressionist, pacifist, or “degenerate” besides. Works by Karl Kraus, Walter Mehring, Heinrich Mann, Joseph Roth, Carl Sternheim, Georg Trakl, and Franz Werfel all became fuel for book burnings. After the Germans invaded and occupied France, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, with support from the American journalist Varian Fry and his Emergency Rescue Committee, fled Nice with their son, my half uncle Christian, and in March 1941 sailed from Lisbon to New York. By early the following year Kurt and Helen were running Pantheon Books out of their Manhattan apartment.

Kurt would go on to leave the larger public mark, and in some literary circles his name still sparks curiosity. But the great questions that fall to me now come refracted through my father, who did not live a public life. How could Niko Wolff have served in the Wehrmacht despite his Jewish heritage? When his father fled Germany, why didn’t my father join him, rather than be left to live through the Nazis’ rise and rule? What burdens of guilt or shame did Niko carry into the New World and through the rest of his life? To what interventions, exemptions, or privileges did he owe his survival—and do I owe my existence? Of what should I be ashamed?

Unlike Kurt’s, my father’s story comes with none of the ennobling accents of the Gesinnungsemigrant, the German who went into exile out of conviction. I arrived in Berlin knowing little more than what Niko had told me: that he had been forced to join the Hitler Youth chapter at his Bavarian boarding school; that he had served with the paramilitary Reichsarbeitsdienst, the Reich Labor Service, as a nineteen-year-old; and that he had driven a supply truck in support of a Luftwaffe squadron during the invasion of the Soviet Union. I asked if he had ever killed anyone, and he told me: never knowingly. He spent the three years after the war in Munich literally picking up rubble, a duty required to earn a place as a chemistry student at the Institute of Technology. Kurt helped Niko land the student visa that brought him to the United States for graduate work. Other than for occasional family visits, my father didn’t go back.

Kurt was sixty when he became a hyphenated American, and he took that interstitial bit of punctuation, connective and disruptive, as a license to reinvent himself. He did so not once but twice. Within a few years of literally stepping off the boat, he was publishing best sellers in a language he hadn’t mastered; two decades later, back in Europe after having been more or less chased into exile again, he found himself resurrected by the same species of ruthless American executive that had just turned him out. He enjoyed several unexpected years of professional satisfaction as a redeemed German-American before his death.

Kurt flaunted his enthusiasms, and he worked relentlessly, and for the most part cheerfully, to dragoon others into seeing things as he did. And while he sometimes struggled to gracefully take no for an answer, that obstinacy was made tolerable by the enthusiasm with which he worked to get colleagues, guests, readers, or companions to acquiesce to some recommendation of his, usually for a book but often for a work of art or music, or a dish or a vintage. During the first two-thirds of a century marked by destruction and dread, Kurt was forever in search of people with the good taste to recognize his good taste. It couldn’t have been easy being the son of such a man, particularly if your interests and experiences ran in other directions. My father was picking his way through ruins while his father was safely in Manhattan, prospecting for another universalist essay or sumptuous folio with which to favor the public.

From handed-down stories and a few secondary sources, this is more or less what I knew before leaving for Berlin. Indeed, hovering over the entirety of this account is astonishment at how much I would discover about my family and the corollary to that—how little my father had told me. Fortunately, my grandfather’s papers are archived in Germany and the United States and many have been published. Dear Dr. Kafka: Mr. Franz Werfel has told me so much about your new novella—is it called The Bug?—that I would like to acquaint myself with it. Would you send it to me? From his appointment books, diaries, and notes, I know that Kurt, an amateur cellist, played trios with the Swiss Expressionist painter Paul Klee, a violinist, on a September day in 1919, and that the bill for taking T. S. Eliot to lunch at the Grand Ticino in Greenwich Village during the fifties came to seventy-five cents. Late in his life Niko put together a guide to several decades of his father’s diaries, a spreadsheet of Who, When, Where, and Weiteres (miscellaneous) that attests to both Kurt’s compulsive sociability and why I called my father the Human Flowchart.

Kurt himself vowed never to write anything “along the lines of ‘my life and loves.’” To produce a memoir is a fool’s errand, he liked to say: “What one can write is not interesting, and what is interesting one cannot write.” Beyond an outline of my grandfather’s life, I’ve nonetheless tried to grant the wish of the critic D. J. R. Bruckner, who in a 1992 review of a collection of Kurt’s essays and letters called him “a difficult man, it is clear enough from his own words—for all his passion for good writing, his warmth, gentleness and loyalty. Even a reader at a distance can be made uneasy by his clarity, unyielding logic and lofty rules of conduct. But it is all so inspiring. . . . What is so fine is Wolff

himself. To be talked to in confidence by such a human being lifts the spirit.” May that invocation help justify how much unmediated Kurt Wolff fills the pages that follow.

I brought reams of family letters to Berlin and began to read them knowing that thousands more sit in repositories elsewhere. To get lost in more than a half century of correspondence is to hear a recitation of the epistolary rules my ancestors lived by. It isn’t enough to hold on to what the postman delivers; you also make sure to save a copy of whatever you send. What’s the point of keeping some sentiment or aperçu to yourself, stashed away in a private journal or diary (or so I hear my grandfather declaiming from across the years), when it can be confided to another person? If the essence of publishing is to share the written word, writing a letter is publication in the most limited edition possible.

Kurt let his enthusiasm run. “In the case of other authors, a small lapse on my part now and then as their business representative means some annoyance,” he wrote Heinrich Mann. “In your case, it seems to me today that it would be a crime.” And in reply to Hermann Hesse, not one of his authors but a friend: “It’s like magic: here I am, living tucked away in a quiet corner of southern France, and suddenly I hear my name called. . . . My heartfelt thanks to you, the magician.”

He lavished as much attention on sentences he wrote as on those he published. Even his insults came well packaged; bad writing wasn’t “dross” or “crap” but something much worse: it “reduces the value of paper by printing on it.” In 1917, as a thirty-year-old, he described his vocation to Rainer Maria Rilke:

We publishers are alive for only a few short years, if we have ever been truly alive at all. . . . Thus our task is to remain alert and youthful, so the mirror does not tarnish too quickly. I am still young, these are my own years; I take pleasure in deploying my powers and seeing them grow with tasks to be done, seeing them redoubled through struggles and obstacles. I enjoy the give and take, the opportunity to make a difference, and although I may be mistaken, I believe the small amount of good I am able to accomplish makes up for my errors.

In the writing of letters, Kurt knew exactly what was important, and it was worth keeping this in mind as I rummaged deeper in the pile. “Who is interested in the recipients of letters?” he once observed. “People read them because they are interested in the writer.”

Whereupon he gives up the game: “Often authors of letters are actually writing to themselves.”

My father was no Kurt Wolff on the page. But he was a dutiful correspondent who wrote detailed letters home to his mother, Elisabeth Merck Wolff Albrecht, who remained in Munich throughout the war. I consider these surviving letters and the photographs Niko enclosed—as well as documents like a Nazi certificate called the Nachweis der arischen Abstammung, or certificate of “Aryan” ancestry, which as the grandson and great-grandson of baptized Jews my father was able to receive—to be bread crumbs to follow.

Over the years I’d heard that my grandmother altered genealogies for Niko and his sister, using Gentile ancestors to mask Jewish forebears with the same surname. This subterfuge, the tale goes, may have been abetted by well-placed acquaintances of her second husband, an obstetrician whose patients included the wife of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, the man to whom Hitler dictated Mein Kampf. Today this story is impossible to confirm, but its resonances hang heavily. In 2012, in London to cover the Olympics, I spent a morning with my wife and children at the Cabinet War Rooms from which Churchill directed Britain’s response to the Blitz. By the time we sat down for lunch in the café, our nine-year-old daughter had worked out who the good guys and the bad guys were, and where her grandfather lined up. She wanted to know: “Isn’t there some way Opa could have been a spy?”

I think I mumbled something about the sacred responsibility of citizenship and how each of us is pledged to make sure government never acts unjustly in our name. But I don’t feel I adequately answered Clara that day, and I still wonder whether I’ll ever be able to engage her question in the way it deserves. This book is an attempt at the beginning of a proper response.

As a starting point, nowhere seemed more appropriate than Berlin, the modern European city closest in spirit to the Manhattan of the forties where Kurt and Niko both landed. A 1983 comment by the late Bundesrepublik president Richard von Weizsäcker captured it for me: “In good and in evil, Berlin is the trustee of German history, which has left its scars here as nowhere else.” So here I had come, to run a finger over those scars, to measure the length of each cut and feel the thickness of the tissue.

ONEBILDUNGAND BOOKS

Kurt, 1887 to 1913

As Kurt Wolff’s grandson, I came swaddled in the certainty that I would play the cello. It was explained at an early age: with a pianist mother and violinist father, little Alex on the cello would make a trio. I broke in on a half-size instrument and graduated in middle school to a three-quarter size, with the expectation that I’d soon be fitted with Kurt’s well-varnished heirloom, crafted in the Tyrol in 1779 from maple and a majestic wide-grain spruce.

You don’t have to look too far back into the Wolff male lineage to see that this is how things were done. My grandfather grew up in Bonn, where his father taught music at the university and kept up an exhausting schedule as a conductor, string player, and organist as well as a choirmaster. On Sundays, at the Lutheran church on Kaiserplatz, Leonhard Wolff sandwiched organ and choral pieces around the sermons of Pfarrer Bleibtreu—literally, Pastor Stay Faithful. A scholar of Bach and friend of Brahms’s, Leonhard was a composer himself, part of his inheritance as the third Wolff in a line of professional musicians from the Rhineland town of Krefeld. When the pianist Clara Schumann passed through to perform in winter concerts staged by his father during the 1850s, young Leonhard had been dispatched to deliver flowers or fruit to her hotel room.

In 1886, twenty months after his first wife, Anna, took her life by throwing herself into the Rhine, Leonhard remarried. His new bride, Maria Marx, was the daughter of two Rhinelanders who could trace their Jewish roots as far back as records were kept. She gave up her job as a teacher at a secondary school for girls to assume stepmother duties to Leonhard and Anna’s two children. On a March evening in 1887, Maria gave birth to Kurt while Leonhard conducted Handel’s Messiah in the old Beethoven Hall. Unto us a son is given, the family joke would go.

Christian by baptism, as her own parents were, Maria ran a culturally German if mostly secular home. Her training as a teacher showed up in her parenting, as she shared a love of poetry with her stepchildren and Kurt, as well as with his sister Else, who was born three years later. Kurt began those requisite cello lessons and set out on a path toward a Gymnasium education. By the time of her death in 1904, at forty-six, Maria had made a decisive mark on the formation of her now seventeen-year-old son.

Preoccupied and more introverted than his wife, Leonhard liked to go for long walks, and as an adolescent my grandfather often joined him. Kurt would draw his father out about composers, performers, and two paternal forebears. Leonhard’s grand father Johann Nikolaus, a Franconian miller’s son born in 1770, the same year as Beethoven, had served as music director in Krefeld. Leonhard’s father, Hermann, who succeeded Johann Nikolaus in that post, befriended Clara Schumann as well as her composer husband, Robert. Hermann was such an early champion of Brahms’s that in 1870 he left Krefeld in defeat after hostile reaction to a performance of A German Requiem, a piece apparently too radical for the town at that time. Leonhard would honor his father’s forerunning taste by embracing Brahms with gusto. Before arriving in Bonn he had played chamber music with the master, and successfully foisted A German Requiem on the city soon after taking up his post there in 1884.

In the predawn of a spring day in 1896, a few hours before Leonhard was to lead the chorus at Clara Schumann’s funeral, Brahms himself showed up at the Wolffs’ home on the Bonnerthalweg. “I remember the consternation, excitement, and grief at that unexpected appearance of Brahms at five in the morning at my parents’ door,” my grandfather, then nine, would recall more than a half century later. “Breakfast was like a Last Supper. My father would not see Brahms again after that funeral.” This photograph survives from a gathering the next day. Brahms is the bereft, white-bearded figure in the middle. Thanks to the Human Flowchart’s annotations on a tracing-paper overlay, I know my great-grandparents stand on either side of the man with the hat and dark beard just behind the composer.

The Wolffs fixed themselves among that class of Germans known as the Bildungsbürgertum, the haute bourgeoisie who devoted themselves to Bildung, lifelong learning and a cultural patrimony of art, music, and books. By age ten, Kurt had come under the spell of the stories of Theodor Fontane, and a love of literature propelled him further toward the Abitur, the capstone of a secondary education in the liberal arts. This kind of humanistic self-cultivation was taken for granted in a university town like Bonn. “Should, on occasion, the embarrassing event occur that a son of a faculty member elected not to study but rather pursue a career in business or trade, he’d be lost and abandoned,” my grandfather noted. “It was a disgrace to the family, which profoundly regretted it, and the unhappy episode was tactfully never mentioned.”

Besieged by “snobs and burghers,” as Kurt later put it, young Bonners eager to express themselves turned to music and poetry. Leonhard championed the piano prodigy Elly Ney, daughter of a Bonn city councilman, who lived across the street from the sports hall at Kurt’s school. After World War II the city would ban Ney from its stages for her Nazism. But here Kurt, not yet a teenager, skipped phys ed to slip into her salon and ask the sixteen-year-old Elly to play for him. And play she did, as if he were punching up tunes on a jukebox—“whatever I wished, for hours without tiring: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin . . . Brahms’s sonatas in C and F. I owe my knowledge of the major piano works to those hours with Elly. . . . [I] was totally smitten by the highly spirited young lioness.”

Kurt turned similarly to literature. As a nineteen-year-old he met Friedrich Gundolf, the literary titan who would go on to teach at the University of Heidelberg. Gundolf was close to the poet Stefan George, who had attracted a circle of acolytes that eventually included the von Stauffenberg brothers, the aristocratic German officers who would lead the unsuccessful Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler. “Refined, handsome, studious, modest, well-bred, possessed of a touching, inquiring, and searching spirit and freshness,” Gundolf wrote to George, describing Kurt in advance of bringing him by for an introduction. “[He is] one of those young men so essential to creating an atmosphere and elevating standards.”

Soon after that meeting, at the risk of mortifying academic Bonn, Kurt sailed to São Paulo, Brazil, for a six-month training program sponsored by the German banking industry. But he threw himself back into books as soon as he returned. With the 100,000 gold marks he inherited upon his mother’s death, a sum that would be worth more than $1 million today, he had begun to buy up first editions and incunabula, books produced during the fifteenth century shortly after the invention of the printing press. He would eventually count some twelve thousand volumes in his collection. But much like his father, a champion of music both old and new, Kurt let his eye wander from literature gathering dust to what was then being written—to those writers challenging the staid assumptions of the Wilhelmine era. Migrating from campus to campus in a fashion common at the time, he studied German literature at universities in Marburg, Munich, Bonn, and, most fatefully, Leipzig, then the seat of the country’s book publishing industry. In 1908, at twenty-one, he set aside work on a PhD in literature to take an editorial position there with Insel Verlag. “I loved books, especially beautiful books, and as an adolescent and student collected them even as I knew it to be an unproductive pursuit,” he would recall. “But I knew I had to find a profession in books. What was left? You become a publisher.”

One of his first projects came out of the family archives. As a teenager, while helping his maternal grandmother, Bertha, clear out a bookshelf in her home one day, he had discovered notes and visiting cards from Adele Schopenhauer, sister of the philosopher, and Ottilie von Goethe, the writer’s daughter-in-law. Kurt pressed his grandmother for details. It turned out that Bertha’s mother, Jeanetta, had been friendly with both women. Bertha unearthed further correspondence, and in 1909, supplementing those letters with a diary of Adele’s he’d found in private hands, Kurt assembled it all into two volumes to be published by Insel.

He turned next to the work of an associate of Johann Wolf-gang von Goethe’s, the writer Johann Heinrich Merck, an ancestor of the seventeen-year-old woman Kurt had begun courting while posted with the military in Darmstadt and would later marry—my grandmother, Elisabeth Merck. Her family, with its international pharmaceutical business, at first balked at him as a suitor for the opposite reason the professoriat in Bonn might have found him wanting: Kurt struck them as a man too much of letters and not enough of commerce. But book publishing plausibly split the difference, and by the end of 1907 the Mercks had signed off on the marriage, which took place in 1909, shortly after these portraits were taken.

In 1910 Kurt hitched himself as silent partner to the publisher Ernst Rowohlt, who had just launched what would become one of Germany’s most important houses. With his lean frame and drawing-room manners, now installed with his wife in a Leipzig apartment with household help, Kurt cut a starkly different figure from Rowohlt, a bluff and earthy character who would conduct business in taverns and wine bars around town and sometimes sleep in the office. By June 1912, having abandoned his doctoral work, Kurt found more time to stick his nose into the affairs of the publishing house. Thus he was in the office the day Max Brod, a writer from Prague, turned up with a protégé named Franz Kafka. Kurt recalled that visit years later:

In that first moment I received an indelible impression: the impresario was presenting the star he had discovered. This was true, of course, and if the impression was embarrassing, it had to do with Kafka’s personality; he was incapable of overcoming the awkwardness of the introduction with a casual gesture or a joke.

Oh, how he suffered. Taciturn, ill at ease, frail, vulnerable, intimidated like a schoolboy facing his examiners, he was sure he could never live up to the claims voiced so forcefully by his impresario. Why had he ever gotten himself into this spot; how could he have agreed to be presented to a potential buyer like a piece of merchandise! Did he really wish to have anyone print his worthless trifles—no, no, out of the question! I breathed a sigh of relief when the visit was over, and said goodbye to this man with the most beautiful eyes and the most touching expression, someone who seemed to exist outside the category of age. Kafka was not quite thirty, but his appearance, as he went from sick to sicker, always left an impression of agelessness on me: one could describe him as a youth who had never taken a step into manhood.

One remark of Kafka’s that day helped account for Kurt’s impression of him as an innocent with wobbly confidence: “I will always be much more grateful to you for returning my manuscripts than for publishing them.”

The relationship with Ernst Rowohlt fell apart a few months later, after Kurt retained Franz Werfel, the Prague-born novelist, playwright, and poet, as a reader on lavish terms without clearing the arrangement with his business partner. By February 1913, using money from both his late mother’s prosperous ancestors and the Merck family of his bride, Kurt had bought out Rowohlt, eventually christening the new firm Kurt Wolff Verlag and bringing Kafka and Brod with him. He raised more cash needed for the business by auctioning off parts of his book collection, and in case anyone missed the symbolism—may the old underwrite the new!—Kurt adopted a credo he articulated in a letter to the Viennese critic and editor Karl Kraus: “I for my part consider a publisher to be—how shall I put it?—a kind of seismographer, whose task is to keep an accurate record of earthquakes. I try to take note of what the times bring forth in the way of expression and, if it seems worthwhile in any way, place it before the public.”

In 1912, at Werfel’s urging, Kurt had gone to Vienna to meet Kraus for the first time. Kurt found himself overcome by the exhausting intensity of this literary provocateur. Whether discussing literature or leading him on a tour of the city, Kraus, then thirty-eight, wanted the full attention of his twenty-five-year-old visitor. “If he wants to walk you back to your hotel, you mustn’t take it for a polite gesture and refuse,” Werfel had warned him. “Kraus walks people home. He can’t bear the thought that they would meet someone else after being with him. If you want to disentangle yourself, there’s only one excuse that Kraus will accept, though with bad grace. Somewhere between midnight and one o’clock, you may hint at a rendezvous with a woman. It’s your only chance.”

Kurt’s first visit to Kraus’s apartment spilled into the early hours of the morning, whereupon his host pulled a book of poems from a shelf and began reciting several favorites. “The poetry itself barely penetrated the fog of my fatigue,” Kurt recalled. “I was spellbound not by the familiar verses, but by the singular man who was reading them. Mechanically I began to recite the last few lines of the ‘Mondlied’ [‘Moon Song,’ by the poet Matthias Claudius] along with him, but soon found myself speaking alone as Kraus fell silent:

Spare thy wrath, Lord, we entreat;

Let our sleep and dreams be sweet,

And our sick neighbor’s too.

“He stared at me in astonishment and asked in a tone of voice that betrayed dismay as well as surprise, ‘But how do you know that? Matthias Claudius is completely unknown!’

“‘Perhaps in Austria,’ I replied, ‘but not where I’m from. When I must have been between five and eight and tired of the usual bedtime prayers for children, my mother used to recite the “Mondlied” with me every night.’

“His joy at finding someone to share his enthusiasm was greater than the disappointment over not being the first to introduce me.”

The first had been Maria Marx Wolff, the acculturated Rhinelander of Jewish descent. A young rebel in turn-of-thecentury Bonn found his voice in music and poetry, and Kurt inherited his love of the first from his father. Love of literature—the passion with which he would make his way and name and eventually reinvent himself in exile—came from his mother, pictured above.

But the story only begins here. The world into which this fully formed young man was launched would not be kind to Bildungsbürger who shunned the grubbiness of politics. For Germans content to lose themselves in books and art and music, history held out consequences—and left clues to what might be in store.

It’s impossible to fully understand my family without excavating a strange and historically significant series of events that took place in Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden in Germany’s southwest, during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Kurt Wolff’s great-great-grandfather Salomon von Haber, pictured overleaf, served three grand dukes of Baden, first as an independent financier and, beginning in 1811, as banker for the grand duchy. By the early nineteenth century, Baden had developed extensive material needs, and Salomon knew the levers to pull to pay for them. If the state needed tack for cavalry horses or satin for ladies’ dresses, “court Jews” called on trusted coreligionists around Europe to move gold or float loans. At the same time, Salomon was active in Karlsruhe’s Jewish community, advocating for such reforms as a modernized liturgy and worship in German rather than Hebrew. With Grand Duke Louis I taking his cues from the Habsburgs’ Edict of Toleration, my ancestor the Hofbankier seemed safe and content in his identity as both a member of the elite and a practicing German Jew.

But in 1819 antisemitic riots broke out among university students in the Bavarian city of Würzburg and soon spread across Germany. Mobs of citizens, many of them members of the educated middle class, chanted Hep, hep, Jude verreck! (Death to the Jews!) as they trashed shops and homes and chased Jewish citizens into the countryside. In Baden, even the grand duke’s court banker wasn’t safe. On the night of August 27, a mob gathered outside the Haber palace, Salomon’s home across Marktplatz from Karlsruhe’s main synagogue, pelting it with rocks and chanting anti-Jewish slogans. Escorted by a detachment of bodyguards supplied by the grand duke, Salomon fled to safety in the town of Steinach, sixty miles south.

A Jewish-born Berliner named Ludwig Robert, a playwright and recent convert to Christianity who happened to be in Karlsruhe visiting his fiancée, witnessed the riot and its aftermath: troops on horseback patrolling rubble-strewn streets; placards that read DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO THE JEWS; townspeople not just laughing at the spectacle but grumbling that the commandant had shut down the city’s taverns to quell the unrest. This was antisemitism as festival. The emancipation of Jews within the German Confederation, decreed by Prussia seven years earlier, meant little, a disgusted Robert wrote to his sister in Berlin: “How corrupt people really are and how inadequate their sense of law and justice—not to mention their love of humanity—is clear from the fact that there was no indignation expressed at these incidents, not even in the official papers.”

It took days to restore order, which came only after the grand duke sent cannons into the streets. In place of incendiary posters, new ones appeared: EMPERORS, KINGS, DUKES, BEGGARS, CATHOLICS, AND JEWS ARE ALL HUMAN AND AS SUCH OUR EQUALS. In a carriage pulled by six horses, Louis I personally escorted Salomon back from Steinach before making a show of solidarity by temporarily moving into the Haber palace.

Louis I so appreciated Haber’s work on behalf of the grand duchy that in 1829, a year before his own death and two years before Salomon’s, he bestowed on him the title that permitted the family to use the noble “von.” The von Habers had done much to earn the honor. They had developed Baden’s three largest industrial sites—a sugar factory, a cotton mill, and a machine works that built railway locomotives. After Salomon’s death, two of his sons, Louis and Jourdan, took charge of those enterprises, and Louis assumed his father’s role as court banker.

Even as these two von Haber sons remained Jewish, their older brother, Model (Moritz) von Haber, pictured here, had long since converted. In 1819, at twenty-two, he married the daughter of a Parisian banker in a Catholic ceremony and over the following two decades lived a life of social prominence in Paris and London. With the help of agents around the continent, Moritz tended to a portfolio of interests, including mining enterprises in France and Portugal. He also handled the financial affairs of both the French king Charles X and Don Carlos, the Bourbon pretender to the Spanish throne.

Sometime in the late 1830s, Moritz had a run-in that touched off what would come to be known throughout Europe as the Haber Affair. The story goes that an English officer named George Hawkins was carrying documents from Spain to England when French authorities with Carlist sympathies detained him. Hawkins suspected Moritz of engineering his arrest and challenged him to a duel. Insisting that the Englishman lacked any standing to do so, Moritz sloughed Hawkins off.

Around the same time, after two decades of consorting with nobility around Europe, Moritz returned to Karlsruhe with the swagger of a man of the world. Thanks to the marriages of his brothers Louis and Jourdan, the prodigal son now had connections to the Rothschild banking family, and he took to describing himself as “a man of private means.” Moritz became a regular at the court of Sophie, the Swedish-born grand duchess of Baden, who shared his worldly outlook and high-spirited nature. Soon gossips had Moritz trysting with the grand duchess at Schloss Favorite, the royal hunting lodge south of the city, and eventually pegged him as father of her youngest daughter, Princess Cäcilie. Officers and courtiers around the ducal palace—to say nothing of Sophie’s husband, Leopold, Louis I’s son and the new grand duke—disapproved of this interloper and the loose talk he was touching off.

At one point Moritz’s old nemesis George Hawkins turned up in Karlsruhe looking for him. Hawkins died before he could get satisfaction in their dispute, but in 1843, Julius Göler von Ravensburg, a Badenese army officer who had sided with Hawkins, decided to take up the late English officer’s cause. He called Moritz ein Hundsfott—a scoundrel. Moritz refused to take the bait and challenge Ravensburg to a duel, and there matters might have ended. But soon the social season in the spa town of Baden-Baden was in full swing, and it seems that Moritz had been dropped from the guest list for one of the fancy balls on the calendar. When he pressed social arbiters for an explanation, Moritz was told that he wasn’t “a man of honor” because he had let a slur go unanswered—at which point Moritz concluded he had no choice but to take Ravensburg on.

In Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century, a man of rank or social standing who had been wronged didn’t seek redress through the police or the courts. He insisted instead on an engagement with deadly weapons under prescribed rules. If you had been insulted and didn’t demand a duel, you forfeited your right to associate with people of good repute. For Jews, matters were more complicated; it wasn’t unusual for a German Jewish university student with pistoling skills, slighted by some antisemitic remark, to challenge the offender—but this only touched off a movement among non-Jewish fraternities at German universities to declare Jews categorically “unworthy of satisfaction.” In 1843, such was the disposition, at first, of Moritz’s challenge to Ravensburg: a court of honor declared Moritz too disreputable to be party to a duel—he wasn’t, as the Germans would say, satisfaktionsfähig. And that appeared to be that.

But the protocol of dueling held that each principal nominate a “second,” someone to hammer out logistics and act as a go-between. As his second, Moritz had selected a Russian officer named Mikhail von Werefkin. Ravensburg’s chosen second, a Spanish-born officer of the Baden court, Georg von Sarachaga-Uria, didn’t simply reiterate to Werefkin his patron’s refusal to duel—he also joined Ravensburg to assault the Russian on a Karlsruhe street.

As a result of that incident, Werefkin and Ravensburg hastily agreed to duel each other at a riflery range in the Forchheimer forest south of the city. There, on September 2, Werefkin mortally wounded Ravensburg with his first shot. But as he lay on the ground, Ravensburg was able to squeeze off a shot of his own, killing Werefkin.

The death of both duelists set Baden on edge. Three days later, in the aftermath of Ravensburg’s funeral, a procession of mourners made its way along Langestrasse, Karlsruhe’s main east-west thoroughfare. As the funeral train reached the Haber palace, pictured here, and dusk settled over the city, a rumor spread that Moritz himself was watching from an upper window.

At that, the ranks of the mourners dissolved. Students and soldiers led a mob of 150 people that stormed and ransacked the same home Moritz’s father had been chased from during the Hep, Hep riots two dozen years before. “Down with the Jews!” the crowd shouted, and “Tonight we’ll finish the Hep, Hep over there!” Rioters set upon two Jewish-owned businesses nearby, throwing the owners through their shop windows. David Meola, director of the Jewish and Holocaust Studies Program at the University of South Alabama and an expert on the history of the Haber Affair, told me that the attack lasted hours, with soldiers egging on townspeople, who yelled things like “drown them in blood!” The rioting caused tens of thousands of florins in damage, the equivalent of at least several million dollars today. This time the incumbent grand duke supplied no protection. During those intervening years, the status of even Karlsruhe’s most prominent Jews had grown ever more tenuous.

In fact, as the riot raged, Moritz was no longer in the family home. A half hour earlier police had remanded him to Rastatt, south of the city. There he was quickly convicted of inciting the Ravensburg-Werefkin duel and sentenced to fourteen days in prison. As soon as he served his sentence, the authorities deported him to Hesse.

Over the following weeks Sarachaga-Uria vowed to avenge the death of his comrade. He challenged Moritz in an open letter, using language so inflammatory that it made clear he had no misgivings about dueling someone he would call in print ein geborener Israelit, a Jew by blood. Moritz accepted, and on December 14—this time well north of Karlsruhe, near the Hessian village of Roggenheim—my ancestor killed Sarachaga-Uria with his second shot. Afterward Moritz was detained, charged with illegal dueling, and convicted by a Hessian military court, which sentenced him to six months in prison, four of them suspended for good behavior and community service. Upon his release Moritz filed and won libel suits against a Karlsruhe newspaper and a Frankfurt-based journalist, donating the settlement monies to charity.

As it unspooled over those months, the Haber Affair caused a sensation around the continent. Moritz had his sympathizers, especially in the Rhenish press. Many Germans knew of the family’s public spiritedness and Moritz’s own charitable giving, including a large donation to recovery efforts in Hamburg after the city’s fire of 1842. But much of the coverage pandered to the basest instincts of an inflamed population. To most Badeners, the events of late 1843 came down to a simple accounting: on one side, three dead Christians; on the other, one uppity and still-atliberty Jew.

* * *

At the time of the Haber Affair, Baden’s Jews stood on the cusp of emancipation. The legislature of the grand duchy had taken up the issue for a dozen consecutive sessions, and only a few months earlier the parliament of the nearby Prussian Rhineland had voted to grant Jews full civil rights. As Baden celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its constitution, the Jewish-born writer Heinrich Heine was hailing full freedom as “the call of the times.” Yet even though Jews in 1843 made up no more than 1.5 percent of the grand duchy’s population, and perhaps 5 or 6 percent within Karlsruhe’s city limits, Badenese Christians feared Jewish emancipation.

At trial, Moritz’s liberal, Christian lawyer had enumerated the many ways his client had been done wrong. His home had been invaded, his property destroyed, his freedom taken away. Yet because of press censorship, the public could take only some of this into account. Then, upon his release, Moritz was summarily expelled from Baden. All these injustices were visited upon a citizen of the grand duchy—one whose family had been ennobled by the grand duke’s father—just days after Baden celebrated its status as a Rechtsstaat, a government of laws.

In the years afterward, framing of the Haber Affair took on an increasingly antisemitic cast. The publisher of a manifesto that Sarachaga- Uria had written before the second duel, distributed after the Spanish officer’s death, chose to pair the text with an engraving of Sarachaga-Uria alongside Ravensburg and Werefkin over the caption Duell-Opfern (Duel Sacrifices). Popular accounts called Ravensburg a Landeskind, a “child of the nation” who had given his life for the fatherland.

That story line would persist into the next century with the publication in 1926 of the historical novella King Haber. The book doesn’t bother to change the name of its main character, “the banker, Moritz Haber, or to give him his recent title, Baron von Haber.” In it Moritz cuckolds the grand duke, fathers a child with the grand duchess, and meets his comeuppance after a procession of mourners leaving the funeral of a “Baron Raven” spot him on the balcony of his own home and pelt him with rocks. Someone in the crowd finally fires the shot that kills him. The story has such defamatory resonances that in 1947 one of Salomon’s descendants, Willy Model, tried to claw back some of our common ancestor’s reputation with an affidavit sorting out what was hearsay from what was known to have happened.

The Haber Affair foreshadowed atrocities to come. The timing of the publication of King Haber—on the cusp of the Nazis’ seizure of power—helped stoke the antisemitism that Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would step in to exploit. And the episode conformed with Jud Süss, the 1940 film based on an eighteenth- century Jewish court banker who became a recurring figure in Nazi propaganda.

In the anti-Moritz manifesto written before his death in the second duel, Sarachaga-Uria declared that “religion and honor” would prevent Moritz from ever being “true and straight.” Whatever the outcome of the duel, the Badenese officer further proclaimed, it would be “a judgment of God between good and evil, right and wrong.”

After winning his duel with Sarachaga-Uria, Moritz couldn’t resist a triumphant riposte. In January 1844, having served out his sentence in Hesse, he bought space in newspapers around the German states. “So!” read one of his Erklärungen, or declarations. “The highest driver of all human fate has judged according to his wisdom between good and evil, right and wrong.”

David Meola puts it this way in a scholarly article about the Haber Affair: “As victor of the duel, Haber can be seen as having been judged—by God—to be both good and right. Moreover, in the public sphere, Haber would also have the last word, defeating his opponent again posthumously using his adversary’s own words and beliefs.”

For Uncle Moritz, it must have made for the most satisfying touché.

I have few clues to how my ancestors processed the life and trials of Moritz von Haber through the years. Kurt’s grandfather August, the eldest son of Moritz’s sister Henriette von Haber, would go on to handle some of his uncle’s business affairs, so it’s hard to imagine my grandfather not having heard of his notorious forebear. But my father never mentioned Moritz. I learned of him and this entire saga only after arriving in Berlin, from pursuing a throwaway line in a genealogical essay by my aunt Holly, Kurt’s daughter-in-law. She refers to “an internationally known rake, duelist, and adventurer” and suggests that, in his great-great-uncle’s cosmopolitan instincts, generous spirit, nose for commerce, and eye for women, Kurt may have found both inspiration and template.

Kurt and Moritz shared one more thing. Both believed they enjoyed all the rights of a citizen of a constitutional state, only to discover that they didn’t.

The journeys of my exile grandfather and emigrant father stand as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant mood in much of the United States, the country that once took them in. Today the German chancellor, not the American president, is welcoming asylum seekers, denouncing neo-Nazism, and banging the drum for global integration and liberal democracy. The contrast appears even more stark when viewed from Berlin, perhaps the most radically welcoming city on earth—not just over the previous few years, as Angela Merkel threw Germany open to more than a million refugees, mostly from Syria, but also through much of the city’s history, dating back to when the Duke of Prussia invited fifty Viennese Jewish families to settle there after the Thirty Years’ War.

Not all Germans are offering an embrace. Merkel has failed to win over followers of the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland party, the AfD, which is especially popular in the villages and countryside of the old East Germany encircling the city. But in Berlin proper, particularly where we’ve landed, in Kreuzberg, a defiant cosmopolitanism obtains. We see it in graffiti like NAZIS RAUS (Nazis out) and find it in clubs like SO36, which hosts a monthly dance night for gay Muslims. It’s heralded by a banner reading ISLAMOPHOBIA DAMAGES THE SOUL, hung from the facade of the church around the corner, where we’re as likely to hear world music as Lutheran liturgy. It comes with the lingering spirit of the activists who once organized squats in abandoned buildings, and shortly before the fall of the Wall declared the Free Republic of Kreuzberg, issuing “visas” and building “customs posts” of papier-mâché. And it validates what the exiled journalist Sebastian Haffner wrote from the safety of England on the eve of World War II: “Berlin was, let us say it with Prussian precision, the very essence of an international metropolis. It had, so to speak, roots in the air. It extracted its life force not from the native soil of the surrounding country . . . but from all the great cities of the world.”

The six-hour time difference between Washington, DC, and Berlin ensures that a sleep-cycle’s worth of backed-up US news alerts greets us each morning. Three days after our arrival comes news that ethnonationalists have engineered a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump fails to condemn the neo-Nazis who assembled, one of whom struck and killed a protestor, Heather Heyer, with his car. The president goes on to describe the day’s actors as including “very fine people, on both sides.”