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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.

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 1936. Photograph by Nikolaus Wolff, age fifteen

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 co-working 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.