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ОглавлениеDone with the War
Kurt, 1913 to 1924
My grandfather had barely reached his midtwenties, but his adult life was off to the headiest kind of start. In 1913 Kurt brought out the work of his two in-house readers, Franz Werfel and the Expressionist poet and playwright Walter Hasenclever. He foreshadowed a long devotion to the visual arts by publishing the writings of the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. And he launched the Expressionist literary magazine Der jüngste Tag (The Judgment Day), with which he pledged to showcase writing that, “while drawing strength from roots in the present, shows promise of lasting life.” Several years later the edition seen here would feature the novella Kurt had asked after in that note to Kafka, which my grandfather referred to as “The Bug” and we know today as The Metamorphosis.
In 1913 the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Kurt Wolff Verlag eventually sold more than a million hardcover copies of a collection of his work, turning it into an under-the-Christmas-tree staple throughout Germany. In a January 1914 diary entry, Robert Musil, an Austrian writer in Kurt’s stable, described the man presiding over it all: “Tall. Slim. Clad in English gray. Elegant. Light-haired. Clean-shaven. Boyish face. Blue-gray eyes, which can grow hard.”
Kurt’s firm seemed to be making its way without having to compromise. “The house often functioned more as a patron of the arts than according to commercial calculations,” remembered Willy Haas, who joined Werfel and Hasenclever as a Kurt Wolff Verlag reader in 1914. Kurt had no interest in a kind of publishing where “you simply supply the products for which there is a demand,” he would write, the kind where you need only “know what activates the tear glands, the sex glands, or any other glands, what makes the sportsman’s heart beat faster, what makes the flesh crawl in horror, etc.” My grandfather held fast to another view, a luxury he could afford, but that would later make his row tougher to hoe: “I only want to publish books I won’t be ashamed of on my deathbed. Books by dead authors in whom we believe. Books by living authors we don’t need to lie to. All my life, two elements have seemed to me to be the worst and basically inevitable burden of being a publisher: lying to authors and feigning knowledge that one doesn’t have. . . . We might err, that is inevitable, but the premise for each and every book should always be unconditional conviction, the absolute belief in the authentic word and worth of what you champion.”
In 1914 Kurt finally landed Karl Kraus as an author. The Viennese Mencken was so prickly about whom he shared a publisher with that he and Kurt agreed on the only solution: to set up a subsidiary devoted solely to his work. Kurt also took over publication of the pacifist and anti-nationalist journal Die weissen Blätter (The White Pages), which would have to be printed in Switzerland after war broke out to dodge the censors. Even from his provincial haunts in Prague, Kafka noticed that Kurt was riding high, and said as much in a letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer: “He is a very beautiful man, about twenty-five, whom God has given a beautiful wife, several million marks, a pleasure in publishing, and little aptitude for the publishing business.”
Even after allowing that no publisher is commercially minded enough to satisfy the typical author, Kafka was on to something. “In the beginning was the word, not the number,” Kurt would say, many years later, in a riff on the Gospel of John. Der jüngste Tag nonetheless helped the Kurt Wolff Verlag carve out a niche as purveyor of cutting-edge writing, and that was worth something. Though my grandfather had been raised to revere the classics, he knew enough to step back and let that rule of twentieth-century marketing—if it’s new, it’s better—carry the day. For a while this worked. And it was an exhilarating time to be in the book business: during Kurt’s first year out on his own, no country produced more books than Germany, some thirty-one thousand new titles in 1913 alone.
With the outbreak of war in August 1914, both the Kurt Wolff Verlag and German publishing at large were changed forever. Eleven of the thirteen members of the firm’s staff were called up, including Leutnant Wolff, who was sent with an artillery regiment to the Western Front. “I flatter myself in thinking that I have some understanding of artillery service,” he wrote in an early entry in the diary he kept throughout his tour of duty, “and above all I love my weapon very much.”
Within a few weeks Kurt felt the full force of the carnage delivered by this “war that will end war.” His unit was dispatched to a forest south of the Belgian village of Neufchâteau to assess casualties after the 1914 Battle of the Ardennes. “The dead lie in monstrous numbers within a very small space,” he wrote. “One notices that every inch of earth was bitterly fought over and gets a sense of how dreadful a fight for a forest can be.”
Scattered among hundreds of corpses, Kurt’s unit discovered eighteen survivors, fifteen Frenchmen and three Germans,
who had passed days and nights since the battle without dressing or water or food amidst the horrific stench of decaying bodies, through the heat of the days and the damp cold of the nights. . . . It goes without saying that only in very rare, exceptional cases could some living thing, weakened by the heavy exertions and deprivations of the past days and weeks, without any food and especially with fevers from their untreated wounds, cling to life as long as these eighteen did. Most of these wounded, to the extent that they were able to utter a few words or communicate in any way, explained that they had had no sustenance. In every case their wounds were so severe that they had been unable to move at all. Only one, a German, in despair at slowly dying of starvation yet nursing hopes of being found if he could only hang on a little longer, had resorted to a desperate measure: he took the only thing left of his meager rations, a cube of condensed pea soup, dissolved it in his own urine, and drank it.
Kurt had arranged to have Hasenclever assigned to his unit, so in the midst of the war, even as they were deployed in France, eastern European Galicia, and the Balkans, the two imagined the directions German literature might take after hostilities ended. Riding the Orient Express back from Macedonia on leave, Kurt would stop off in Vienna to visit Kraus, a loud and consistent critic of the conflict—one of the few among German-language intellectuals of the time.
It’s hard to fathom the enthusiasm with which Germany greeted the outbreak of war. In an act of mass self-delusion, Germans across the political spectrum believed this common call to sacrifice would help Wilhelmine society bridge its many differences. Almost no one foresaw the duration of the stalemate or the scale of the slaughter. Shortly after its end, one of Kurt’s authors, Joseph Roth, declared the war a “great annihilative nothingness.”
The Kurt Wolff Verlag would be the only major house in Germany to refuse to publish pro-war literature. But like most of his countrymen, Kurt at the outset seemed open to victory by arms and tried to suppress his doubts. In December 1914 he wrote from Ghent:
I drive into the darkness and light my pipe. I think about my conversations with the military authorities, of the report of my female spy this morning, of the war and how we will win a victory over France. And suddenly all those with whom I so often, so bitterly, argued over these past months seem to be right: We must continue on over the rubble of these countries, and there must be misery and distress among our enemies and in enemy territory, and they must feel this bitter, unrelenting war, feel it until the hunger for peace is so great that the cry for the war’s end becomes so loud and penetrating, and so unanimously does the wailing rise, from Liège to Reims, from Namur to Lille, from Brussels to Calais, and also in the east, that it mingles with the groans of the exhausted in the trenches at the front, all of it swelling into a hurricane, into a raging, incessant sound that will ring in their ears in Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Petersburg, until they give up.
The young officer, pictured here, seemed to be writing for an audience beyond my grandmother, who had moved in with her mother in Darmstadt and to whom he sent his dispatches. In November 1914 he noted that a British torpedo had roared up the beach at Ostend, Flanders, ripping a hole in the dining room of the Majestic Palace, a hotel then billeting German officers, killing two as they ate their breakfast. The attack held two lessons, concluded Kurt, who noted that the Majestic Palace was built by British investors: “The British simply assume that German officers take their breakfast at only the finest hotels; and the blood of German officers seems to be of more value to them than British capital.”
But as the war progressed, his diary began to betray disillusionment. The first hint came that same month while he was still in Belgium. “I do not know if the weather has made me melancholy,” he wrote. “But all at once I found myself in the bleakest, darkest mood as I reflected on this country and its history. What great potential lies in the fertile soil here, what riches were accumulated from trade by sea and over land, from fishing, from the breeding of horses, cattle, flowers, lacemaking, and much else—and over and over again, this land and its people have suffered from war. And now this war has impoverished everything once more, a war that the Germans have delivered to their country.”
In December he wrote that he had been reading War and Peace:
I don’t want to go off on a literary digression here, but only quote a passage I’ve read many times, and which, it seems to me, should serve as an epigraph for the hundreds of books that now appear, or will appear, touching off millions of reviews. . . . : “Rostov knew from experience, from Austerlitz and the campaign of 1807, that men always lie when describing military exploits, as he himself had done in recounting them; furthermore, he had experience enough to know that what happens in war is entirely different from how we imagine it or relate it to others. . . . But he didn’t express his thoughts, for in such matters he had also gained experience. He knew that this tale redounded to the glory of our arms, and so one had to pretend not to doubt it.”
And then: “I must relate a story here, to free myself of it, of what unfolded on January 17, 1915. It is one story of many. Such things and occurrences are slowly but surely destroying my nerves. They (taken together) seem almost to have a more lasting effect on me than thoughts of many of the other horrors that war brings.”
The incident he recounted took place in a military courtroom presided over by a German judge. A Belgian district administrator reported that a stable boy had witnessed a soldier in a feldgrau (field-gray) uniform, with regimental number 207 stitched on his epaulettes, steal a farmer’s horse.
“Sir, I must warn you against using the word ‘steal’ when referring to a member of the German army,” the military judge said.
“In Germany this may be called something else,” the Belgian bureaucrat replied evenly. “Here in Belgium we call it ‘stealing.’”
At that, the judge ordered the district administrator jailed, and Kurt privately renders his judgment:
When I think of isolated incidents like these, and what thousands of decent Belgians living among such barbarians will think and say, and swallow and swallow, and hold on to, hold on to . . . I find it hard to take. . . . I nurse feelings of shame while walking down the street the next day . . . [at] all those who accept these things as standard operating procedure, who cheerfully, blithely, confidently, with a sense of relativism and the heady feelings of the conqueror, stride steadily and proudly along, thinking that everything is just as it is, as it can be, as it must be, as it should be.
Out on the town seven weeks later to celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday, Kurt and three comrades capered about the alleys and squares of Ghent. Eventually they came upon the Gravensteen, the castle of the counts of Flanders, where they woke the guards to be let in.
We climbed up on the ramparts and looked down on the beautiful, sleeping city, whose sons are yonder on the Yser, with no connection to, no news of, their fathers, who have been left behind, bitter and full of grief. . . . But at least this beautiful, imposing city with its proud cathedrals still stands. . . . Here it smells not of war, fire, destruction, and putrefaction but of home and stone, water and fish, healthy, alive, with the promise of spring.
What will spring bring—? The end of the Battle of the Nations, the great Peace of the Nations? It’s strange that this age of great deeds has also become a time of eternal question marks. . . . Why, when, how much longer, for what?
World War I has been called a conflict “that sloshed back and forth like waves in a basin: the trigger lay in the East, the escalation in the West, but the greatest destruction ultimately occurred, again, in the East.” In April 1915, Kurt found his unit redeployed to Galicia, where this picture was taken, for a spring offensive against Russian forces.
From Gorlice, southeast of Krakow, he devoted a telegraphic entry to what he called “a day in the war”:
Dust, columns of troops, supply trains, Russian prisoners, dust, shouting: Polish, Russian, Austrian, German, Hungarian, Czech, dust, columns marching, columns at rest, mobile messes, dust, vehicles in motion, wheelbarrows, artillery columns, broken-down vehicles, abandoned bivouac sites, fresh graves with and without crosses, the entrails of slaughtered cattle. . . .
Overturned wagons, dead horses, dust, the smells of August, supply columns, road work, dead Russians, the casings of two mortar shells, a live white cat on the windowsill of a shot-up house. Galicians burying dead Austrians, Germans, and Russians, a mountain of empty tin cans flashing in the sun. . . .
Dust, fatigue, evening, prisoners, many thousands of them in a long procession, stench, cars, infantry columns, dust, prisoners, infantry columns, dust, prisoners, infantry columns, dust—dusk, fatigue, darkness. Shots in the distance. A few lights. The soft sounds of German, Russian, Polish. . . . Dust, stench, prisoners, infantry columns, cooler, darker, campfires.
Nightfall. And through the dust and haze, the stars . . .
He asked forgiveness for his fragmentary reportage. “But what should I do?” he wrote. “It is too much. One cannot form out of chaos sentences with a subject and a predicate, cannot (should not) transform the madness into meaning.”
By summer, almost two years in, ennui had enveloped him. In June he wrote from Galicia.
How long the war has gone on. You have no idea how long. For a couple of hours you sleep in a car; the next night, you sleep in the villa of some Galician con man who has fled, with the newspaper on the nightstand left by the Russian officer who was here a week ago, and with dead bedbugs plastered to the wall. In the morning, at sunrise, still half-asleep, you mount your trusty horse, always there for you despite shrapnel wounds in its haunches and the scant oats to be had. You ride into the world with unbrushed teeth—you’re out of drinking water and don’t want to put cholera-swill in your mouth—off to nowhere in particular, gazing sleepily more within yourself than at the world around you; and when, stirred by the dazzling sun or a sudden jolt of your horse, you do look around, aware, you’re in a completely alien world, which might be strangely beautiful but through which you never intended to travel or ride. . . . For ten months now you’ve been looking into a kaleidoscope, and the very real and brutal facts it reveals seem more and more unreal, more vivid, and more improbable than the reality of what was once your everyday, civilian existence. And yet everyday life back home has also slipped away, like some feast day long since gone. What is, you want no part of; what was, no longer exists. . . . Who can blame me for being done with the war, even if the war isn’t done with me?
In September 1916, Ernst Ludwig, the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, declared the war indeed done with Kurt, intervening to spring him from military service. A man of literary interests and a poet and playwright himself, the grand duke wanted his own work published, and Kurt was happy to oblige if that were the price to return him to Leipzig. Marketing director Georg Heinrich Meyer had run the firm in Kurt’s absence and regularly traveled to the Western Front to go over business while Kurt served in Belgium. My grandfather’s redeployment east had left Meyer on his own. But Meyer’s knack for selling books held up even in wartime; upon Kurt’s return, the firm’s backlist featured more than four hundred titles, among them Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem, a notable best seller. “I extend my warmest greetings now that you are near us once again,” Kafka wrote Kurt in October 1916. “Though these days there is little difference between being near and being far.”
After the peace of 1918, Kurt brought out several books from an inventory that war fever had precluded from publication. Foremost was Heinrich Mann’s novel Der Untertan (literally, “The Underling”), held back for its anti-war and anti-monarchy themes. Kurt read the manuscript while serving on the Western Front and wrote Meyer right away: “I am entranced. After the war it is to appear immediately, marketed courageously, with timpani and trumpets. . . . Especially at a time the field-gray publicists will be swamping us with their deluge, Der Untertan should and must be published.” Although the kaiser, Wilhelm II, had abdicated and fled, the book appeared in a Germany riven by political intrigue and factional violence. The publication of Der Untertan earned Mann death threats—and the Kurt Wolff Verlag sales of one hundred thousand copies in six weeks.
A year later Kurt published Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” He had balked at doing so during the war, writing the author that he feared its gruesome subject would be too “painful” for readers. In fact, Kurt knew that this book too would have run afoul of the censors. “Your criticism of the painful element accords completely with my opinion, but then I feel the same way about almost everything I have written so far,” Kafka had replied. “Have you noticed how few things are free of this painful element in one form or another?”
Kurt had surely noticed. At the same time, the flight of the kaiser and the promise of democracy seemed to foretell the kind of Germany in which the Kurt Wolff Verlag would flourish. In its 1918 catalog the house foreswore “prejudices of a literary, political, national nature” and vowed instead simply to “consider the question of whether a book is good.” But post-traumatic social conditions and an economy shackled by reparations imperiled the book business. Bureaucrats with authoritarian sympathies remained in place. The first democracy in Germany’s history, established in the cultural capital of Weimar, lacked the hardheadedness to enforce the lofty values in its constitution. Communists and reactionaries clashed violently with one another from their respective camps, and the idealism and confidence that had marked German literary culture before 1914 became collateral damage. Karl Kraus put it succinctly: “[The Germans] will have forgotten that they lost the war, forgotten that they started it, forgotten that they waged it. For this reason, it will not end.”
The Wolffs now had an infant daughter, my aunt Maria, and in October 1919 Kurt moved the firm from Leipzig to Munich. With supply chains disrupted and habitable apartments for its employees scarce, he nonetheless set up shop in a neo-Baroque villa on Luisenstrasse. It quickly became a house of culture, accommodating Kurt’s still-substantial library and hosting regular readings, concerts, and exhibits. But my grandfather soon fell into a funk. “More than ever, Kurt Wolff is a slave to the Kurt Wolff Verlag,” he wrote Hasenclever in November 1920. Nine months later it was Werfel’s turn to hear out one of my grandfather’s lamentations—that their generation had groomed “no young creative successors.”
Kurt began to choose titles that were more bourgeois and less adventurous. He shut down Der jüngste Tag and threw his house open to European writers, not just German ones. All good as it went, but crotchets and peeves sometimes rushed in where sure-handed seismography once prevailed. In 1920, when a “Professor James Joyce” offered him the German rights to a novel that was probably A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kurt wondered who “this idiotic ‘professor’ who has written me from Trieste in bad German” could be. Forty years later my grandfather confessed, “If the Kurt Wolff Verlag had published an early book by Joyce, it would certainly also have acquired Ulysses, the most important work to be written in English in our century.”
In Munich he turned more often to the arts, to painters of Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider), such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, whom he had begun to patronize before the war. During his exile to come, Kurt would pawn some of their works to support himself and his family.
Carrying a payroll of one hundred, the firm in 1923 began steadily shedding staff. “The times are bad,” Kurt wrote his mother-in-law, Clara Merck, that June, “and the publishing business accords with the times.” Kurt started to hedge his bets. Instead of the new, he published more of the tried-and-true, including authors from countries with which Germany had just been at war—Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov, even Sinclair Lewis. Hoping to become less dependent on the fragile German economy, he founded a house in Florence, Pantheon Casa Editrice, the first pan-European firm to specialize in art books. He brought out volumes with text in five languages, cutting deals with foreign publishers to share costs. But the uncertainty of the times left even wealthy continental book buyers reluctant to spring for lavish editions, and rising nationalism began to subvert the cosmopolitan assumptions at the heart of these copublishing arrangements. The firm’s prewar reputation as safe harbor for avant-garde playwrights, poets, and authors of fiction vanished as these kinds of writers seemed to disappear too. As the worst of the hyperinflation set in, Kurt paid his staff daily, so that, he wrote, “they could spend it the same day for purchases that would be unaffordable the day after.”
My father was born into this gathering chaos, in July 1921. When Niko was two, my grandfather made an entry in his diary that is almost unimaginable today: “A KW novel now priced at 5 million marks.”
The Berlin skyline is almost too jumbled to qualify as one. It’s as if city planners took instructions from Karl Scheffler’s 1910 observation that fate “condemns Berlin forever to become and never to be.” Yet a protean cityscape is somehow appropriate for a place that, during the lifetimes of my grandfather and father, has been by turns imperial, impoverished, heedlessly carefree, fascist, ruined, occupied, and divided, until its ultimate reunification and position at the center of the European project.
The renovated Reichstag is an exception to all this visual unruliness. To tour the building and its dome, you ascend the ramp that spirals up underneath the distinctive glass dome, then gaze down at the seats of the MPs in the chamber below. Symbolism is at play here twice over: government should be sheathed in transparency, and there’s no better way to remind a parliament of its proper place than to have constituents literally look down on it from above.
Germans can be relentless in their remembrance. During the Reichstag’s restoration, project managers chose to preserve Cyrillic graffiti left by some triumphant Soviet soldier that reads I FUCK HITLER IN THE ASS. Visible to the south is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; it’s no accident that the site, known informally as “the Holocaust memorial,” goes by such a precise and explicit official name or that it occupies a spot so central that no visitor to Berlin is likely to miss it. This historical humility informs much of current German political life, keeps memory alive, and drives the far-right Alternative für Deustchland crazy. If, as the AfD legislator Björn Höcke has grumbled, Germans are “the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital,” it’s because they’re discerning enough to recognize that they need to, especially as long as politicians like Höcke have a following.
One of the authors Kurt and Helen published in New York, Günter Grass, served as the moral compass of postwar West Germany, even as he felt uncomfortable in the role. “You cannot delegate your conscience to writers or anyone else,” Grass said in 2000. “I don’t speak out because I am a writer. My profession is a writer, but I speak out because I am a citizen. I think the Weimar Republic collapsed and the Nazis took over in 1933 because there were not enough citizens. That’s the lesson I have learned. Citizens cannot leave politics just to politicians.”
In late 1944, as a seventeen-year-old responding to a draft notice, Grass joined the Waffen-SS. He never admitted having done so until the end of a career in which he hectored Germans to engage with their past. In that, he was surely wrong. But Grass is right about the lesson worth carrying forward: there were not enough citizens.
The AHA Factory occupies much of an upper floor in an old Mietskaserne, one of countless five-story “rental barracks” built to accommodate workers who flocked to Berlin during the Industrial Revolution. Around me turn the cogs of the creative economy. Moritz, a jazz guitarist and arts impresario, swans into our shared office aglow from his success fishing over the weekend. Aidan, an Irishman married to a German of Turkish descent, is performing motion analysis for dancers. Ed, a computer programmer from Holland, is busy coding an app for parents of preschoolers, while Francesco, a filmmaker from Italy, creates videos for corporate clients and humble AHA Factory cohabitants alike. Each contributes to Berlin’s status as home to more start-ups than any other city in Europe. The cost of living is still cheap enough for the starving artist, and any day can deliver an energizing encounter with someone in flight from convention or repression. All of which leaves you with the thrill of being on the crest of a wave.
But this wave comes with an undertow that can yank you from the present when you least expect it. Each morning our kids go off to school on an S-Bahn headed for the Wannsee, where in January 1942 the Nazis signed off on the Final Solution; in the afternoon they return on a train bound for Oranienburg, from which the Schutzstaffel (SS) oversaw it. We buy meat and produce in the market hall in which Carl Herz, the Jewish mayor of Kreuzberg, after being chased from city hall and dragged through the streets by Brownshirts of the Sturmabteilung (SA), was beaten on a spring day in 1933. Walking around our Kiez, as Berliners call a neighborhood, we come across some of the more than five thousand Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones—brass cobblestone memorials nested in the sidewalks of the city, each commemorating a Berliner victimized by the Nazis and set outside the last home he or she freely chose. Dates of detention and murder come inscribed beneath each name in recitative simplicity. The power of the Stolpersteine lies in their subtle obtrusiveness. Whereas you must consciously make a destination of immured, monochromatic gravestones in a cemetery, stumbling stones glint up at you throughout the open city, nuggets in the creek bed. To read an inscription you bend at the waist in a kind of bow of respect. As memorials go, Stolpersteine derive an animating power from being a work in progress, as tens of thousands of Berliners are yet to be memorialized.
It’s a sobering fact, the historian Timothy Snyder points out, that “cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero.” That’s precisely why each stone in our neighborhood calls out as it does, testifying to the meaning of one particular spot in the life of one particular person, insisting on its place in our daily routine. Cross the street to the ice-cream stand, weighing whether to enjoy one scoop or two, but only after you remember Wilhelm Böttcher, the widower with a wooden leg who, rather than finger other gay Berliners, killed himself in September 1936 in the Alexanderplatz jail two weeks after police took him into custody. Fill out a transfer slip at the bank on the corner, and you do so steps from where, a month apart in early 1943, the Jewish cousins Ruth Gerstel and Erwin Rones were detained and deported, Schicksal ???, fate unknown, their stone tells us. Approach the threshold of the nearest chain store to buy sundries, and you’re reminded that a tailor and postal worker named Martin Jaffé, who performed six years of forced labor at a chemical plant in nearby Tempelhof, lived here in a third-floor apartment before being arrested at work in February 1943—whereupon the Nazis, having decided to bring in captured Slavs from the east to replace Jews like Jaffé, sent him first to the ghetto at Theresienstadt and then to his death.
Just around the corner from where we live, the stumbling stone nearest to us, ERNA WOLFF, deported on December 14, 1942, murdered in Auschwitz. No relation, as far as I know. And I really don’t know.
My writ as a journalist often ran beyond sports, to how the games we play and watch spill into the world at large. So it’s hard not to see two events scheduled for the same day—the Berlin Marathon and the German election—as an invitation to find a spot along the marathon route a block from our apartment and riddle out what both mean.
The procession begins with outriding cop cars, follows with the African favorites, and soon delivers the pack, its riot of color at odds with a slate-gray sky. This being Kreuzberg, no one gets a bigger cheer than the competitors the Nazis would have eliminated: the handcyclists and a man with one arm. To watch anyone run is to realize how much this enterprise of the legs depends on swinging whatever arms you have.
Despite the breadth of candidates and parties on the ballot, most Germans regard today’s election as a binary choice. On one side stands Merkel, with her decision to welcome those million-plus refugees. Taking seriously the Christianity in the pedigree of her party, the Christian Democratic Union, she invoked the biblical injunction to welcome the stranger. Her mantra of Wir schaffen das—“We’ll manage it”—was an appeal to German practicality and willingness to tackle challenges. “I grew up behind a wall,” Merkel liked to say, “and have no desire to repeat the experience.” Her refugee policy was a spectacularly risky political choice, but it was the brave one, the righteous one, and, once asylum seekers had massed at the border, given German history, really the only one.
On the other side there’s the Alternative for Germany. The AfD began as an anti-European protest movement and gained strength after Merkel led the European Union’s bailout of Greece. Soon the party became a catch basin for anyone with a gripe about immigrants, Islam, or the ostensibly uncontroversial matter of whether National Socialism should be held up as a national shame. Some party members no longer even bother to cloak their Nazi sympathies. A regional AfD official, Alexander Gauland, said, “If the French are rightly proud of their Emperor, and the Britons of Nelson and Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.” Another, a judge from Saxony named Jens Maier, once called racially mixed people “unbearable” and said that Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist and anti-Islam extremist, “became a mass murderer out of pure desperation.”
It’s a vocational tic of mine to be attuned to sports references: Of course, Gauland said, he cheered for Jérôme Boateng, the defender on the German national soccer team whose father comes from Ghana. But to have Boateng as a neighbor, Gauland went on to say—that would be another matter altogether.
The AfD winds up capturing 13 percent of the vote, enough to qualify for representation in the Bundestag, the federal assembly, for the first time. But Merkel easily wins reelection as chancellor. Opinion polls suggest that Germany has built a firewall against extremism. Some 80 percent of the population identifies with the political center, almost 30 percent more than the French do. Historian Konrad Jarausch credits the Federal Republic’s extraordinary political stability to an aging generation of peace-prizing, centrist, small-d democrats, many of whom have faced up to what happened during the Nazi era and their own ancestors’ complicity in it. That a country so late to democracy, and until the mid-twentieth-century so apparently indifferent to it, is now its beau ideal, surely qualifies as “an irony of history.” The trauma of Nazism—and for those in the east, the ensuing oppression by the Stasi, the secret police of the German Democratic Republic—will do that to a people. Which leads me to conclude hopefully that, even with one impaired political limb, Germany can count on its others to keep moving forward.
