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Four

Mediterranean Refuge

Kurt and Niko, 1931 to 1938

Beginning in 1931, Niko and Maria spent four summers in the south of France, where their father lined up a succession of rentals. It would be their only extended time with Kurt during this span. As the train carrying the Wolff children clattered its way from Munich, cold and order gave way to the sunshine and languor that has long fueled the German yearning for the south. They would use their small fingers to manipulate the signage on the toilet doors, switching VACANT TO ENGAGED and delighting in the lines that formed at the ends of the cars. During station stops Niko might get off to run the platform, boarding again only after the train began to move, mortifying their chaperone, their mother’s Jewish friend Elisabeth Krämer.

At first their destination wasn’t the grandest part of the French Riviera but the more modest Petit Littoral, that coastal stretch anchored by the still-undiscovered fishing port of Saint-Tropez, where Frau Krämer, at right in the photograph, has joined Niko, Helen, and Maria for a swim. The uprooted German Jewish litterateur Sybille Bedford captured the cultural landscape of this patch of meridional France at that time: “The conjunction of the perennial austere beauty of climate and nature­—­scouring mistral, the unfudging sun—with the sweetness and sharpness and quickness, the rippling intelligence, the accommodating tolerance of the French manière de vivre gave one a large sense of living rationally, sensually, well. As no other place in Europe, no other place in the world, France between the wars made one this present of the illusion of freedom.”

After their mother’s fussy domestic standards, Niko and Maria found relief in homes with no running water or electricity, like Le Cabanon, a bungalow set in a vineyard, and the seaside Villa Schlumberger, to which Kurt and Helen brought oil lamps, a hand-cranked gramophone, and a tube radio with a rechargeable lead acid battery. Of the two siblings, one could pull rank as Kurt’s favorite. “My father thought Niko illiterate,” Maria once told me. “With me he could talk about books and art.” And he would take Maria, nearly five foot ten by age twelve, to the Saint-Tropez Fisherman’s Ball, where he ran interference for her with the men who asked, Permettez, monsieur?

My father and his sister, shown here with Kurt in Saint-Tropez in 1931, spent days free of care, picking figs and pawing through the bonbon bins at the Patisserie Senequier. Outside the nearby villa La Treille Muscate, they checked the lantern that glowed green if its occupant, the writer Colette, was receiving visitors and red if she wasn’t. Mail would mistakenly arrive for a German aristocrat named Baron von Wolff, who lived in a nearby nudist colony, and my grandfather could be counted on to announce, in a put-upon tone, Ich muss die Post wieder den Nudisten zustellen (I’ve got to deliver the mail to the nudists again). For siblings from the steadily Nazifying north, to shuttle across the cleft of a broken home had its compensations.

During their last summer in Saint-Tropez, Niko announced to his astonished father that he had figured out how to drive. Every bit the man of letters, Kurt asked his son to prove it in writing. So Niko, only just twelve, put together an illustrated Gebrauchsanweisung (instruction booklet) so thorough that his impressed father might have been tempted to publish it. Behind the wheel of a 1929 Buick four-door convertible, with a spare tire surmounting each running board, Kurt gave his son a place on his lap, and the two set out on the back roads of Provence—until a gendarme waved them over.

Niko slid sheepishly on to the shotgun seat.

“He has a hard time seeing over the windshield,” Kurt told the policeman preemptively.

“I hope he’s not driving.”

“Oh, no.”

“May I see your driver’s license?”

Kurt produced his license. But he also flashed his Friends of the Saint-Tropez Police membership card, and the gendarme let them go.

Idyllic though it was, their sojourn in Saint-Tropez did nothing to alter Kurt and Helen’s status as Gesinnungsemigranten, emigrants of conviction. By the fall of 1933 they had moved east along the coast to La Chiquita, a house in the hills above Nice. There they took in boarders to help cover the rent. My father’s half brother Christian was born the following March.

During these years on the lam Kurt auctioned off more books and sold paintings. He stashed liquid assets in banks in Switzerland and England, a hedge that would pay off after the Nazis imposed restrictions on foreign exchange. Whether buying gold or joining organizations like the Friends of the Saint-Tropez Police, Kurt stayed tuned to a kind of defensive wavelength while keeping an anxious eye on the news.

By the end of 1934, with Italy’s fascist government still reasonably independent of Hitler, Kurt and Helen were plotting one more move, to the village of Lastra a Signa outside Florence. In December Kurt wrote Hesse from Nice:

We cannot remain here, much as we love the house and the countryside. Living here required the presence of paying guests, and although we had a steady stream of them, in the form of German friends, until the fall, the new German currency regulations have prevented them from coming [and spending Reichsmarks] since October. And so we decided to mobilize all our reserves and take advantage of the opportunity to acquire a lovely small property in Tuscany: a house with some good land that will supply us with wine, oil, grain, fruit and vegetables, as well as chickens, eggs, milk, etc. There we hope—Mr. Mussolini and the demons of politics willing—to be able to stay.

Kurt makes himself out to be some back-to-the-lander. In fact, the villa Il Moro, to which they moved in March 1935, included an adjacent casa colonica housing a farm family that pulled enough from the property to feed everyone. If an emergency came up, villagers knew they could call on the German in the big house for the use of his car; in return, locals looked out for Kurt and Helen during an unsettled time. Meanwhile Kurt continued to engage in his dalliances. In Italy the Wolffs could take on paying guests again, and Kurt declared to his wife one day that they had on their hands “ein florierendes Geschäft,” a flourishing business. Helen came right back at him: “Rather more like ein deflorierendes Geschäft”—a deflowering business.

Exile did nothing to diminish Kurt’s self-image as a grand seigneur who loved to foist high culture on those around him. Willy Haas, one of the original readers from the Kurt Wolff Verlag’s Leipzig days, recalled a trip in 1937 to another Wolff rental, this one on that most felicitous of exile landing spots, Elba. Upon meeting Haas at the final train station on the Italian mainland, Kurt demanded to know what his old colleague had seen while passing through Florence.

“I know Florence pretty well,” Haas replied.

“Do you know the Castagno frescoes in the Sant’Apollonia?”

“No.”

“Then go back to Florence immediately. I’ll be here this evening waiting for you.”

Haas backtracked and maintained later that he didn’t regret it.

As their father and stepmother settled into Italian country life, Niko and Maria learned to look forward to school breaks and trips to Il Moro, including the visit during which the photograph of my teenage father was taken. In the meantime Kurt kept a literary hand in. He prepared the translation of a French text for a Munich publisher, using a pseudonym to keep himself and his client out of trouble. During two weeks in 1935 he hosted the conductor Bruno Walter and his wife, Elsa, as well as Alma Mahler Werfel and her husband, with whom he weighed plans to start an Exilverlag. But it became more and more unnerving to live in one fascist country while holding the passport of another, renewable only at the whim of some Nazi.

After the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Kurt and Niko weighed how to secure the Nachweis der arischen Abstammung­—­the certificate of “Aryan” ancestry the regime required of anyone who wanted to remain a German citizen.

Niko’s Nachweis, pictured and filled out in his father’s hand, carries the mark of success. The purple eagle-and-­swastika stamp of a Nazi Amt on the reverse looks as if it has been affixed yesterday. Kurt indicates his own profession as Landwirt, or farmer—no publisher of Jewish authors or patron of “degenerate” artists he. The religion of Niko’s paternal grandmother, Kurt’s mother, Maria, is listed as evangelisch, Protestant, which she claimed by birth to two baptized Christians as well as baptism in her own right. (The parenthetical auch frühere, “also earlier,” could be an invitation to indicate Maria Marx’s Jewish background, but Kurt has pointedly ignored it.) The form, notarized in Munich at the Justizrat Heinrich Himmler, confirms “that the information contained in the evidence above accords with the content of the corresponding documents submitted to me in original form.”

My grandfather’s application, just as neatly filled out, survives too. But it was never certified, because it was never submitted. A flurry of letters and forms, mostly from 1937, document Kurt’s initial efforts to renew his passport, which was set to expire in November 1938. He signs one letter “mit deutschem Gruß,” with German greetings, the closest thing to a Heil Hitler his dignity would apparently allow. In the end, he and Helen chose to apply for, and secured, French travel documents called titres de voyage—“because,” Kurt wrote Hasenclever in August 1938, “we both simply don’t want the German passport anymore.” But he surely knew too that applying to the Nazis for renewal was not a battle to be won, not by someone controversial enough to be suspect for reasons beyond any Jewish ancestry. Several years later, before she would settle with her new husband in Freiburg, Maria was let go from a job at a Munich bookshop. The reason, the proprietor told her, was that her father was ein Kulturbolschewik.

At my father’s boarding school, “Mischlinge” at least had an ally in headmaster Ernst Reisinger. Through 1938, Reisinger used the mit deutschem Gruß dodge in official communications, including several invitations to Parents’ Day that I unearth. Only in 1939 did he begin to employ Heil Hitler! My father remembered Reisinger making tactical compromises to retain influence with the authorities, including a high-ranking local Nazi official, the husband of the school’s piano instructor. The Schondorf headmaster did so, Niko told me, to protect “first-degree Mischlinge” like Ursula Lange, a student one grade ahead of my father who would marry his first cousin Emanuel Merck after the war.

How one “identifies” is a personal prerogative, a choice we regard today as reserved for every individual. But this photograph, taken at Schondorf during the late thirties, reminds me that, in Germany under Nazi rule, to identify was a verb deployed not in the active sense but the passive. Then and there, you were identified. To do the identifying, party bureaucrats could access centuries of civil and ecclesiastical records and trot out crude charts and calipers to back up any judgment they cared to make. Niko stands in the middle at the back here, his dark and curly hair bobbing in a sea of towheads. Did classmates and teachers fully accept him? Or, Nachweis notwithstanding, did they regard him as having a secret to keep? To see him as so striking an outsider invites me to consider his and Kurt’s and my own Jewish roots. And to do that leads back to the imperiled status of the German Jew long before the Holocaust. The tighter he embraced his Germanness, the more acutely he was made to feel his Jewishness.

I pay a visit to the Jewish Museum Berlin, a labyrinth of canted corridors and disorienting spaces that architect Daniel Libeskind designed to look from above like a shattered Star of David. The permanent exhibition, with its broad focus on the history of German Jewry, fills in the backstory. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Germany could count only a few hundred thousand Jews, most of them poor and uneducated. Yet some had become prosperous, like the ancestors of Kurt’s mother, Maria Marx, and these arrivistes tended to live in cities, where they could integrate themselves into the cultural life to be found there. Excluded from university professorships and denied commissions in the military or civil service, ambitious German Jewish men instead practiced law or medicine, or became merchants, engineers, or entrepreneurs. And to improve prospects for themselves and their children, many adult Jews converted to Christianity. Most of these converts didn’t pray to a Catholic or Protestant god so much as the Enlightenment polestars of reason and humankind, and thus made the library, museum, and concert hall their houses of worship. Many well-to-do Germans of Jewish ancestry could recite by heart passages from Goethe, who had endorsed the malleability of faith and the supremacy of Bildung with his declaration, “He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them needs religion.”

My ancestors were among the roughly twenty-two thousand German Jews who chose to convert during the nineteenth century. My great-great-grandfather August Karl Ludwig Marx was baptized in 1837, as a fifteen-year-old, although he would go on to donate much of his wealth, accumulated as a civil engineer and mining and railroad baron, to Jewish charities. August married another convert, his first cousin Bertha Isabella, the daughter of a doctor and art and book collector, who with his wife had cultivated friendships with the families of Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer—the evidence of which Kurt had stumbled upon as a teenager while visiting his grandmother. Bertha’s own parents were first cousins too, descended from several generations of prominent Jewish Rhinelanders. In addition to serving as a health administrator for the city of Bonn, Bertha’s father owned part of the railroad line that ran between the city and Koblenz.

The phrase “baptized Jew” is among the most striking things I encounter while walking the halls of the Jewish Museum. By modern and secular lights, a Jew who chooses to convert would no longer be considered Jewish. As it happens, rabbinical law and Nazi ideology both hold that a child born to a Jewish mother is a Jew, regardless of any subsequent event. And the persistence of the epithet “baptized Jew” in nineteenth-century Germany shows how conversion from Judaism hardly made it socially so. The writer Heinrich Heine, who grew up in the Rhineland as Harry Heine, once vowed never to convert, yet in 1825 did so in hopes of purchasing what he called “the admission ticket into European culture.” He came to bitterly regret having “crawled to the cross,” for it left him “hated by Christian and Jew alike.” Heine embodied a paradox that the German Jew came to know well. To be “the arriviste who never arrived” left him “mocked by the elites, vilified by the rabble,” writes the German-born historian Fritz Stern, himself the son of “baptized Jews” who escaped to the United States before the war. “Lamentable efforts at being accepted made him the object of backstage malice. . . . [And] his putative power made him the ideal target for the rising anti-­Semitism of the 1870s.”

For all the complications this duality posed in the private realm, its effect on public life would be dazzling. Germans of Jewish descent accounted for an outsize portion of the culture for which the nation would earn renown. By the middle of the twentieth century they had achieved distinction in the sciences (Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrlich, Fritz Haber, Richard Willstätter, Nobel Prize winners all); music (Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill); philosophy (Hannah Arendt, Theodor Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn—the composer’s grandfather); and literature (from the Kurt Wolff catalog alone, Else Lasker-Schüler, Walter Mehring, Carl Sternheim, and Arnold Zweig, as well as writers with roots in Vienna or Prague like Kafka, Kraus, Roth, and Werfel). Yet, amidst the nativism, militarism, and Christianity-­infused nationalism that would carry Germany off into three successive wars of aggression, German Jewish accomplishments touched off resentment. Antisemitism draws strength from stigmatization of the alien “other”; in nineteenth-­century Germany, it also fed off a desire to punish Jews for their prosperity and acculturation, regardless of what they might have contributed or overcome.

Kurt’s ancestors on his mother’s side, men like Salomon and Moritz von Haber, traced precisely this kind of bootstrapping but perilous path. The first to settle in Germany were rabbis from Bohemia, Galicia, and Italy. One, who became the chief rabbi of Trier, was also a forebear of the social theorist and Communist Manifesto author Karl Marx. During the eighteenth century another Jewish ancestor, a Jesuit-educated doctor named Moses Wolff (unrelated to Kurt’s Protestant, paternal Wolff forebears), served as personal physician to Clemens August and Maximilian Friedrich, two of the Rhineland electors who chose the Holy Roman emperor. Ancestors like Moses Wolff sat on local Jewish boards and councils. At the same time, their prosperity and collections of paintings and books signaled how invested they were in German society and culture.

Yet even the most distinguished German Jews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lived precarious lives, as the trials of Salomon and Moritz bear out. And now here was Kurt, on the run, as vulnerable as any von Haber.