Endpapers, p.2
Endpapers, page 2
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.
One
Bildung and 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 grandfather 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 Wolfgang 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-the-century 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.
