Endpapers, p.24
Endpapers, page 24
The two apparently met up in Hamburg sometime in the early fifties. Christian recalls Enoch and his mother visiting Manhattan, where the half brothers discovered a common interest in jazz. But despite the intimate pronouns, Dus and Deins, the father-son exchanges have an awkward formality. Raising a child can’t be done by letter, not in the way you can flatter an author or pitch a reviewer or order up a print run.
Even though he grew up more or less fatherless, Enoch was fatefully lucky for his mother’s sham marriage and every kindness Fritz Crome showed him. As Hitler threw young bodies at two fronts, a German boy born in 1926 was doomed to be cannon fodder during the fading days of an unwinnable war—like the son of Kurt’s sister Else, Eduard Grafe, who fell in battle in 1944 at nineteen. Annemarie von Puttkamer’s desperate appearance at the Danish consulate in Munich that day during the late thirties probably saved my uncle Enoch’s life.
When I return to Berlin I pull out Kurt’s last will and testament. It’s written in French and notarized in Geneva, listing as his legal residence a hotel there. In a codicil added four months before his death, Kurt left $10,000 each to Niko, Christian, and Enoch. But the fine print holds one of them at arm’s length. The first two are identified as mes deux fils—my two sons. Enoch is simply Enoch Crome à Copenhague.
Seventeen
Play on the Bones of the Dead
Niko and Alex, 2002
If he had wanted to assimilate fully, my father would have adopted the backslapping, other-directed ways of the postwar American salaryman. Niko had no interest in doing so. He continued to cultivate the “inner boundlessness” that Helen remarked upon long ago. Even after decades as a US citizen, he never shed a reserve that made him uncomfortable bantering about sports around backyard grills, to say nothing of swapping war stories. In the meantime sports was captivating me, teaching arithmetic and narrative and a way to express Americanism with the fluency my father never acquired. He had been a teenager when the Berlin Olympics and the Max Schmeling–Joe Louis fight galvanized Germany, but Niko shared no memory of either—only the trauma of playing field hockey at boarding school, where he broke his nose multiple times when he would rather have been building theater sets. His own father’s disapproval of sports had come down through the years and even crossed the ocean; in Manhattan, Kurt frowned on Christian’s choice to play intramural basketball at his Quaker secondary school, calling the game “unhealthy and dangerous.”
But to play sports, even to follow or talk them, was a way for me to leave behind my ancestors’ immigrant ill ease. Sports could help consummate the assimilation my grandfather gave up on and my father never entirely completed, and thereby plant the flag for all future Wolffs. My mother had passed on to me some athletic aptitude, which I took first to the driveway and then to playgrounds and gyms farther afield. Basketball offered community and a way into a world alien to the ones that had produced my parents. There was no better way to keep at bay Niko’s German origins (NBA imports Detlef Schrempf and Dirk Nowitzki were still decades off), and the slaveholders and restrictive covenants in my mother’s family’s Southern and WASP past, than to explore this unbuttoned game tied up in the African American experience.
When I showed an interest in journalism in high school, my parents let slip their hope that I would someday find my way to National Geographic. But no—I wound up instead pandering to “the sportsman’s heart.” Niko and Mary were never as explicit as the snobs back in turn-of-the-century Bonn. But with them the raised eyebrow was an involuntary tic.
It took reading Sebastian Haffner years later for me to realize that my forefathers’ wariness of sports might have come from something darker than a few broken noses. During Niko’s adolescence and throughout Kurt’s European exile, spectator sports in Germany came bound up in Nazism.
The Nazi leaders love Germany in the way an inconsiderate racehorse owner “loves” his horse. He wants it to win the race, nothing more. To this end it has been trained and ridden as hard and as inconsiderately as possible. Whether the horse shares his desire for glory and wants to be a racehorse; whether it comes to grief or is henceforth lamed for life; [these] are questions that do not concern him. . . . Certainly nations and the men composing them are not there to be collective athletic teams, the fate that the Nazis have imposed on the German people. The Nazi leaders aim at converting Germany into a gigantic sports club which is always winning “victories”—and thereby losing its happiness, character, and national identity.
I had been pushing a notebook as a writer at Sports Illustrated for more than two decades when an assignment catapulted me back to my father’s birthplace. Two years before the 2004 Olympics in Athens, the first to be staged in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, I was asked to revisit the 1972 Munich games, where Black September terrorists murdered eleven Israelis in the athletes’ village.
From New York came the news-peg rigging with which good editors equip their writers: we’re exactly thirty years on; the Palestinian mastermind of the attack has just written a memoir; the Athens organizers seem to suffer from a security deficit, the perils of which the 1972 Olympics serve as an abiding reminder. But all I needed to hear was “Munich.” Watching on TV as a fifteen-year-old, I had followed those events in real time, hanging on every update from ABC’s Jim McKay—first the shock of the hostage taking, then the false hope of a successful rescue, finally the horrifying endgame, a fireball at an airfield on the outskirts of the city. The point—really the entire point—of the Munich Olympics had been for the Federal Republic of Germany to stage an event to repudiate the catastrophe foreshadowed by the 1936 games in Berlin. And then, more catastrophe.
I had watched knowing that the athletes of the world were gathered in the city where my aunt and uncle and cousins all still lived. The undulations of the Olympic Park came from bulldozed rubble—“so the young play on the bones of the dead,” I remember Maria’s husband, my uncle Peter, telling me. When the 1972 games delivered more death, I was prepped for the irony.
Details about the backstory to the attack had emerged over the years, and as I set out to learn all I could, a few paragraphs of an old newspaper clipping caught my eye. I reread them several times, wondering whether my rusty German was playing tricks on me. There was a man, this brief item seemed to say, a security professional, who had prepared crisis scenarios in advance of those Munich games. He had predicted the actual attack with a haunting accuracy. Yet the organizers had refused to listen to him.
A few weeks before leaving for Europe, I asked my father to translate that clipping and flag anything else he might find in reports I’d culled from German newspapers and magazines. He was eighty-one now, half-consumed by the cancer that would kill him. But Niko confirmed the account about the clairvoyant consultant, a Dr. Georg Sieber. Not since those Watergate evenings on the couch had my father’s interests and mine aligned so closely. For him, here was the confluence of history and his hometown, fateful events in which sports were swallowed up rather than wallowed in. In the premise of my assignment he could surely hear what I heard—the devil’s whisper of “condemned to repeat it.” Upon landing in Munich in search of Georg Sieber, I felt Niko at my elbow.
Two months later I turned in a story that would fill seventeen pages in the magazine. This is how it began:
For a citizen of a country manacled to its past, Dr. Georg Sieber had a remarkable knack for seeing the future. In the months leading up to the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich, West German organizers asked Sieber, then a 39-year-old police psychologist, to “tabletop” the event, as security experts call the exercise of sketching out worst-case scenarios. Sieber looks a bit like the writer Tom Clancy, and the crises he limned drew from every element of the airport novelist’s genre: kidnappers and hostages, superpower patrons and smuggled arms, hijacked jets and remote-controlled bombs. Studying the most ruthless groups of that era, from the Irish Republican Army and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, to the Basque separatist group ETA and West Germany’s own Baader-Meinhof Gang, he came up with twenty-six cases, each imagined in apocalyptic detail. Most of Sieber’s scenarios focused on the Olympic Village, the Games’ symbolic global community; one that did not—a jet hired by a Swedish right wing group crashes into an Olympic Stadium filled with people—foreshadowed a September day in another city many years later.
But on September 5, 1972, at the Munich Olympics, history would not wait. It hastened to crib from one of Sieber’s scenarios virtually horror for horror. The psychologist had submitted to organizers Situation 21, which comprised the following particulars: At five o’clock one morning, a dozen armed Palestinians would scale the perimeter fence of the Village. They would invade the building that housed the Israeli delegation, kill a hostage or two (“To enforce discipline,” Sieber says today), then demand the release of prisoners held in Israeli jails and a plane to fly to some Arab capital. Even if the Palestinians failed to liberate their comrades, Sieber predicted, they would “turn the Games into a political demonstration” and would be “prepared to die. . . . On no account can they be expected to surrender.”
I had found Georg Sieber at his home in Nymphenburg, only a few blocks from the site of my father’s Heimkehr. He now worked as a consultant to insurance companies eager to pare back their risk. But he had never fully put behind him his time with the Munich police department and the events of 1972. Over the course of several hours, he laid out his story with striking matter-of-factness and clarity of detail. It was as if he had been waiting thirty years for someone to appear on his doorstep to hear him out.
To guard against Sieber’s “situations,” Munich organizers would have had to scrap the kind of games they had been planning for years. The “Carefree Games” were to be a sporting jubilee, free of barbed wire or police bristling with sidearms. Where Hitler’s Olympics had been festooned with swastikas and opened with a cannon salute, Munich would feature a one-worldish logo, with security personnel, blazer-clad “Olys,” prepared for little more than ticket fraud and drunkenness. Organizers asked Sieber to get back to them with less-frightful scenarios—threats better suited to the games they intended to stage.
And so the Munich Olympics went off as a premature Oktoberfest. Mimes and bands gamboled through the village alongside Waldi, the dachshund mascot. After late-night runs to the Hofbrauhaus, virile young Olympians didn’t bother using the official entrance when they could easily scale a two-meter high chain-link fence while Olys looked the other way. A police inspector in charge of security in the village cut back nighttime patrols because, as he put it, “at night nothing happens.”
Nothing, except what Sieber foretold. To be sure, he turned out to have been slightly off. Black September commandos scaled the fence about fifty minutes earlier than envisioned in Situation 21. To gain entry to the Israelis’ ground-floor apartment they did not, as Sieber had imagined, have to ignite a blasting compound, because they could jimmy the door open. But the rest of his details—from the demands for a prisoner exchange and an airliner; to the eventual change of venue from the village; even to the two Israelis killed in the first moments of the takeover—played out exactly. By the next morning, after that bungled rescue attempt, nine more Israelis were dead, as well as five of the terrorists and a Munich policeman.
Sieber recounted all this with neither bitterness nor any apparent sense of vindication. He betrayed only the clinical detachment characteristic of his profession. “The American psychologist Leon Festinger developed the theory of cognitive dissonance,” he told me. “If you have two propositions in conflict, it’s human nature to disregard one of them.”
Late on the day the hostages were seized, Sieber had fielded a call from his boss. His services were no longer needed, Munich police chief Manfred Schreiber told him. “[Israeli prime minister] Golda Meir is involved,” Schreiber said. “This is no longer a psychological matter but a political one.”
At that, Sieber returned home, flicked on the TV, and poured himself a cup of coffee.
Ten Olympiads later, before the 2012 games, I would spend those months in London with my family. Early that summer our children—then ten and nine—cheered for Germany during the soccer Euro. They thought nothing of wearing their Bastian Schweinsteiger and Mesut Özil national team jerseys, gifts from cousins back in Bavaria. But it had been impossible for Vanessa and me to take the kids around the city, not just to the Cabinet War Rooms but to places like Saint Paul’s Cathedral and the Underground, without speaking of the Blitz. And when we spoke of the Blitz, we had to speak of Nazi Germany and share with them some essentials of history and how those events touched our family. There was a time not long ago, we told them, when the German government killed millions of people simply because they were Jews. A time when Germany would have had a place for a Schweinsteiger, but an Özil would have been sent to the camps. All of which helped lead Clara to ask, “Isn’t there some way Opa could have been a spy?”
Over the years I’ve asked questions like it. They first occurred when I was a teenager in suburban Rochester, upon seeing the old men with the camp tattoos in the locker room at the Jewish Community Center and wondering what they would think if they knew of our membership.
They now occur when I hear Vanessa play the violin, an heirloom from my father, who had himself inherited it from his stepfather, Dr. Albrecht, the man I now knew to have been a financial supporter of the SS. An instrument with glorious sound and compromised provenance, it emblemizes the breathtaking marks Germany has made on the world, beautiful and evil.
They occur as part of an exercise: Was my father’s service in the Wehrmacht at all mitigated by the Nazis’ having burned so many of the books his father published? Would my own moral inheritance be cleaner had not 80 percent of the Kurt Wolff Verlag catalog but all of it been declared a threat to the German race and nation?
Is there indeed such a thing as a “moral inheritance”?
If some deficit of virtue has come down to me on my father’s side, did the efforts of that cousin on my mother’s, Caroline Ferriday, go any distance toward closing it? How many good works was Caroline obliged to perform to square accounts with her slaveholding ancestors?
And then the exercise ends. There’s a case to be made for moral balance sheets, but if they exist, every child deserves a blank one on the day of its birth. At the same time, let that blank one come with a ledger accounting the family debt. And may the significant figures of shame—clarifying, activating shame—fill the lines of that ledger, to help inform the task before us.
History tends to overwhelm individuals who try to control its course. But for the occasional black swan, a Hitler or bin Laden or Gavrilo Princip, only a critical mass of citizens can steer it. Georg Sieber came to understand this, and in his own way my father did too. Of course organizers wanted to turn the page, to banish from their Olympics anything that smacked of Nazism. But to take history seriously is to understand that you can’t “get back to us with less-frightful scenarios” more in keeping with the games that modern Germany wished it could stage.
For all the truth to Santayana’s nostrum that those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it, the organizers of the 1972 Olympics were confounded by a paradox for which eleven Israelis paid the ultimate price. To dig into the detail is to discover that the tragedy of the Munich games was not that anyone failed to remember the past. It was that Germans, trapped in a circle, recalled their past all too well.
With Vanessa and our children I’ve come by train and company car to Darmstadt, longtime seat of the family firm. Three hundred and fifty years after a common ancestor founded the original pharmacy across from the palace moat in the center of town, we’re joining relatives to celebrate Merck’s status as grande dame of the world’s drug companies. Despite how my father disentangled himself long ago from a silent partner’s stake in the business, management still regards blood as blood. So I’m plied with regular mailings and the latest edition of the family tree, its boughs now laden with the fruit of thirteen generations. The executive board has invited us to the M-Sphere, a geodesic pavilion built for the festivities, which will include dinner, speeches, and a performance by the Deutsche Philharmonie Merck.
During the Enlightenment, the Merck family had grown its wealth not only by selling powders and potions, but also by lending money in and around the landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt. Thus, when Emanuel Merck made his breakthrough with alkaloids in the 1820s, the business could tap capital to begin production on an industrial scale. My ancestors’ instinctive cosmopolitanism led them to pursue markets around the world, which guaranteed huge losses in the aftermath of world wars that left German industry ruined and isolated. Yet that same global vision helped lead to renewal during the Wirtschaftswunder. Since the end of the war Merck has enjoyed almost uninterrupted growth, from acquisitions as well as expansion into biotech, semiconductors, and materials like pigments and liquid crystals.
Today the company grounds are as much research center as factory, with a racially diverse, multilingual workforce that has the look and feel of the student body at some campus in the California system. Merck now routinely tries to put down markers on the side of the angels. The company participates in the Access Accelerated Open Platform initiative, which targets treatable, preventable, noncommunicable diseases around the world. And it invests in cultural causes like the orchestra that takes its name as well as the annual Tagore Award in India, a literary prize that highlights Kurt’s connection to the Bengali Nobel Prize winner. Much of this corporate citizenship—and recent willingness to confront National Socialism in the company’s past—began under the chairmanship of Maria’s son Jon, who for twelve years led the executive board and is among those assembled in the M-Sphere tonight.
