Endpapers, p.26
Endpapers, page 26
Wilhelm insists that he “repeatedly tried” to prevent the dismissals of Rudolf Engelmann, a “non-Aryan” engineer at Merck, and personnel director Otto Henkel, who “was forced to leave under the threat of violence” by local Nazi Kreisleiter Karl Schilling because of his Jewish wife, Emmy. “I very much regret that these two gentlemen, especially Dr. Henkel, who is now back at the factory as head of human resources, were booted out because of their political leanings,” he writes, “but I was personally powerless to oppose it.”
Two Stolpersteine in the sidewalks of Darmstadt speak to Wilhelm’s impotence. One honors Rudolf Engelmann. The other memorializes Emmy Henkel. Both were murdered in the camps.
In his defense Wilhelm also invokes his defeat in the “palace coup,” as the Pfotenhauer episode came to be known among my ancestors. “In 1942 I detached myself from the factory I loved, in which I had been boss and partner for almost twenty-five years,” he writes. “My departure was also done in a way that could have easily been fatal to me and might have landed me in a concentration camp.” Yet for all of Pfotenhauer’s Nazi ties, this self-pity misses the point. It was the family’s stake in the company that hung in the balance during that power struggle, and every Merck family member stood to forfeit shares if an unappeased Pfotenhauer were to invite the Nazis to nationalize the firm. Wilhelm lost out to Karl, Fritz, and “the Himmler of Hessen” for a number of reasons. Some ideological clash over National Socialism wasn’t one of them.
In the final paragraph of his statement, Wilhelm includes one more thing: “My brother-in-law Kurt Wolff, who was a half Jew, happily stayed over at my house.”
Yes, the “some of my best brothers-in-law are half-Jewish” defense.
Wilhelm, seen here chauffeuring my grandparents sometime in the early twenties, was de-Nazified as a Class IV Mitläufer, or collaborator, in June 1948 and ordered to pay a fine of 2,000 Reichsmarks, or $200. The tribunal cited several witnesses who testified on his behalf. One, a Dr. Hammer, said the sight of a copy of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer one day had led Wilhelm to express to him “his disgust at the persecution of the Jews . . . so strongly and emphatically that the voicing of his opinion might have led to him being sent to a concentration camp.” Another, a Herr Weigand, who taught music to one of Wilhelm’s sons, testified that Wilhelm had provided financial assistance after Nazi thugs hounded Weigand from his apartment during Kristallnacht.
In Berlin we did our laundry with a detergent called Persil. After the war cynical Germans referred to exonerative certificates of de-Nazification as Persilscheine. Someone with Wilhelm’s standing and connections would have had little difficulty getting a Persil slip. Yet for all his self-interested pleadings, the picture of my great-uncle to emerge from the tribunal is less of a monster than of an invertebrate. He wasn’t as deeply implicated as his cousin Karl. But Wilhelm was fatefully representative. Dazzled by uniforms and rank, drawn to the whispering glider as much as the revving motor, he had no reservations about serving as a tool on behalf of the “gigantic sports club” of Sebastian Haffner’s description. Nazism swept up the German people because of the willingness of scores of Wilhelms and millions of Wilhelm wannabes.
As proof of the farce of the whole de-Nazification process, Karl Merck—who had gone underground before the Americans reached Darmstadt, and whom prosecutors wanted to convict as an activist, or Class II Nazi—received the same verdict and punishment as Wilhelm: Class IV Mitläufer; fine of 2,000 Reichsmarks. He was soon reinstated as head of the company.
Eighteen
The End, Come by Itself
Niko, 2003 to 2007
Growing up in Nazi Germany, Niko could count one close American relative—his cousin Albert (Albie) Merck, George W.’s son in New Jersey. In 2004, then eighty-three and living outside Boston, Albie unearthed his first exchange of letters with my father after the war and sent copies to him in Vermont.
A year after V-E Day, Albie had written Niko in Munich from his Harvard dorm room to share news of his impending marriage. My father replied in his imperfect English, enclosing a photo he had taken of his cousin in lederhosen during a hiking trip they took together through Austria in 1938. Niko’s reply had to clear American censors before reaching Cambridge:
Let me tell you how happy I am, and I wish you good luck and almost the best for your engagement. My congratulations to such a beautiful girl as I can imagine her by the picture. Do you remember the days we were very young and happy boys walking, swimming, rowing and taking movies and pictures in Austria? I looked this day and found some coulored pictures, one of you, as a real “Bavarian” and another of the “Schloss Mirabell” at Salzburg. Do you remember it? I often wish the time may come back, but unfortunately it is impossible.
I hope that one day I can come to the States to join my father so I wouldn’t be dammned to finish my life in this dammaged country where it is quite impossible to have real studies. I lost about five years during the war and now it seems I loose still more.—
I hope you have not already forgotten your cousin but I lay a picture of mine in this letter too, so you can see how I’m looking now.
Please excuse my bad English but I shall learn it better in the States.
“What a discouraging place Germany must have been,” Albie wrote in a note. “But you did succeed in getting to the USA after all. And the rest is history.”
I can imagine my father nodding. As he grew older, Niko seemed to become more conscious of the unlikely distance he had covered. There was an assertiveness to him in those final years, the cancer notwithstanding. He told his financial adviser which stocks to buy. He described to his oncologist the molecular structure of his medications. And he loved nothing more than to strip from daily life anything that might interfere with what he wanted most, the company of my mother and his grandchildren, and the few fruits of the Glotzofon worth organizing an evening around. Otherwise, as he’d say, “Who needs it,” which became a family catchphrase, both balm and incantation. As a birthday gift one year, Kathy’s husband gave his Internet-averse father-in-law the domain-name rights to WhoNeedsIt.org. Niko delighted in this who-needs-it twofer: rights he would never exercise to something he would never use.
There was a flip side to “Who needs it?” Those things he adored—my mother’s company, pasta, Poirot mysteries—he would binge on. At a concert a few years before he died, hearing a quintet perform his favorite Schubert, he whispered to Vanessa, “They’re taking the repeats!” If Niko suffered from lingering PTSD, Kurt had modeled a way to counteract it: helping oneself to any sensual pleasures at hand.
My nonreligious father insisted he was a spiritual man. He didn’t believe a scientist at his bench could miss the divinity in what lay before him. But he had no use for the capital-C Church, which in the country of his youth had failed its biggest test. The closest thing to a statement of belief Niko ever shared with me was to boil down the history of the universe to a hypothetical year: if the Big Bang took place on January 1, life on earth began four seconds before midnight the following December 31. Human beings have our place in all this—a sacred and glorious one, to be sure—but only as arrivistes. We should be accordingly humble.
He did have a healthy sense of the larger arc traced by time, of not getting mired in the slog, either while living out a citizen’s public life or a mortal’s private one. Notations my mother made in her journal bear this out. “From Niko, February 2002. Democracy—you have to fight for it. . . . Expect to take one day at a time.” Two years later, in May: “Niko, on a bad day: ‘It’s important to remember that not all days are the same.’” And in October 2006: “Nick talks of grace, which helps us accept the mystery of life, death, living. He says his many near-death experiences and rational way of thinking have helped him live with the ‘not knowing’—not knowing his end. ‘You don’t have to work on the end. The end comes by itself.’”
Aware of the carbon that makes up our cells, he trusted nature as only an organic chemist can. One night, awake and glimpsing the moon out the window against a bell-clear sky, he delivered a report to my mother. “Nature,” he whispered across the pillow. “Just going about her little rounds.”
When her brother was a child, Maria once told me, he had a certain stoic tic on family trips. If you asked him how he felt, and the answer came back Sag’s lieber nicht, “I’d rather not say,” he was about to get carsick. Before her own death Maria recounted for me the phone call in which Niko brought up his failing health. She pressed him for details. “Sag’s lieber nicht,” he replied.
“That’s when I knew,” Maria said.
The cancer reached his gall bladder, a section of small intestine, eventually a lung. Before launching into an itemization, Niko would pull together a thin smile and announce an impending “organ recital.” He went into hospice care several months before the end.
The last thing I remember telling him was, “Your life has been a miracle.” He didn’t reply. But the look he threw back at me confirmed that he knew this, and that it meant something to him that I knew it too.
Niko may have been correct that the end comes by itself. But it was hard not to conclude that death was ultimately a choice he made, an act to flout all the times he had been denied agency during that first third of his life. On his last morning, the visiting nurse ordered a hospital bed for the living room. Niko couldn’t explicitly say so, but we all knew he had no desire to spend even one night outside the connubial bed.
The Times crossword from three days earlier lay half-finished on a side table. He had filled in JESU for Bach’s “____, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and ESSEX for English county on the North Sea. I took a moment to supply SIGNOTHETIMES for 1987 Prince song and album. As dusk fell, sitting alongside him as he lay in that interloping slab of furniture, Christian and I watched him take his final breath.
The last word anyone heard from him—after he was asked how many pills he needed—came in German. Drei.
My father wore a gold ring that had belonged to his father, engraved with the colophon of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, Romulus and Remus suckling at the she-wolf of Rome. Moments after he died, my mother slipped it off his finger and gave it to me.
We returned to America to find that several boxes of books, sent weeks earlier to avoid airline surcharges, hadn’t arrived. The one package to do so came with a shipping label in my handwriting, but none of the dozen volumes inside were ours. The box must have come apart in some handling facility between Berlin and Vermont, where a postal worker had reassembled it and filled it with random titles. Among the books standing in for ours were Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit and Thich Nhat Hanh’s Your True Home.
Vanessa said the postal service simply wanted to enrich my understanding of the travails of transatlantic relocation.
The year has left a series of afterimages.
A violin. My father took one to Hitler’s war. What kind of world produced a young man who would do that? Surely my grandfather deserves credit for recognizing important writing and doggedly finding a readership for it. But at the risk of blaming the victim, for Kurt was clearly that, I now wonder if, in their devotion to Bildung, my ancestors helped blind Germans to the obligations of citizenship, which include getting out of the salon to stand up for the neighbor down the street. Didn’t the Bildungsbürgertum propagate an illusion of security to German Jews, so many of whom refused to believe the country they loved, the land of Beethoven and Goethe and Kant, would target the very people who most appreciated that culture, who indeed helped create and elevate it?
Emil Krämer on Kristallnacht, lifeless on the ground beneath the window of his own home. How much nobler it would have been to practice citizenship sooner, so as not to be tested in friendship later. Not easier, but nobler. And in so doing lay the foundation for a sturdier and more just civil society.
The dome of the Reichstag, translucent and insurmountable. A year in Berlin let me see up close modern Germany’s enshrinement of history in the public square; her civic vigilance and, yes, humility; and her draining of almost all militarism from a society in which men not long ago made sure to include a reservist’s rank on business cards. In the space of two generations the Federal Republic has built a consensus that the Allies knew better what was right for her than Germans themselves did. For all this, I returned to the United States with great respect for today’s version of Kurt and Niko’s native country, and believing that Americans can learn much from it.
Another image: A house of cards on a table. Kurt loved a parable that Kafka shared in a 1923 postcard to Max Brod. To me it speaks to the failure of the Weimar Republic, even if the author didn’t live to see the end of Germany’s first stab at democracy. “Rage is something a child has when his house of cards collapses because a grown-up has shaken the table,” Kafka wrote. “But the house of cards didn’t collapse because the table was shaken, but because it was a house of cards. A real house doesn’t collapse even if the table is chopped into firewood; it doesn’t need a foundation from somewhere outside.” Democracy came to France and the United States in the aftermaths of their own revolutions. But Germany had its first democratic government essentially imposed, after the humiliation of a lost war, on a people who knew only how to be subjects, not citizens—which only underscores how fragile, how tied to context, democracy is.
My father, seeing his father off. It’s a recurring image. How many times did Niko say goodbye to Kurt wondering if he’d ever see him again? In Munich in 1930, on Elisabeth’s “worst of days.” In France and Italy during the thirties, then again in Freiburg in 1947, in “horrible, agonizing train stations.” At New York’s Idlewild Airport in 1959, as Kurt “shuffled to the plane” for Switzerland.
I feel for my grandfather, betrayed in both countries of which he was a citizen. But I feel too for my father. He was condemned to travel the morally murkier path, even if his father was in some ways the morally murkier man.
And so it comes time to take inventory of what my father never told me that I now know.
Two ancestors, father and son, chased from the same family home during the nineteenth century in antisemitic riots, twenty-four years apart.
My father’s younger sibling, a stillborn baby boy.
My father’s half brother Enoch, saved by the grace of the Danish nationality of the beard his desperate mother chose.
My father himself, a “Mischling” with a Nachweis, a party to genocide simply for having eaten the rations made available to him.
His favorite uncle, in the SS; his imperious “Tante,” Himmler’s pen pal; his beloved magician stepfather, a financial supporter of the SS—with party connections that may have helped conjure for Niko protection from the regime.
His aunt, celebrating her twenty-second birthday with a gunshot to her head.
Merck Darmstadt during the Third Reich—using forced labor; supplying the drugs that likely addled Hitler’s judgment; collaborating on secret arms projects; submitting to “the Himmler of Hessen”; standing by while the Nazis made a widower of one employee and a corpse of another.
Jesko von Puttkamer, my father’s uncle and, nearly a half century later, virtual stepfather.
The home in which my grandmother grew up, and her brother then lived, destroyed in an Allied bombing raid.
The inheritance of my father’s godson, my cousin Niko, who had a victim for a grandmother and a perpetrator for a grandfather.
A comrade in my father’s unit, fragging their ranking officer in the dying days of the war.
A few of these things Niko was likely unaware of. And of course I could hardly ask after things about which I had no clue. But I was reluctant to ask. Why? Maybe I was afraid he would tell me a painful truth. Maybe I was afraid he wouldn’t tell me the truth, out of wanting to protect me or not wanting me to think less of him—to think him a coward or worse—and, sensing as much, I spared him by withholding my questions.
Or maybe, like my father, taking America to be staging ground for the clean break and the fresh start, I did what so many Germans once did and kept my counsel.
It’s hard to tell, just as this has been hard to tell. “Those things about which we cannot theorize,” Umberto Eco has said, “we must narrate.” So I have tried to do. But it’s a strange place to sit, between wanting to know and not wanting to know, which may be why I’ve come home uncertain about so much still.
Epilogue
Though we returned to the United States at the end of July 2018, for the entirety of our time in Europe we kept our eyes fixed on a date several months after that. The midterm elections on November 6 would give Americans their first opportunity since Donald Trump’s inauguration to check his presidency at the ballot box.
“There is no inevitability in history,” Fritz Stern wrote. “Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. . . . We deem the future in a free society, however constrained by preexisting conditions, to be open, and if this is so, then civic engagement also becomes a moral and political imperative.”
