Endpapers, p.31
Endpapers, page 31
But to have Boateng Philip Oltermann, “German Rightwing Party Apologises for Jérôme Boateng comments,” Guardian (UK), May 29, 2016.
Some 80 percent Economist, “Special Report: The New Germans,” April 14, 2018.
Historian Konrad Jarausch Konrad H. Jarausch, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 2–3.
“an irony of history” Timothy Garton-Ash, cited in Jarausch, Broken Lives, 380.
Chapter Three: Technical Boy and the Deposed Sovereign
“With his long” Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 119.
enforce the rules The motto of Fletcherism’s inventor and namesake, Horace Fletcher, was “Nature will castigate those who don’t masticate.”
stuffed bear Zoschl When my father went off to war, his mother sat Zoschl up on a corner shelf in the parlor of her home. There the bear remained until sometime in the fifties, when from its perch it caught the eye of Hannes Rosenow, an artist paying a visit. “This is an object that has been loved to death,” Rosenow declared. “I must paint it.” His portrait of Zoschl was exhibited at Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 1962.
My grandparents spent Felice Casorati (1883–1963) was a member of the Return to Order movement in European painting following World War I. In her memoir Family Lexicon, trans. Jenny McPhee (New York: New York Review Books, 2017), 51, Natalia Ginzburg describes the vogue in Casorati’s realist, Renaissance-influenced work between the wars among the bourgeoisie of Turin, where her family and the artist both lived.
The sale grossed Jos. Baer & Co., Ergebnisse der Versteigerung Kurt Wolff, Frankfurt, October 5–6, 1926. H&KW Papers, box 80, folder 2384.
Those concerns might The Kurt Wolff Verlag published only ten titles that year—a novel by Joseph Roth and nine books on art or food.
The two exchanged scores Wolfram Göbel, “Ernst Rowohlt und Kurt Wolff,” in Kurt Wolff zum Hundertsten. Göbel, a literary historian, suggests that Clara Merck filled a maternal role for a young man who had lost his mother as an adolescent. For her part, Clara adored her son-in-law, who launched his first publishing venture in part with Merck family money.
Nonetheless, if you For an exploration of who the Nazis considered a Jew, and the roughly 150,000 German men of Jewish descent who, like my father, served in the Wehrmacht, see Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, especially p. 21: “Conversion to Christianity at any stage more recent than a great-grandparent did not remove the stain of Jewish blood.” Kurt’s maternal grandparents were both baptized; only one of their parents, Kurt’s great-grandmother Henriette von Haber Marx, was. Peter Gaupp, a Wehrmacht soldier with one Jewish parent, described to Bryan Mark Rigg his relief upon reading the Nuremberg Laws in 1935: “That was the first time you knew where you stood legally. . . . Before it was all guesswork. You could meet a Nazi in some office and he could exterminate you or you could meet a Nazi who was very human and he could help you.” Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 98.
I cannot, I will not Kurt Wolff letter to Franz Werfel, June 23, 1930, in Kurt Wolff: Briefwechsel, 351–52. In the early thirties Kurt sold what was left of his publishing business to the husband of his ex-wife’s sister Caroline, Peter Reinhold, who had served for a year as finance minister of the Weimar Republic—finance minister of the Weimar Republic being rather like captain of the Titanic.
“Why did I stop?” Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, xxiii.
He had made Kurt was an enthusiast for the new, but he had his limits, and Dada exceeded them: “Even before I became aware that what was performed and deformed in the name of Dada was utter drivel, the pedantry, tedium and sheer dreariness of [the Dadaists’] correspondence had cured me of the delusion that they might be the source of any creative fun.” Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 16.
But after five years Leo Bogart, Commercial Culture: The Media System and the Public Interest (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 2000), 56. None of Kafka’s works went back to press during the author’s lifetime. Howard Nelson, “Speaking Volumes: The Wide World of a Publisher,” Washington Post Book World, April 4, 1971.
“That so many” “The Seismographer of Expressionism,” Times Literary Supplement, February 2, 1970.
But the Nazis The 1929 stock market crash dashed Kurt’s last hope—kindled by talks with a wealthy American investor—for an infusion of cash that could save his publishing business.
“like a deposed sovereign” Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 193. The phrase is from Lambert Schneider’s laudation when Kurt was awarded the medal of honor of the German Booksellers Association in 1960.
“The Kurt Wolff Verlag” Franz Werfel letter to Kurt Wolff, March 25, 1930, in Kurt Wolff: Briefwechsel, 350. As he aged, Kurt became steadily more reluctant to wear the mantle of “publisher of Expressionism.” Several years before he died he lamented that the tag had become “my detested, indeed accursed claim to fame”; Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 18–19. Fritz Redlich advances possible reasons he rejected the honorific: recognition that, in his youthful enthusiasm, Kurt published some work he realized hadn’t worn well; or that Expressionism included leftists and anarchists out of step with his middle-of-the-road politics; Fritz Redlich, “German Literary Expressionism and Its Publishers,” Harvard Library Bulletin 17, no. 2 (April 1969). My uncle Christian puts the most stock in a third theory of Redlich’s: that Kurt simply disliked labels. “He felt ‘Expressionism’ was too exclusive,” Christian told me. “Movements don’t write things. People do.”
Louis eventually abandoned Helen found that vow easier to keep after the early thirties, when Louis Mosel joined the Nazi Party and settled in Berlin. There he fell on hard times but soon clawed back some power and status by taking an unpaid position with the Reichsbund der deutschen Kapital- und Kleinrentner, a National Socialist–sympathetic lobby for pensioners who had lost their savings during the Weimar hyperinflation. Throughout, Helen refused to have anything to do with him. In Kurt and Helen’s exile and émigré circles in New York, knowledge of her father’s Nazi connections could have complicated their lives.
Helen had to content Marion Detjen, “Zum Hintergrund des Hintergrunds,” afterword to Helen Wolff, Hintergrund für Liebe (Bonn: Weidle, 2020), 147. Helen’s prewar travels and stopovers in the south of France with a much older, restless philanderer would inform her novel Hintergrund für Liebe (Background for Love), which captures the exhilarating uncertainty of their first years together. “Whoever swims, swims,” Helen has one of her characters say. “And if they sink, they sink. But while you’re swimming it’s best not to think about sinking” (63). In April 1933, Rowohlt Verlag had verbally promised Helen that it would publish the novel, only to back out after the book burnings that took place the following month. Ullstein Verlag also lost interest, ostensibly because of the story’s setting in France; Detjen, “Zum Hintergrund des Hintergrunds,” 209. The novel finally appeared in print in Germany twenty-six years after Helen’s death.
“It’s better to spend one week” Detjen, “Zum Hintergrund des Hintergrunds,” 157.
“already gloomy and sickening” Kurt Wolff letter to Walter Hasenclever, November 26, 1931, cited in Steven Schuyler, “Kurt Wolff and Hermann Broch: Publisher and Author in Exile,” PhD thesis, Harvard University, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, 1984.
I rest, swim Kurt Wolff letter to Franz Werfel, June 23, 1930, in Kurt Wolff: Briefwechsel, 353.
In letters he was Detjen, “Zum Hintergrund des Hintergrunds,” 152.
To be so far Ibid., 138.
In March 1931 Ibid., 164.
“The saplings are called” Cited in Mak, In Europe, 208.
“We are now” Detjen, “Zum Hintergrund des Hintergrunds,” 201.
“lapse into barbarism” Ibid., 204.
“These are madmen” Helen describes this moment in The Exiles, a 1989 documentary film directed by Richard Kaplan.
“The news is sad” Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 156–57.
“Deciding whether to” Cited in Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 542.
“The ideal subject” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1973), 474.
the entire content Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, trans. Oliver Pretzel (New York: Picador, 2000), 68–69.
Only a certain cultured class Ibid., 70. It’s uncanny how closely Haffner’s analysis, from the late thirties, accords with how Helen had described the German people in that letter to her brother the day before the Reichstag fire: “Life leaves them bored, thus they throw it away.”
“In animals [it] is called” Ibid., 135.
Albert Einstein also remarked Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 129.
“the worst enemy” Ibid., 91. Joseph Roth, one of the authors of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, recorded something similar in “Germany in Winter,” a December 1923 feuilleton essay that likened the effects of the hyperinflation to the symptoms of a fevered, raving patient. “The sick man will talk all kinds of nonsense, ridiculous, trivial, unworthy of himself and his condition. He is missing the regulating consciousness. That’s just what is missing in Germany: the regulating consciousness.” Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2015), 33.
After Günter Demnig Suzanne Cords, “Curator of the Largest Holocaust Memorial Turns 70, but His Life’s Work Continues,” DeutscheWelle.com, October 27, 2017, dw.com/en/creator-of-the-largest-holocaust-memorial-turns-70-but-his-life-work-continues/a-41107926.
When Günter Demnig Neiman, Learning from the Germans, 277.
“Detached from the question” Jan Philipp Reemtsma, “Wozu Gedenkstätten?,” Politik und Zeitgeschichte, June 21, 2010. Translation after Neiman, Learning from the Germans, 283.
“You cannot choose” Neiman, Learning from the Germans, 325.
Chapter Four: Mediterranean Refuge
“The conjunction of” Sybille Bedford, Jigsaw (New York: New York Review Books, 2018), 76–77.
We cannot remain here Kurt Wolff letter to Hermann Hesse, December 19, 1934, in Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 158. To help raise the cash to buy the property in Tuscany, Kurt yet again put books from his library up for auction, this time at the Galerie Alexandre III in Cannes. Schuyler, “Kurt Wolff and Hermann Broch.”
If an emergency Kurt and Helen fled Italy on a tip, likely paid for with goodwill built up during their time in Lastra a Signa. A local oral history project, conducted during the mid-2000s and incorporating late-in-life recollections of two residents who grew up near Il Moro during the thirties, includes this: “The positive memory the Wolffs left in the community is also derived from this story about a three-year-old girl with bronchopneumonia, a then-fatal illness, recounted by the child’s eldest sister. ‘Helen and Kurt Wolff came to visit her. They too had a small child. . . . They recommended a warm compress of flaxseed flour and olive oil overnight, refreshed from time to time. . . . The next day when the doctor came to visit her, he found my sister improved. He was amazed and said, “She’s much better today, what have you done to her?” My sister recovered.’” Giuseppe Simoncini, “Kurt Wolff, Soggiorno a Lastra,” LastraOnline.it, 2008, LastraOnline.it/p/storia.php?idpag=374&idpag=374. Author’s translation.
Willy Haas, one of the Haas, “Kurt Wolff : 3 März 1887–22 Oktober 1963.”
A flurry of letters Various civil servants and church clerks were responsive to Kurt’s requests, forwarding to him birth, death, or marriage certificates on file. For instance, in December 1936, the Protestant Gemeindeamt in Bonn sent to Italy proof that Kurt’s grandparents on Maria Marx’s side, August Karl and Bertha Isabella Marx, were married in a Protestant ceremony in 1856. But the document goes into inconvenient detail about August’s forebears, citing excerpts from the death records of the “israelitische Gemeinde” in Mannheim. On his unsent application for a “certificate of Aryan ancestry,” Kurt makes no mention of ancestors beyond his maternal grandparents—surely because his great-grandfather Jacob Marx never converted.
“because,” Kurt wrote Hasenclever Detjen, “Zum Hintergrund des Hintergrunds,” 206.
“He who possesses art” Cited in Stern, Five Germanys, 17.
Bertha’s own parents Marriage between cousins was common among German Jews during the nineteenth century. It strengthened family bonds and consolidated wealth—prudent safeguards in a world with so much closed off to them.
As it happens Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 7.
And the persistence Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy converted and famously celebrated the Protestant Reformation in his music, but the Nazis re-Judaized him so successfully that the composer is widely regarded as Jewish today.
He came to In his poem Germany: A Winter’s Tale, Heine agonized over the push and pull of his homeland, lamenting the ways it fell short of the democratic standards then prevailing in Paris, to which he had fled. Heine’s epic was nonetheless a love note to the German language, the tongue he grew up with—“our most sacred possession,” he called it, “a fatherland even for him who is denied one by malice and folly”; Elon, The Pity of It All, 118. There may be no more melancholy commentary on the fate of the acculturated German Jew—lover of Goethe, admirer of Kant, subscriber to all things classical and enlightened—than Heine’s. As the poet himself put it, this unrequited longing made the German Jew like other Germans he lived among, only more so; Stern, Five Germanys, 21.
To be “the arriviste” Stern, Five Germanys, 296. During the nineteenth century, German Jews engaged in what Amos Elon calls “reckless magnanimity”—“a desperate but vain attempt to civilize German patriotism: to base citizenship not on blood but on law, to separate church and state, and to establish what would today be called an open, multicultural society.” Elon, The Pity of It All, 9.
By the middle Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a process for fixing nitrogen from air. He converted to Christianity to advance his career but still had to wait twelve years to be named a full professor. As a military veteran he could have remained in charge of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry after the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933, but he would have had to fire all the Jews who worked under him. He chose to resign and died the following year. See Stern, “Together and Apart: Fritz Haber and Albert Einstein,” in Einstein’s German World, 59–164. Haber, who worked on some of the chemical weapons deployed during World War I, also helped develop Zyklon-B, which the Nazis would use in the gas chambers. Haber was Fritz Stern’s godfather, and Haber’s eldest son, Hermann, was Stern’s uncle. Stern nonetheless addresses the irony head-on: “The horror of Haber’s involvement with the gas that later murdered millions, including friends and distant relatives, beggars description.” Stern, Einstein’s German World, 135. From her genealogical research, my aunt Holly believes that Fritz Haber is a descendant of Isaac Haber, my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and the father of Salomon von Haber. Like Fritz Haber’s family, Isaac and Salomon came from Breslau.
One, who became That ancestor, Mordechai ben Samuel ha Levi, went by the civilian name Marx Levi. In addition to being grandfather of both Karl Marx and my great-great-great-great-grandfather Jacob Meyer Marx, Marx Levi was my own grandfather to the sixth degree. I have to go back to Salomon von Haber, and to Jacob Meyer Marx’s son Jacob Marx, who died in 1830, to find ancestors who identified as Jewish.
During the eighteenth century In a confidential communication, Pope Benedict XIV once called Moses Wolff “the only person with a head on his shoulders at the castle of Bonn.” In 1768, Dr. Wolff was summoned to the Vatican to treat Benedict’s successor, Clement XIII, for an eye ailment.
Chapter Five: Surrender on Demand
On a tip By leaving Italy on short notice, as they would flee Paris and then Nice over the next several years, Kurt and Helen left behind not only their greatest asset, Il Moro, for which they had three years earlier mobilized “all our reserves,” but many of their possessions too. During a 2000 trip to Florence, Vanessa and I took a bus out to Lastra a Signa, found Il Moro, and rang the bell. The man who came to the door, Luciano Innocenti, now lived in the subdivided villa with three generations of his family, and over the following months my father struck up a correspondence with him and his daughter Laura. A year later we returned with my parents, and during that visit Niko pointed out several pieces of furniture he remembered from the thirties as having belonged to his father.
To judge by Kurt’s diary Helen’s mother, Josephine, died in Lastra a Signa in June 1937. She is buried in Florence at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, on the grounds of the church of Santo Stefano.
“We cannot and do not” Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship. The friend, Elisabeth Mayer, had been Maria’s piano teacher and became the mother-in-law of Wolfgang Sauerländer, who would work with Kurt and Helen as an editor at Pantheon.
Joining them there Luise Marx Wolff, Niko’s unsinkable Oma Lullu, died in Nice of natural causes in June 1947. In September 1943, after Italy made a separate peace with the Allies, the Nazis invaded France’s Italian-occupied zone, including Nice, and seized five thousand Jews over the following five months. Oma Lullu was nonetheless spared, despite her Jewish ancestry. Similarly, until his death in Germany in 1943, Hermann Grafe, the fully Gentile husband of Kurt’s sister Else, shared his wife’s fear that Else would be rounded up as a “first-degree Mischling.” She never was and died in Rastatt in 1967.
On September 29 Kurt is making note of the meeting at which Britain, France, and Italy agreed to let Germany annex the Sudetenland. Billed at the time as a way to avoid war, the Munich Agreement only emboldened Hitler and became known as a notorious act of appeasement. “When [British prime minister Neville] Chamberlain left, we knew,” my father once told me. “There was no way there wouldn’t be war.”
