The day after Kurt wrote Maria that letter, she sent him one of her own, in which she refers to a photograph of my father she had shared earlier—perhaps the one here, on the back of which Niko has written “Hungry Summer.” If her words seem excessively pitying, I’d attribute that to her sisterly compassion and an incomplete sense of the scale of Nazi atrocities.

  That photo of Niko, alas, is an accurate one. His expression captures two and a half years of the Russian campaign and the lethal exhaustion from which we all suffer. Aside from the physical hardships, the icy winters in the east, all the things he saw, and the hunger, Niko felt the terror of it all. At the end of his furloughs I’d be the one to take him to the train station to head back to the front, and the sight of his face, pale and distracted, and his body, buffeted by that sea of field-gray in the half-destroyed station, will always remain unforgettable to me. The last time, with those trains overflowing with lambs to be led to slaughter, the pointlessness was so cruelly clear to us both that no words of consolation had the slightest effect. The last thing Niko said to me was, “It’s all over, and now they’re sticking pistols in the backs of our necks and driving us to certain death.”

  There’s a subgenre of German literature called the Heimkehrerroman, the novel that deals with the soldier back from the front. My father’s Heimkehr—his homecoming—was smoother than that of many others. Occupants of the house on the Südliche Schlossrondell could still count on a working stove. But Allied forces had commandeered the little available wood and coal. Toilets and water lines froze. My grandmother’s home quickly filled up with boarders, assigned there by authorities desperate to house the homeless. Niko and Elisabeth consolidated themselves in the dining room, clear of their uninvited guests—the woman who taught Slavic studies at the university; the avuncular gentleman from the Bavarian countryside; the married couple, both psychoanalysts, whose four-year-old son my father came to call le fils expérimental. As they prepared to face that first postwar winter, the American officer in charge, Lieutenant General Lucius Clay, put the locals on notice: “Some cold and hunger will be necessary to make the German people realize the consequences of a war which they caused.”

  For Niko, it all became too much. One morning he showed up at breakfast with a cardboard sign hanging from his neck. BITTE NICHT ANSPRECHEN, it read—PLEASE DON’T SPEAK TO ME.

  In Munich in early 1946, a German civilian could expect an allocation of 1,330 calories per day. To supplement these rations, Kurt and Helen sent regular CARE packages, as well as food and clothing. In the meantime, Niko found ways to make some money. The Archdiocese of Munich-Freising hired him to take measurements and draw sketches to help restore the Bürgersaalkirche in the city center. A training film called Your Job in Germany—written and produced by Theodor Geisel, the American grandson of four German immigrants, who would go on to become Dr. Seuss—had warned occupying soldiers not to fraternize with locals. But that policy proved impractical and was quickly abandoned, so my father would loiter outside an American PX with a camera, offering to take photographs of GIs and make prints they could send home. Sometimes he took payment in food or cigarettes instead of cash.

  As soon as the Institute of Technology reopened in March 1946, Niko returned to the chemistry department, where he and fellow students improvised a lab in one of the buildings still standing. As he heeded Kurt’s advice to improve his English, nothing helped more than the midday jazz show on the American Forces Network, Luncheon in Munchen. When a woman with the American Occupation Authority swung by the Schlossrondell in her jeep one day to drop off aid packages, Niko chatted her up. He eventually procured photographic paper for her; in return, she posted letters to Kurt in Manhattan, including this one, dated September 19, 1946, in which he too wants to make sure his father knows what life has been like.

  We’re currently living in the age of the questionnaire. You have no idea what you can be asked and what people are interested in. There is the standard questionnaire with 132 entries, about one meter long, which serves to ascertain one’s past, political and otherwise. You don’t have to fill that one out too often, but almost every couple of weeks come extensive instructions on how to correctly fill something out. You are registered, you get a new identity card, you need a registration card from the employment office, and food ration cards . . . and then there are the fuel ration cards, which must be brought to the coal dealer, and you have to make sure, when a quarter cubic meter of wood becomes available, that you get it home immediately. . . . They record your marital and occupational status, and then come more questionnaires pertaining to the upcoming elections . . . and just when you think you’re getting a brief break, a man shows up in the doorway. Says he’s from the housing office. He’s usually very kind and polite, for this unhappy man is desperate to find places for poor people living in shelters or like pigs in the street, and you show him all your rooms and the dear subtenants who live in them, and how you regret not being able to help him. . . . I’ll spare you any more.

  At seven a.m. on fair-weather days, an eighty-four-year-old handyman named Joseph would show up at the house on the Schlossrondell to cut wood and rake leaves. “Unfortunately he’s half-blind and can’t be trusted with the vegetable garden,” my father reports. “One time he pulled up and threw out the onions and left the weeds in place. So with my help, Mutti does the gardening more or less alone. . . . For a few weeks now we’ve had cool autumn weather. I look ahead with horror at the winter to come, without windows—now the third year like that—with little to heat the house. But we survived last winter, and so it must be.”

  The first questionnaire my father mentions was for the de-­Nazification process, administered by courts known as Spruchkammern. Ex-Nazis could be assigned to one of five classes, ranked V, IV, III, II, and I, in ascending order of guilt: exonerated or non-incriminated; collaborators or fellow travelers (Mitläufer); lesser offenders; activists or militants; or major offenders. Unless he had been implicated in serious crimes, a common soldier born after 1919—my father cleared this cutoff by two years—was presumed, absent evidence otherwise, to be not worth prosecuting.

  In early October 1946, Niko sent his father another letter, this time describing a trip to Darmstadt, where he saw his uncle Wilhelm for the first time since the war.

  Wilhelm Merck was Elisabeth’s younger brother, a Merck Darmstadt director with a dandy’s sense of style and a passion for racing cars. Little Niko had idolized him. In a deal the firm struck during the twenties with Mercedes-Benz, Merck would buy only Mercedes cars for its company fleet. In return, Wilhelm received the use of two automobiles, one for personal purposes and another to race in rallies—an SSK-300 Sport Kabriolet with chrome tubes sprouting from both sides of the hood and headlights bugging out from beside each front fender.

  Until her suicide in 1927, his wife, Ernesta, shown with Wilhelm in this photograph, had been an automotive celebrity in her own right, featured in the pictured Mercedes ad campaign as the flapper-like “Lady in Red.” Huge trophies in the living room of their Darmstadt home attested to the success of them both. During visits Niko would slip into the driver’s seat and grip the wheel of that Kabriolet, with the black finish of the chassis setting off red leather upholstery. He imagined himself negotiating the storied Nürburgring, bagging a trophy of his own.

  Those days were long gone, as Niko reported to his father upon returning from Darmstadt. “The streets are spick-and-span, completely undamaged, but . . . you pass the oozing rubble from the once-pretty shops of the Wilhelminenberg,” he wrote. “It pours out on to the sidewalk like thick porridge.” He found Uncle Wilhelm’s home in ruins. Nothing had prepared Niko for the sight of his hero, who now lived out back in a garden shed.

  Uncle Wilhelm looks terrible. He has a tiny bird’s head, very thin hands, and a back thoroughly hunched from spinal arthritis. He doesn’t look like this because he hasn’t had enough to eat; he had a complete nervous breakdown and is totally at wit’s end. What with moving from the Löwentor to [the home of the distant cousin he had married, Lisbet] and concern over the construction of this emergency lodging, and all the other worries about the [Merck] factory, Manuel [Wilhelm’s son Emanuel, still imprisoned in the Soviet Union], and etc., he has been laid low.

  Niko’s return trip turned into an odyssey. “When we got back to Munich, exhausted and dead tired, we had to wait in the rain for an hour for the tram,” he wrote. “But it had stopped running, so we had to walk a half hour in search of another. All thanks to our ‘Führer.’”

  After a war’s worth of my father’s letters, each drafted with an awareness that it would have to clear the censors, finally, a slap at Hitler.

  That German winter of 1946–47, the one Niko feared, turned out indeed to be epically cold. Barges loaded with provisions froze fast in the ice. Desperate women climbed atop the coal cars of slow-moving trains to toss off lumps for later collection. Germans cut down any standing tree for firewood, wrenching stumps from the frozen ground. Pictured, in an almost barren Tiergarten, a Berliner hacks away within sight of the husk of the Reichstag.

  In the meantime, in Freiburg, Maria’s bitterness abided. Kurt’s daughter was now a single parent, as she and her husband split up soon after his Heimkehr. A complicated relationship with her mother—Elisabeth never fully accepted Maria’s bohemian ways or her artist husband—foreclosed for the moment the option of moving back in with her in Munich, even if there had been room in the house on the Schlossrondell. Still not sure her father in New York fully understood, she felt alone.

  For his part, Niko wanted more than anything to join Kurt in the United States. And it turned out his father was indeed “able to do something for him.” My father soon held the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree, and the head of the chemistry department at Princeton, the soon-to-be-knighted English atomic chemist Hugh Stott Taylor, told Kurt that he needed only to see a transcript to offer Niko a place as a graduate student and arrange for financial aid. “Professor Taylor was an immigrant too,” my father told me once. “He was willing to admit me sight unseen.” Taylor’s guarantee allowed Niko to apply for a student visa. In the meantime Kurt, a US citizen since December 1946, swore out an affidavit pledging that his son would not become a public charge.

  During air raids, my grandmother had descended the cellar stairs, posture erect and lit candle in hand, wearing a French World War I helmet Dr. Albrecht had brought back from the front as a souvenir, “looking like she stepped out of a Delacroix painting,” as Maria put it. One Allied bomb had left a crater in her garden; another, which came through the roof and landed on the dresser in her bedroom, failed to explode. Now Elisabeth was reluctant to accept that Niko, despite the hold placed on his own life, would not stay indefinitely at her side. But on Christmas Eve in 1947, in a short poem acknowledging that this would likely be their last together, Elisabeth seemed to accept his need to leave for America. She invoked the word Heimat, which can mean home, and homeland, and a broad range of things besides—from the community familiar to you to the landscape you were born into. And she deployed the imagery of the forest, der Wald, a place so sacred and powerful in German culture that more than a thousand longer words are built on it, words like Waldumrauscht, the rustling sound of leaves in the woods:

  You want to swap your Heimat for foreign things,

  The New World lures you,

  The red maple forests powerfully rustling . . .

  Europe is dying, the weary people yearn for death’s sleep,

  Seeking only rest and balm for their wounds,

  Since they encountered the god of war

  In June 1947, Kurt finally returned to Europe, where he saw Maria and Niko for the first time in nearly nine years. Niko came over from Munich to meet his sister in Freiburg, and together they took the Basel Express south, to Weil am Rhein, on the Swiss border, to meet up with the man they called der Greis, the Old One.

  Maria worked through the tangle of emotions of that visit in “Wiedersehen und Abschied: Selbstgespräche mit dem Vater” (Reunion and Farewell: Interior Dialogues with Father), a reminiscence published anonymously in Germany the following year. She and her brother abandoned their compartment to stand in the corridor of the railroad carriage, trying somehow to will the train to go faster. But they made the trip having “grown deeply mistrustful of fortune,” Maria writes, “that anything happy might break our way.”

  They alighted at the train station in Weil, then followed a winding road that led finally to a customhouse at the border. As soon as they made out the figure standing behind a wooden barrier, waving at them with outstretched arms, they fell into a trot. Of that moment Maria writes:

  I’m at the end of a marathon lasting nine years, with only a few hundred meters before the tape, and I feel Niko next to me, as if a part of me, and the tears run down my face so I can’t see a thing until, with my last strength, I stumble against the barrier and feel an arm around my shoulder and Niko’s head close to mine and rough wool fabric on my wet cheek and a voice above me, completely unchanged, I could pick it out from a thousand, cheerfully saying:

  “But don’t get all excited. What have you done with your bags?”

  Niko never mentioned this reunion to me, and I wouldn’t want to impute to him everything his sister was feeling. But I’m certain my father would recognize many of the brushstrokes in the portrait of Kurt that Maria goes on to paint in her piece—of a man strong and substantive but elusive too, a serial escape artist who somehow escaped harm, escaped Europe, and, whatever his intentions, for long stretches escaped his fatherly obligations. For all the strings Kurt would pull to help Niko start a new life in the New World, he could do nothing to get him or Maria out of Nazi Germany.

  Kurt drove Maria and Niko back to Freiburg in his rental car. On the outskirts of the city, Maria describes how “the first real evidence of war and destruction begins to reveal itself”—“[a] half-destroyed building, like a dollhouse, revealing its secrets up to the attic. Homes where people lived and died, were happy and suffered. Cellar holes full of filth and rubbish . . .”

  You look out the window and, seeing a German city for the first time, interrupt your stories for a moment and say, “Actually, I’ve made up my mind not to look at the rubble.”

  And these few words, they hurt me somewhat, a mixture of anger and fright rises inside me, but then I think, Yes, you don’t need to look at it, just wait a bit and it will look at you—it’ll grab you by the throat, and you’ll suddenly realize that this was once your life as much as ours.

  We drive through a welter of streets, none of them undamaged, and . . . I too force myself not to see the destruction, and think that maybe I’ve become too sensitive.

  We finally reach our destination and try to drive the big American car through the garden gate, to more easily unload the luggage, but it can’t be done, the gate is too small.

  The gate is too small. Probably not just in this particular case—no, here everything suddenly seems too small, too cramped, too tired. Even language, the possibility to express oneself.

  Maria had returned to the same theme she broached in that letter to her father sixteen months earlier, in which she privileged those who actually lived through the horror, “all the way, to the end.”

  In fact, Kurt was well aware of the destruction. A year earlier Pantheon had published Lost Treasures of Europe, a volume with more than four hundred plates of masterpieces now damaged or ruined—“from Coventry to Kiev, from Cassino to Rotterdam,” he had written Maria, “that part of Europe’s cultural heritage destroyed by this war and the human eye will not see again.” A year after this reunion, Kurt would be back in Germany on assignment from Washington, with letters of introduction from the National Gallery of Art and Library of Congress. He would spend four weeks furiously chasing down the fruits of what was known as the Führerprojekt, a professionally shot, full-color photographic survey, ordered by Hitler in 1943 as the Allies ramped up their air raids, so that frescoes, statuary, and other immovable and jeopardized works of art could be restored or reconstructed after the victory of the Reich.

  Yet to Maria, it seemed her father was busy taking inventory of what the war had forever changed, not who.

  At the end of their father’s visit, Maria and Niko put Kurt on an overnight train from Freiburg to Paris, from which he would go to Le Havre to board a ship back to New York. “Oh, horrible, agonizing train stations,” Maria laments on the platform, as she recalls leave-takings going back to the early thirties. The Bahnhof recurs in her account for a reason. During the immediate postwar, railway stations became the hub of life, “the focal point of an often miserable, transient, provisional existence: the place where, despite the collapse of rail transport in the spring of 1945, refugees arrived, notes were left by people seeking lost family members, and the black market thrived,” the historian Richard Bessel writes. “The entire country seemed to be waiting for a train to arrive: a train that would bring their families together, a train that would enable them to go home.”

  But for the Wolffs there would be no permanent reunion.

  Through the window I see you negotiating with the sleeping-­car conductor, and I see your lips moving as if in a silent movie, and even though I can’t hear your words, I know you’re bribing him so you can have a compartment to yourself. I see you in the most exaggerated detail: gray coat, pale profile, dark hat. . . . And a thousand things I want to say sit in my throat in a strangling lump, and I know I can’t say them anymore.

  You pull the window down and lean out toward me, give me a lost look, and I feel you close to me, because I sense that you’re just as mute as I am, yet at the same time . . . already in Paris, already on the ship, the vastness of the ocean distancing you farther and farther from me, that other part of the world absorbing you—the foreign, the busy, the living.