In exile in New York, my grandfather had longed for a world where he wouldn’t have to waste his breath arguing that gold lettering shouldn’t fade from the spine of a book. Yet, as Marion Detjen points out, continental origins clung to Kurt in success and failure alike. Forced to make a living at the only thing he knew, he did so against the odds and with great flair. Ironically, in Germany before World War I, Kurt had rankled rival publishers with “American” book-selling tactics—colorful jackets, popular prices, bold designs in newspaper ads and kiosk placards. But something Old World at his core put him at loggerheads with the business culture of his new homeland. The East German daily Neues Deutschland would allude to the Pantheon endgame in its description of him as a man who had been “betrayed by his class.” In the end, it all took a toll on his heart.

  Kurt saw no choice but to flee again, back across the ocean, to Switzerland—literally, to a neutral corner; once more, he couldn’t help but conclude, to save his life.

  I owe my being here, at the Bundesarchiv in the nondescript Berlin district of Lichterfelde, to a Bavarian factory foreman named Hanns Huber.

  On April 15, 1945, at the Josef Wirth paper mill in the Munich suburb of Freimann, a Nazi official arrived in a dark sedan to issue a command. Over the coming days the factory would take delivery of truckloads of paper that was to be immediately pulped. Given the prevailing shortages, Herr Huber was delighted by this news. And sure enough, trucks soon began to turn up. They delivered bale upon bale, some twenty bales a day over nine days, fifty tons of paper in all. Curious, the foreman peeked inside a few of the first bales and realized what they contained: the membership records of the Nazi Party—cards with names, in some cases photographs, even notations to indicate reliability, of millions of followers of the Führer, hastily evacuated from the party treasurer’s office in central Munich as American forces closed in from the west.

  Nazi officials had handed over their incriminating records to the wrong man. Hanns Huber despised National Socialism and made sure the bales remained undisturbed in a corner of the factory yard. When another Nazi turned up several days later, demanding to know why so much had yet to be pulped, Huber bluffed. Those bales? They’re from other customers bumped by all this urgent party business. Huber stalled successfully until the fall of Munich two weeks later.

  For decades after the war, the US government secured those membership records in its sector of Berlin. Only after reunification did the Federal Republic of Germany take possession and make them publicly available, in this archive in whose reading room I find myself.

  The NSDAP-Kartei (National Socialist German Workers Party files) of the Bundesarchiv contain much more than records of Nazi Party members. From affiliated professional organizations to auxiliaries for boys, girls, and women, every by-product of the Nazification of German society generated its own paperwork. Frau Gresens, the researcher assigned to me, has pulled anything that matches the names and birthdates I’ve submitted. She hands over a stack of folders. I take a seat, a deep breath, and an inventory of what I find.

  It turns out that Ernst Reisinger, Helen and Niko’s headmaster at Landheim Schondorf and protector of “first-degree Mischlinge” there, joined the National Socialist Teachers’ Bund in 1933 and four years later applied for party membership. His application seems to have been turned down—perhaps because, petitioning so late, he was regarded as an opportunistic Märzgefallene, or “March violet.” Or perhaps because of an April 1933 letter I find in his file, in which a woman from Berlin denounces Reisinger to a Hauptamt in the teachers’ bund, bemoaning that the “Horst Wessel Song” is “something foreign” to her younger brother, a Schondorf student. “You will understand how painful it is for us to put the education of Ernst-Georg in Dr. Reisinger’s hands, which deprives him of the great experience of our times,” she writes. “In Schondorf it’s said that one wants to keep politics separate from school.”

  But every other file I sift through contains something more sobering.

  Maria once told me that Hans Albrecht, her and Niko’s viola-playing, magic-trick-performing stepfather, was “as likely to hobnob with Nazis as with the July twentieth plotters,” and the evidence confirms him to have been a line-straddler. He never joined the party. But he held memberships in both the Reichs­ärztekammer (the Nazified National Medical Association) and Reichsministerium für Wissenschaft, Erziehung und Volksbildung (Ministry of Science, Education, and National Education). And in 1933 he became a förderndes Mitglied der SS (FMSS), a supporting member of the SS, making regular financial contributions in lieu of taking a commission and a uniform. If these payments constituted a kind of protection money, they apparently worked, according to an exchange I come across between two Munich-based Nazi bureaucrats in late 1938, in which they discuss my step-grandfather. “His political attitude so far gives no cause for complaint,” concludes the last of these memos marked HIGHLY CLASSIFIED. “With collections, etc. [i.e., FMSS contributions], lavish generosity can be confirmed. It can be expected that he will always be committed to the movement and the state. The Gauleitung [the Nazis’s regional administration] raises no concerns.” Without at least some party engagement, Dr. Albrecht would likely never have become obstetrician to the wife of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess.

  A folder for Mathilde Merck attests that my distant cousin, known within the family as Tante Tilla, was a fanatical party follower. For more than eighty years she kept a diary, and by the thirties it had become seasoned with the Nazi beliefs she clung to until her death in 1958. As a generous patron of the Ahnenerbe, the SS-administered institute devoted to “Aryan” pseudoscience and history, she wrote often to the Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Ahnenerbe general secretary Wolfram Sievers. Only Hitler surpassed Himmler as a war criminal; Sievers was convicted at the 1948 Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg and hanged for his role in the murder of 112 Jews, selected at Auschwitz so their skulls and corpses could be used for the kind of twisted anthropological “research” to which the Ahnenerbe dedicated itself. The Bundesarchiv includes a letter in which Sievers informs Himmler that Tante Tilla has offered to leave her Darmstadt home to the Ahnenerbe so it can be turned into a museum of comparative art. Beyond her journaling, most of Tilla’s writing consisted of privately printed monographs and doggerel shared with family. But in 1941, at Himmler’s urging, she applied to join the Reichs­schrifttumskammer, the Reich Chamber of Literature, so a play she wrote and dedicated to him, Die Letzte Volksmutter, could be published and performed.

  Yet the fattest folder by far contains the file on my grandmother’s brother Wilhelm Merck, the company director and onetime Mercedes-sponsored race-car driver my father had so looked up to. Uncle Wilhelm joined the party on May 1, 1933, the same day as his cousin and fellow company director Karl Merck—shortly after Hitler’s seizure of power and just before the Nazis began to limit admissions. Yet it turns out he wasn’t just a Nazi. That same year Wilhelm became a member of the SS, the organization that would be implicated in every atrocity perpetrated by the regime, from supervising the Gestapo to running the death camps.

  Himmler had issued an order prohibiting any SS man from marrying unless both he and his bride could document “Aryan” ancestry back to 1800. Sitting before me is an inch-thick stack of Wilhelm’s correspondence with the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, the sub-ministry charged with safeguarding the “racial purity” of the membership. In 1936, Wilhelm—SS member No. 73089 and at the time a middling Unterscharführer, the equivalent of a corporal—begins plying the bureaucracy with a blizzard of birth, death, and baptismal documents. Maybe this is because he has been back on the marriage market since his wife Ernesta’s suicide. Or perhaps (for he submits genealogical information for his late wife too) he is trying to clear the way for their sons, Emanuel and Peter, to pull on black uniforms someday. The records he forwards are exhaustive, the cover letters cloying. And the typewritten replies from the reptiles in the bureaucracy come studded with a chilling keystroke: a runic SS, executed by engaging the shift key and typing the numeral five.

  Taken together, these documents make up the bed in which my father’s uncle chose to lie. And they put a frame around the scene Niko described after his 1946 visit to Darmstadt, where he found Wilhelm a broken man, living in that garden shed behind his bombed-out house.

  Here in Lichterfelde I realize that, like Caroline Ferriday, I too have a cross to bear in the form of a great-uncle. And I’m led back to the late seventies, when my father was stunned to learn that, as a family shareholder in Merck Darmstadt, he owed the US government tax on all paper gains of his stock, despite having never cashed in a pfennig. He hired a tax attorney, negotiated a settlement with the IRS, and—I remember his relief as if it were yesterday—found a family member in Germany to buy him out. He reinvested the proceeds, then rode the rising tide of the US stock market through decades of mostly steady growth.

  That initial sum, which grew to help send me to summer camp and college, owed itself to West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder. But while Merck has been a largely respectable corporate citizen since the war, much of the company’s intellectual capital and brand positioning can be traced to the nineteenth century and the decades before World War II. For that reason it’s impossible to simply overlook the interceding Nazi era. How did Merck survive the Third Reich? Beyond using forced laborers from the east, apart from supplying drugs to which Hitler apparently became addicted, what did the company—what did my family—do under or with or for the most shameful and warped regime in history?

  Die Recherchen zu Ihrem Vater, Nikolaus E. Wolff, verliefen negativ, Frau Gresens reports. Niko, in the clear. But if there’s a lesson I’m drawing from this deep pile of paper, it’s the interconnectedness of implication. No one is in the clear, least of all anyone held to modern standards of accountability. And those standards lead me to an excruciating place. For while it’s easy to judge my step-grandfather harshly for having been a supporting member of the SS, who am I to hold against Dr. Albrecht what he might have done to conceal Niko’s Jewish roots, if doing so helped save my father’s life?

  A day later we meet Wilhelm Merck’s grandson, my cousin Niko Merck, and his family for dinner in our Kiez. He’s a former dramaturge who now edits a theater website he helped found. His wife, Ute Frings-Merck, is a journalist whose life in Berlin dates to the earliest days of the Kreuzberg squats. They’ve adopted two Vietnamese-born children, a son from the south about to head to college in the United States and a daughter from the north who shares a homeroom at that international school with our son.

  Cousin Niko has a direct, sometimes Socratic manner and enjoys posing the probing question. Today 70 percent of Merck Darmstadt remains in the hands of the family, whose Familienrat, or family board, still has a say in Merck policy. Niko and Ute belong to a feisty subset of family shareholders, mostly artistic or progressive, who see themselves as checks on the hidebound thinking that can sometimes drive company decisions. During a recent visit to Darmstadt to congratulate Merck on its 350th birthday, Angela Merkel made sure to mention the company’s use of forced labor, and her callout pleased the faction with which Niko and Ute align themselves.

  Cousin Niko knows all about Tante Tilla and her friendship with Himmler. Apparently everyone in the family does. Her outsize personality amplified her political beliefs, and the attention she attracted filled a void in her life after she became a widow in 1932. Cousin Niko believes other family members found Mathilde Merck to be a useful foil, a kind of crazy aunt in the attic. “With her being the black sheep and such a forceful person, everyone else could say, ‘Oh, Tilla over there, she’s the Nazi,’” he tells me.

  To illustrate Mathilde’s blend of imperiousness and obstinacy, cousin Niko shares a story: Well into the war, with coffee more and more scarce, Himmler had sent her a portion of his private supply. Mathilde returned it with a note that read, “I drink tea.”

  What cousin Niko did not know, until I tell him now, is that his grandfather had been in the SS.

  Wilhelm Merck never served as a soldier in World War II, his grandson tells me after taking a moment to absorb this. He bore the designation uk., for unabkömmlich (indispensable), meaning the regime considered him most useful to the war effort at the Merck factory. But that detail makes his apparent enthusiasm for National Socialism seem only more craven. And there’s this: If the point of getting right with the SS Race and Settlement Main Office was to smooth his sons’ futures by attesting to their “racial purity,” Wilhelm’s efforts would have been pointless. After finally returning from captivity in the east, his son Emanuel, cousin Niko’s father, married Ursula Lange, one of the “first-degree Mischlinge” that Schondorf headmaster Ernst Reisinger took pains to protect.

  I try to soften the blow of this news about his grandfather by telling cousin Niko that the Bundesarchiv also supports my father’s—and, it turns out, cousin Niko’s mother’s—memory of Reisinger as a man who tried to keep the worst of the regime at bay. But cousin Niko’s mind is elsewhere. He takes several beats before deploying his mordant sensibility. “A grandmother who was Jewish,” he says. “And a grandfather who was in the SS.” Then he repurposes a Nazi word that means “people’s community”: “Victim and perpetrator in one family makes me a full member of the postwar Volksgemseinschaft.”

  Cousin Niko’s maternal grandmother, Käthe Silbersohn, was born in Königsberg in 1891 into an East Prussian Jewish merchant family. By the outbreak of World War I she had begun working as a physician and soon married a non-Jewish psychiatrist named Johannes Lange. They divorced in 1934. Three years later, considered a “full Jew” under the Nuremberg Laws and prevented from practicing medicine, she committed suicide in her Munich apartment. Käthe’s ex-husband died a year later, leaving the orphaned Ursula Lange and her younger brother Ernst to be shuttled between boarding school and various clergy and family friends.

  After her graduation from Schondorf in 1939, Ursula moved to Berlin, where she lived out the war under the protection of a former colleague of her father’s, the neuropathologist Hugo Spatz. Decades later it emerged that Spatz had been a Nazi Party member who, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, performed research on the brains of corpses from concentration camps.

  This news had so shattered cousin Niko’s mother that she wrote the reporter who broke the story to press him: Was he certain?

  He was indeed certain, the journalist wrote back regretfully.

  Ursula Lange Merck, who lived through the Third Reich thanks to the mercies of a Nazi brain researcher, spent her adult life fearing nothing more than mental illness. In 2003 she died of dementia.

  Twelve

  Second Exile

  Kurt, 1960 to 1963

  “Ultimately it all depends on whether I, à la fin des fins, have become a halfway decent person, at least insofar as the modest raw material I’m working with makes possible.”

  So Kurt wrote his old friend Curt von Faber du Faur shortly before the move to Switzerland, with mortality clearly weighing on his mind. He went on:

  I am completely happy to have grown older (you too?)—I’m always astounded that one doesn’t really age gradually, at least not at all for many years, but rather from time to time with violent jolts. (The beginning of this year delivered to me just such a jolt.) Then you look around searchingly and make interesting observations, like: the weight of important things has shifted, and agreeably so. And as far as the business of “being a good person” is concerned: since you’ve never achieved this desirable state, you remain pleasantly occupied with working toward it until the end. I so love the words of Péguy: “I know that I’ll die. I just don’t believe it.”

  The verb is abbröckeln. Man bröckelt ab, Kurt liked to say—“one crumbles away,” especially after the heart trouble and general aches and pains of his seventies. And then, as if he had suddenly discovered the cure for piecing himself back together and undoing the damage from those serial jolts, came “the great miracle of my later years,” Kurt wrote Faber du Faur several years on. “A man whom I had never met before, younger than Niko, suddenly turns up and seduces Helen and me (the 74-year-old!) into a collaboration that [is] fully satisfying . . . [and he] turns out to be a personality of exceptional intelligence, vitality, enthusiasm, open-mindedness, integrity, and noblesse. . . . For me, the American miracle.”

  Late in 1960, an unprepossessing piece of mail turned up at the Hotel Esplanade, addressed to Kurt and Helen both. William Jovanovich had scrawled a simple query on a postcard: “Would you like to publish with me?” The president of Harcourt, Brace & World must have known that no other verb would stir their blood just so. During a visit to Locarno after the new year, Jovanovich filled in the details. He wanted Kurt and Helen to join his firm as publishers under their own imprint. Working from Switzerland, they would report to him alone, while Harcourt Brace handled back-end tasks and assumed all risk. The Wolffs would have complete control over whom and what and how to publish, and share in the profits from every “Helen and Kurt Wolff Book” regardless of how their eponymous imprint list performed for Harcourt overall. After being beholden to the Pantheon board and clashing with Kyrill Schabert, they could hardly fathom their good fortune at finding themselves independent intrapreneurs under the aegis of this “American miracle”—a man born in a Colorado coal camp to a miner from Montenegro and his Polish immigrant wife.

  On a fall morning in 1962, a little more than a year after striking this arrangement, Kurt and Helen awakened in their room at the Hotel Beau Rivage in Lausanne.

  “I had a strange dream,” he told her.

  “So did I,” she replied.

  “I dreamed I wrote a novel,” he said.

  “So did I.”

  “I remember the first sentence.”