“So do I.”

  “There are days of which we say they don’t please us.”

  “Some days are more dreadful than others.”

  Helen repeated this story often after Kurt’s death. I’d long been baffled by her willingness to excuse his philandering—“One can’t expect a virtuoso to play for an audience of one,” she would say—but here is proof that they shared a connection much more intimate than the simply carnal. Ever the close reader, she took care to point out the subtle differences in their respective opening sentences. “Kurt’s is, I believe, a quote from Goethe, or at least in the style of Goethe,” she wrote in recounting the episode to Günter Grass. “Mine, quite notably, is in English. I often dream in English, especially if I wish to formulate something (in my dream) concisely.”

  That detail underscores how, two decades after their emigration to the United States, Helen had adapted to the New World while Kurt remained bound to the continent that formed him. Indeed, Kurt’s final years were marked by an odd mixture of restlessness and contentment. For two people who had lived so much of their life together on the move, a hotel in yet another country made for an emblematic domicile. The Esplanade permitted them to furnish a three-room suite with their belongings, and they hung the walls with a Matisse and a Guardi. I imagine them finding consolation in the lilt of spoken Italian, the rustle of palm fronds, the view from the terrace. In Locarno, a friend of Kurt’s would write Maria after his death, “I found a Kurt I had never known before—not only charming as ever, but relaxed and buoyant, and animated with his own special élan.” That spirit suffuses this portrait, taken by my cousin Niko’s father soon after consummation of the Harcourt partnership.

  But Switzerland can be inhospitable to a foreigner who isn’t a full-fare tourist, and their setup was hardly a home. “I’ve often wondered why Kurt Wolff . . . was living in a hotel at the end of his life,” Wolfram Göbel mused in a 1987 lecture to mark the hundredth anniversary of Kurt’s birth. “Had he had his fill of books, of possessions? No, I believe—this followed from the wise insight, made at the end of a bitter but rich and full life, that the real value in literature lies not in the preservation of treasures but in their constant rediscovery.”

  In much the same way he carried his home around with him, Kurt existed within a kind of force field. “He’s treated with respect without having to throw so much as an elbow,” Helen wrote Maria in 1962, “simply by dint of the confidence of his bearing and the silver spoon that since birth has protruded unmistakably from his mouth.”

  Of course it helped that Helen had his back. “It’s great that you have your lioness,” wrote Faber du Faur, the original Pantheon investor and Schabert’s stepfather, not without admiration. “She would attack a herd of elephants if it wanted to do something to you.”

  When Kurt would travel to Germany, usually in the fall around the Frankfurt Book Fair, he enjoyed introducing himself as ein Amerikaner aus Bonn. In fact, a new generation of literary Germans was rediscovering and claiming him. In 1960, after accepting an honor from the German Booksellers Association, Kurt affirmed his determination to continue “to strike out on new paths, even if they prove to be detours or dead ends,” and to involve himself “with more than sales figures and production costs.”

  In October 1963 he met with Grass in Paris, where the two worked over passages in the English translation of Dog Years, which Harcourt Brace would soon publish as a Helen and Kurt Wolff Book. Days before, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Kurt had feted Grass and his forthcoming novel with a lavish dinner at the Frankfurterhof. The author stands with Kurt in the photograph from that event shown here—perhaps the last taken of my grandfather.

  Members of Gruppe 47, the organization of postwar writers in which Grass was active, wanted to honor Kurt’s record of supporting fresh literary voices, so they invited him to a meeting later that month, in the spa town of Bad Saulgau, in Germany’s southwest. On October 21 he and Helen came up from Locarno to Ludwigsburg. The next day they planned to travel the few miles onward to Marbach am Neckar, to visit the Schiller National Museum and German Literary Archive, and from there backtrack to Bad Saulgau. After checking into their Ludwigsburg hotel, Kurt decided to stretch his legs.

  Years later the Independent of London would get almost everything about Kurt’s death wrong, describing him as having been “crushed by a tram against the railings of a Frankfurt bridge.” What happened took place elsewhere and wasn’t nearly as dramatic. A tanker truck began to back into a narrow driveway between two buildings, and Kurt, loping along the sidewalk, thought he could clear the opening by picking up his pace. He miscalculated, and the truck pinned him against a gate post. It was the kind of tragic pratfall that would have been rich material in the hands of, say, Günter Grass.

  Kurt was taken to an adjacent children’s sanatorium, and Helen was summoned from the hotel. They had several final hours together before he died of internal injuries. The end bore out what he had said of himself: Ich werde an meiner eigenen Leichtsinnigkeit sterben. “I will die of my own carelessness.”

  Word reached us early the next morning in Princeton, to which we had moved from Delaware four years earlier. I found out from my father, who had taken the phone call in bed and still lay there. It was the first time I remember seeing him cry.

  Tributes began to roll in as news spread. “He had one special quality that is very rare,” wrote the Times of London. “His gaiety, intelligence and cultivated learning were so freely imparted that when one was with him one felt one was equally (or almost equally) gay and intelligent and learned, so sympathetic and understanding was his approach to his guests.”

  The German catastrophe had unfolded during the prime of Kurt’s life, between 1914 and 1945—what Fritz Stern called the second Thirty Years’ War, “more frightful even than the first.” The passing decades, the intercession of World War II, West Germany’s fixation on laying down a marker at Stunde Null—all had so obscured the details of my grandfather’s early career that the next day’s Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung reported the death in town of the “American” publisher Kurt Wolff. Technically true—though in a subsequent issue the newspaper did clarify that he was “closely linked to the history of German Expressionism.”

  Helen elected to have Kurt buried in Marbach, a short stroll from the manuscripts of so many of his early authors. Hannah Arendt took note of the “uncanny” symbolism in his final resting place. “It’s lovely and comforting,” she wrote Helen from Chicago. “He never really experienced the rootlessness that is the fate of us all. To go back where he came from, it seems to me, is the last link in a chain of felicity, as if Dame Fortune had smiled again, horrifically, on a life that always remained blessed in both happiness and adversity, and radiated this blessing.”

  Bernhard Zeller, director of the Schiller National Museum, delivered the graveside remarks. “He was able to discover and attract the boldest voices, the most restless spirits, the most hidden talents—among them more than a few whose rank would only be recognized by a later generation,” he said. “Not even disasters and collapses could rob him of the strength and spirit to start over again and again. He dreamed big, and the effects of his work were felt far and wide, combining his sense of value and measure with an entrepreneur’s daring but at the same time an artist’s imagination.”

  Helen dropped Zeller a note shortly after the funeral, thanking him for a eulogy that “put the emphasis on what was essential and lasting in him—his passion for publishing, his love of books and their design. I have you to thank for your assistance on the twenty-first, on that calamitous day, and for your immediate response to my request for assurance that Kurt be buried in Marbach, the only place in an international sense he could call a spiritual home.”

  It had been a literary-state funeral. But for Niko, the trip to Marbach entailed more than burying his father. Maria would later tell me that, surveying the many women among the mourners, he had muttered something about “false widows.” And for the first time as an adult my father came face-to-face with his half brother Enoch Crome.

  From Kurt’s diaries I know that, as a seven-year-old, Niko had played with Enoch, born on his own birthday in 1926 and thus precisely five years younger. But my father never once mentioned Enoch to me. When Niko saw him graveside and registered the resemblance that marked them as kin, my aunt remembered, he went ashen. During a long walk one summer day during the nineties, my mother told me that Niko had returned from Marbach “shaken.”

  Always better equipped than Kurt to cope with change, in better health and command of English, Helen decided to move back to the United States. With my parents having just welcomed their third child, and Christian beginning to make a life in New England as a husband, father, academic, and composer, Helen could now count as much family stateside as in Europe. For another thirty years she would continue to publish Helen and Kurt Wolff Books with Harcourt, Brace & World and then Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. “The false widows pretty much leave me alone,” she wrote my father from Locarno three weeks after Kurt’s burial, appropriating Niko’s epithet. “Only [Hermann Hesse’s wife and the Wolffs’ Swiss neighbor] Ninon will come over, on the twentieth, which should be a bit exhausting even if not worth avoiding. She sent me a very beautiful poem by her husband to cheer me up for my fresh start in New York, with these two lines”:

  Every beginning offers a magic power

  That protects us and helps us to endure.

  A few weeks afterward, the two women once married to my grandfather exchanged letters. From Switzerland, just before Christmas Eve, Helen wrote Elisabeth in Munich.

  You have written such a lovely letter to me, so noble in spirit, and I’ve thought about it often. One thing you don’t really see, I believe, is your role in Kurt’s life. You were with him in the most glorious times, in his youth . . . that happy time in which his enthusiasm for publishing coincided with the poetic zeal of an era in which everything was new. In many ways you were much closer to him than I—in sharing a sense of the aesthetic, the social, the grand gesture of life. You supplied him a setting he never found again, of beauty, of scrupulousness, of indulgence, for which I, coming from a destroyed world, had neither an aptitude for nor a model to follow. Kurt spent the best, most beautiful years of his life at your side.

  When I first met him he was in the process of dissolution, like time itself. Those were tremendously fraught years, in which he made no promises to himself about the present or the future, and actually lived in a state of desperate but dulled resignation interspersed with bouts of lethargy. Maybe he was just looking for someone he could rely on unconditionally, who accepted him as he was—who expected nothing and demanded nothing. Given my generation and difficult family relationships, I offered a kind of guide to living: the fragility and unreliability of things and people, the disintegration of any structure one might have held on to. I loved Kurt above all else . . . just never with confidence. He could never disappoint me. I did not love him like God or like a mother . . . but as a magical, amiable, and unpredictable child. As if I too were a child, I feared for him and would try to protect him, especially from himself. His radical unreasonableness often drove me to despair, and yet that was part of his nature, without which he wouldn’t have been nearly as carefree, as radiant. . . . In recent years he often accused me of “incapacitating” him, for that’s how he felt about reminders and worries, and would say my every second utterance was “Don’t do that!” We were so profoundly different in character that he surely often suffered under me, from my sobriety and caution. . . .

  In the old days widows went into the monastery, which housed many others of their kind. I shall go into the asceticism of work and hope that helps.

  This photograph brings back my lone vivid memory of Kurt. He passed through Manhattan and paid us several visits during the summer of 1963. (Warm weather and family company couldn’t get him out of that dark blazer and tie, and I’d been dressed to match.) In Princeton one afternoon Kurt set himself up in a chair on our screened-in porch and did something that seared itself into my six-year-old mind.

  To drill some frugality into his boy, my father had given me a tin cash register that functioned as a piggy bank. Place a coin in its slot, pull the arm, and it would record the value of the deposit and display the running total, with the drawer set to pop open once the register held ten dollars. Months passed without a digit moving. Something—soda pop, jawbreakers, baseball cards—always claimed my pocket change. From the bedroom dresser that red sentinel reproached me, its arm raised high as if ready to give me the back of its hand, a proxy for my father and his war-forged belief in thrift.

  That day Kurt discovered this tin box and, realizing its constitution, set about to subdue it as he would any stubborn person. A man whose life’s purpose had been to disburse pleasure threw off any shackles of “sobriety and caution,” feeding the register with change until it disgorged its full ten bucks. I watched, entranced, as this incorrigibly social man, so eager to make the human connections he craved, reeled me in.

  That was in July. Three months later Opa Wolff would be dead.

  Thirteen

  Schweinenest

  Niko, 1952 to 1978

  After growing up in a world where people knew their place, my father found himself launched into one where you took your place. He collected a succession of assents—from Princeton, which granted him the thing his father had failed to earn, a PhD; from DuPont, which offered him a job as a bench chemist in its labs in Wilmington, Delaware; and from my mother, who agreed to marry him.

  At Princeton, Niko wrote a dissertation having to do with cholesterol derivatives under controlled conditions. At DuPont, he interviewed with a Mr. Cavanaugh, who worked in explosives and walked with a limp, a combination that led my father to entertain notions of cause and effect. Niko found the smell of tetraethyl something-or-other overpowering. “You’ll get used to it,” Mr. Cavanaugh assured him.

  Niko bristled at the paternalism American companies practiced during the fifties. But in the spirit of the lone compliment thrown his way in that miserable Max-Gymnasium report card long ago—“His behavior was on the whole commendable”—my father could be counted on as a member of a team. Twice he would win DuPont safety awards for his fastidiousness in the lab. The man who now introduced himself as Nick was pulling down a serious paycheck. Deciding to upgrade from that Dodge into which he had sunk a little more than sixty-five dollars, he turned up at a sales lot in downtown Wilmington.

  “Got anything to trade in?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’d you drive over in?”

  My father gestured meekly at his green machine.

  “I’ll give you $250 for it.”

  What a country, he thought.

  Getting my mother to yes took more doing and as much physics as chemistry. Smitten by this woman Maria would call Schmetterlingaugen, Butterfly Eyes, and captivated by her dedication to the piano, my father pressed his interest. She was hesitant: barely out of her teens when she met him, living an independent life with roommates in Manhattan, my mother knew that if she hitched herself to this man nine years older and much more experienced, there would be no going back. In the fall of 1953, just as he began at DuPont, she insisted on not seeing him. He continued to write her just the same.

  By the end of June 1954, she was all in. They set a wedding date for that October and discussed what a life together would be like. Parenting would not be subcontracted, and my father pledged always to be faithful. As my mother told me years later, “My reaction to that was, ‘Well, of course.’”

  She would come to learn why my father felt the need to make that promise so explicit.

  Before Niko became a US citizen in December 1957, my mother helped drill him for the exam. At the ceremony at the federal district courthouse in Wilmington, he was handed a copy of the Constitution, compliments of the Wilmington Lions Club and the American Legion. With that and his latest set of wheels, shown below, he was a fifties American archetype come to life.

  Niko’s closest friend at DuPont was Karl Frensdorff, another German emigrant chemist, who had been in his graduate class at Prince­ton. Before the war Karl’s Jewish family sprang him from Hanover on one of the sealed Kindertransport trains bound for Britain. His parents soon escaped on their own to England, where the family reunited before sailing together to America.

  For all their gratitude at being taken in by the United States, Niko and the man I knew as Uncle Karl shared the same distrust of authority, conformity, and enforced patriotism. The closer you had brushed up against the Third Reich, the more vigilantly you kept an eye on McCarthyism and its by-products. Both men had the playful way with words common among people forced to master a second language later in life. After that citizenship ceremony, Karl gave my father a mock memo, copying the “Turpitude Division, FBI; Espionage Division, CIA; Patriotism Subcommittee, DAR; ‘America First, Americans Second!’ Committee, American Legion; and the Contributions Committee, Republican Party.” It was a collection of “regulations,” a guide “promulgated to render more smooth the transition of the new citizen to the American Way of Life,” that read like the lyrics to a Tom Lehrer song. Best to avoid

  hidden pitfalls and chasms

  Be non-political as protoplasm

  Be wary of enthusiasm

  Abhor like plagues iconoclasm!

  In this artifact over which Niko and Karl bonded, I have one of the founding documents of my father’s formation as an American. He staked out the center with a revolutionary’s zeal, cheering anyone in public life who called the powerful to account or demanded that government work better. He loved the political performance art of Senator William Proxmire, the Wisconsin Democrat whose monthly Golden Fleece Award turned common sense into a cudgel. Senator Lowell Weicker, the indignant Republican renegade from Connecticut, was among Niko’s favorite Watergate characters. And he would fall into a lifelong habit of voting for moderate, internationalist Republican senators with alliterative names, casting ballots for Clifford Case and Jacob Javits and Jim Jeffords as he moved from New Jersey to New York to Vermont.