“Home is the land of one’s childhood and youth,” the Resistance fighter and Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry wrote in 1966. “Whoever has lost it remains lost himself, even if he has learned not to stumble about in the foreign country as if he were drunk.”

  Kurt may have remained a kind of stumblebum, but not my father. Niko navigated the New World sober, mastering the language and practicing his new citizenship with the discipline of a twelve-stepper. He wasn’t quite like the German immigrants of Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday, eager to be “ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism,” for my father loved his Wurst and a proper beer, and delighted in a cassette of oompah-pah music Maria once sent over on a whim. But he had no interest in unpacking his past, not in front of us, least of all before friends and neighbors, many of them Jewish, some of them ex-GIs. Lucky for him, in the same way no Long Island dinner guest of the early forties could be bothered to ask Kurt and Helen about the continent freshly collapsed around them, Niko was rarely asked about his origins. He came to regard this as an unspoken gesture of welcome.

  In 1959, after RCA hired Niko away from DuPont, we made the move to Princeton, into a split-level home within an easy commute of the company’s research park on Route 1. My father understood that the thing that had so beguiled him as a child, technology, was now changing the world—and no country more profoundly than his new one. At a conference during the sixties he listened to a physicist give a talk about one of his inventions, a component called the integrated circuit. When Niko approached Robert Noyce afterward to slip him a business card, it wasn’t to lobby for a job. Instead my father asked Noyce—who would cofound Intel—to get in touch if he and his business partner ever decided to go public.

  Our life in Princeton included the standard incursions of the sixties­—­images of moon shots, riots, assassinations, in black and white on TV in the den, in color in Life in the living room. But reminders of how we were different surfaced from time to time. We exchanged gifts not on Christmas morning but Christmas Eve, after singing “Silent Night,” in English, in the flickering of real candles clipped to the branches of the tree, a practice neighbors considered reckless in spite of the water bucket Niko was careful to keep nearby. Mr. Iverson next door worked in New Brunswick at the national headquarters of the Boy Scouts of America, and he would sometimes slip me copies of Boys’ Life, which fired dreams of finding a place in some pack or troop, wearing the uniform, flashing the insignia, taking the oath. My father would have none of it, and I couldn’t then understand why.

  But I never felt like a child raised post-traumatically, or even under a firm Teutonic hand. There was no parenting intermediary, no nanny or cook; my father would summon us to the living room sofa for the close-quarters ritual he called Schweinenest, to affirm that he and my mother, my sisters, and I were pigs in the same sty. “Niko wanted to be like that statue of Father Nile in the Vatican,” Maria told me once, “with all his tributaries crawling around him.”

  At the end of 1968, Xerox lured my father away from RCA with an offer to be a manager at its research facility outside Rochester, New York. Just before Christmas we moved to the heavily Jewish suburb of Brighton, which my parents decided would deliver the best public education. Here the Wolffs had to do the acculturating, and we used markers of the old Bildungsbürgertum to pull it off—cello lessons, an expectation of top grades, and membership in that locus of social life, the Jewish Community Center. I felt not at all Jewish. If anything, I was sensitive to any residual German-ness, anxious that it might foreclose friendships and, soon enough, romance. But I found my people—kids whose parents were University of Rochester professors and doctors at Strong Memorial and engineers at Kodak or Bausch & Lomb. Our move came just short of my twelfth birthday, so I was thrown into bar mitzvah culture, logging time as a forager at the kiddish and a wallflower at the roller rink.

  If I sensed German authoritarianism at all, it wasn’t from a martinet father but a rigorously enforced cultural correctness. My parents might idly ask each other whether the town we were driving through had “a good music station,” which of course meant a classical music station. Overhearing them, I was reminded that one could be forgiven ignorance but never poor taste.

  Pollyannaish attitudes unsettled my father almost as much as lowbrow culture. At Xerox he led a research team detailed to a new line of toners for copiers.

  “You going to make deadline?” a supervisor asked him.

  “Fifty-fifty chance,” Niko replied.

  “Great!”

  My father didn’t think it was, particularly. “You know what fifty-fifty means,” he told me later. “You cross the street, you make it to the other side. You cross back, and you’re dead.”

  The Human Flowchart was nonetheless grateful to be able to impose order on this world in a way he never could on the old one. In the basement of our Tudor-style home he would whip out his Dymo gun, the Luger of label makers, and dial up words on plastic tape he affixed to the jars over his workbench dedicated to WASHERS and BRADS and PHILLIPS-HEAD SCREWS. In a letter to the editor published in Country Journal magazine, Niko geeked out over the differences between American scythes and the ones he had used as a boy in Bavaria, making his points with single-­syllable English words I’d never seen before and haven’t since: snath, nib, bead, and peen, as a verb. I can imagine his joy at later finding any one of them in the New York Times crossword, which he would turn to and complete more and more often. He griped about the clues drawn from pop culture and sports; I’d let him vent, then ask if he wanted help—an offer that, in the end, he would accept with grace.

  To be a wary consumer was part of flexing one’s citizen muscles, of empowering the individual so politicians and tycoons couldn’t consolidate wealth and influence at the expense of the little guy. The spines of year after year of the Consumer Reports Buying Guide, Niko’s own Britannica, took up a swath of our bookshelves. When Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, my father had surely nodded along. I would return from school to reliably find on the hallway credenza DC-­postmarked mail from Common Cause or Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen or some other goo-goo nonprofit. Oh, the idealism in those names—Weimar names! Yet Niko had faith that America could shear even woolly-headed best intentions of their fecklessness.

  From time to time I’d see evidence of my father trying to backfill his understanding of what had gone so horribly wrong. William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich held pride of place in the living room. Niko read Albert Speer’s memoirs, and not just as an architect manqué. And the latest book from Grass lurked around his nightstand. My father admired the playfulness of his imagination and the impudence of his characters but also the task Grass so insistently turned to, even as Niko himself left his own past unexcavated. On those occasions when his ancestry came up in conversation with a neighbor or colleague, he had a way of leaving it unclear that he had emigrated after the war. Years later I asked about those consistent elisions, and he conceded he would just as soon spare himself the questions. That instinct likely extended to wanting to spare us the burden of answers and probably helps explain why I put off posing many questions myself. One summer during the seventies, while we visited family in Munich, a Swiss friend of mine came up from Zurich, and together we made plans to visit Dachau. Pained, my father had a question for me: “Why would you want to do that?”

  He had so wished to put all that behind him and beyond us. When he sold off his shares in Merck Darmstadt, Niko felt relief at being released from tax obligations but surely also at slipping one of the last bonds of the Old World. Yet a few essential things about America always eluded him. I would cringe at his pop-cultural obliviousness, never more so than in the Tampa airport one spring as we made our way back from vacation. When a local TV crew doing man-in-the-street interviews approached him with a question about the state of the economy, Niko grabbed the microphone from the startled reporter and pulled it close—a faux pas no one familiar with the coolest American medium and Glotzofon etiquette would make. Later I chalked this up to exuberance over living in a country where the mass media cares what the average citizen thinks and he could say his piece with impunity.

  But even in this land he trusted to make just laws and enforce them fairly, I occasionally saw his fealty to rules wobble. Sometime in the early seventies, as aborning adolescents, a few friends and I tried half-hearted juvenile delinquency on for size, engaging in light hanging out that we called “making the precinct scene.” One evening, crouching in the bushes along Rochester’s Highland Avenue during a lake-effect blizzard, we pelted passing cars with snowballs.

  It all comes back to me in a swirl of headlights and blowing snow. The thud against the broad side of a large sedan. The muffled skid of the braking car. The passenger-side door releasing a silhouetted figure, a man, who lit out after the three of us. We scattered, and I was the one he caught. I can still smell the booze on his breath and feel the tug on the wad of my jacket he held in his fist. He frog-marched me back to the car, and I stayed mute during the short ride to our house. At the stoop Niko thanked my captor—assured him that he would “take care of it.”

  As soon as the door clicked shut, my father exhaled. He turned to me, grinned, and urged me not to get caught the next time.

  Each D-Day I’m reminded of when I first surveyed the Normandy beaches years ago. To stand on the lip of the cliffs, to track the gray of the channel to the horizon, to glance back at the bunkers and gun sights of the Atlantic Wall and then over toward the white grave markers describing perfect lines against manicured green—to take all this in—is to marvel not just at the scale and tactical audacity of Operation Overlord but at its lives-for-liberty calculus. The Allies marshaled three million troops for the invasion, the same number Hitler deployed for Operation Barbarossa. Some twenty-five hundred Allied soldiers died on June 6, 1944, and another two hundred thousand lost their lives before the Germans were finally chased across the Rhine.

  As a boy I must have sensed what this event meant for my family and me. I pulled Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day off my parents’ bookshelves before leaving elementary school, and in high school, upon encountering Paul Verlaine in French class, I already knew the lines of verse the BBC broadcast to alert the Resistance to the imminent invasion.

  On May 8, 1985, German president Richard von Weizsäcker delivered a speech to the Bundestag to mark the fortieth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat. At its heart lay a simple if then-provocative proposition: that Germans should use this occasion not to solemnize their country’s loss but to celebrate its liberation. “We must find our own standards,” Weizsäcker said that day. “We are not assisted in this task if we or others spare our feelings. We need and we have the strength to look unblinkered at the truth—without embellishment and without distortion. . . . And this must be stated on behalf of all of us today: The eighth of May . . . liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National Socialist regime.”

  An unbroken line ran from May 8, 1945, back to January 30, 1933, he declared: “It is not a case of coming to terms with the past. That is not possible. It cannot be subsequently modified or made undone. However, anyone who closes his eyes to the past is blind to the present. Those who refuse to remember the past inhumanity will be vulnerable again to new risks of infection.”

  Anticipating promises of “the end of history” that would come a few years later with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Weizsäcker went on to sound cautionary notes. “From our own history we learn what man is capable of,” he said. “For that reason we must not imagine that we are now quite different and have become better. There is no ultimately achievable moral perfection—for no individual and for no nation. We have learned as human beings, and as human beings we remain in danger. But we have the strength to overcome such danger again and again.”

  From the moment I first looked out from those cliffs and took inventory of the chain of events that led to my existence, I have seen modern German history in precisely the way the German president laid it out. But to Alexander Gauland and Björn Höcke and their co-religionists in the AfD, Weizsäcker had delivered “a speech against his own people.”

  Here lies the essential question for postwar Germany, one that informs and frames the country’s current political life: Are human beings so subject to taxonomy that a modern society can’t sprinkle a million from a smaller box within a larger receptacle of eighty million more? Are the German people first Germans or people?

  To the son of a Wehrmacht soldier from Munich and the cultivator of a victory garden in Connecticut, the answers to these questions come with nothing less than existential implications. I am alive for the same reason modern Germany prospers—because the world acted on its revulsion at the Nazi regime and then believed it was worth helping future generations of Germans turn to the task that my grandfather, in his letter to Maria, had urged them to take up.

  Millions of Germans have done so in good faith. In 1995, a scant decade after Weizsäcker delivered his speech, more than half the country’s population regarded the Allies’ defeat of the Nazis as liberation, and another 28 percent as both liberation and defeat. The percentage of Germans who considered the subdual of Nazi Germany by force of arms solely as a defeat stood at only 13 percent—precisely, it bears highlighting, the AfD’s share of the vote in the September 2017 elections. Further, the rest of the world took approving note of how Germany had remade itself. In 2006 the country hosted soccer’s World Cup amidst a healthy equilibrium: Germans had finally hit upon a patriotism that allowed them to cheer and wave flags yet still be gracious hosts—such good hosts, the joke went, that they stepped back to let France and Italy play for the trophy. Visiting fans said they liked the Germans and loved being in Germany, sentiments surely tied to recognition of how far the country had come. As the Green Party politician Cem Özdemir pointed out in a February 2018 speech to the Bundestag critical of the AfD, it is precisely because of Germany’s diversity and culture of remembrance that “this country is respected throughout the world.”

  Rightist populism is indeed on the march around Europe and the globe. But as the country most attuned to its dangers, Germany can make a claim as early-warning system. Thirteen percent is far too large a figure. Indeed, it turned out to be large enough, after Merkel struggled through months of false starts following those elections before finally forming a government, to elevate the AfD to leader of the opposition. But even the AfD wouldn’t dare march through a German city chanting “Jews will not replace us,” or even “Blood and soil,” as American neo-Nazis did in Charlottesville. The rise of the AfD is no reason to give up on the project of vigilance, Susan Neiman argues: “Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung isn’t a foolproof inoculation against racism and reaction; the world is unlikely to suffer a shortage of fools.” But as she worked on Learning from the Germans, Neiman was comforted to discover how many Germans were horrified to learn of the title she intended to use for her book.

  Ernie Pyle, the namesake of the cargo ship that would deliver my father to the United States, never filed the column he planned to write upon Germany’s surrender. He was shot and killed on April 18, 1945, a few weeks too soon. But among the notes he took while covering more than five years of war­—­during which forty-four million people, including twenty-six million civilians, died in Europe alone—is this sentence: “Those who are gone would not wish themselves to be a millstone of gloom around our necks.”

  Pyle’s statement sits beside a corollary, not gloomy either: that the GIs who gave their lives storming the beaches, liberating France, and yes, liberating Germany, did so for an idea—that a country’s citizens aren’t just those people born within its borders. An exile can become a citizen, an emigrant too, by subscribing to a creed. “American” has never been, just as today “German” is no longer, status to which one is bound by blood and soil alone.

  By such lights an American-born son of a soldier of the Wehr­macht observes D-Day in Berlin.

  Fourteen

  Turtle Bay

  Alex, 1975 to 1994

  I showed up as a college freshman aware of the many ways the Princeton campus bound me to my father. Erich Kahler’s widow still lived steps away, in the house where Niko landed in 1948. As campus correspondent for the Trenton Times, the local evening paper, I fetched my stories in print by crossing Nassau Street at midday, the same route my father once took to find his luncheonette pork roll. When Niko visited me on campus, we often caught a glimpse of a grad student from his day, a mathematician who had ridden a bicycle around the basement of one of the dorms at the Graduate College while whistling the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth: John Nash, the schizophrenic game theorist of A Beautiful Mind, wearing a drab overcoat, still haunting Firestone Library decades later.

  The university released me into the world of Manhattan magazine journalism on the cusp of the boom of the eighties. I joined Sports Illustrated as a fact-checker, making $16,000 a year plus overtime. Luckily there would be lots of overtime. If my father felt pride at seeing me launched, it probably came mitigated by my literally supplying what Kurt once dismissed as “what makes the sportsman’s heart beat faster.” As Maria would later tell me, “Sport—it’s as if you’re a society columnist. It’s not quite what your parents expected.”