After I spent a year with the roaches in a $400-a-month studio on the Upper West Side, Helen invited me to relocate to her apartment in Turtle Bay. She wanted to spend more time near Christian and his family in New England; if I moved in, she could keep a pied-à-terre. But it turned out New York law didn’t regard grandchildren as “immediate family” permitted under the terms of her lease. Soon a stern letter on landlord letterhead appeared under the door, invoking various subsections and subparagraphs. Bureaucrats and official documents had a way of stirring up the past, and Helen suffered through several restless nights until a rewritten lease and bump in rent set things right. These scars of exile would appear from time to time—in some possession she could “always sell if I have to;” in the row of relentlessly sensible shoes in her closet. In an admiring nod at Helen’s practicality, Maria called her die Gestiefelte—a play on Stiefmutter (stepmother) that means “she who is shod in boots.”

  Over the next dozen years, when she passed through Manhattan on business, Helen and I were the odd couple. She conjured simple suppers evoking impecunious times in France and Italy—a bowl of lentils, a pesto Genovese. Each piece of furniture and artwork came with some backstory. A photograph of Kurt the aesthete graced her desk, his legs crossed and cigarette pointing insouciantly downward. Literary figures—Grass, Uwe Johnson, Max Frisch, various editors and reviewers—came and went, and sometimes I met them in passing, though not when stumbling home, as I often did, when the magazine’s Sunday night close bled into a Monday morning, after having discharged my solemn duty to make sure we rendered a certain New York Knick as Micheal—not Michael—Ray Richardson.

  I lost my sometime roommate in the spring of 1994. She died in her kitchen in Hanover, New Hampshire, “on her feet,” in the phrase of Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose, the biggest success she enjoyed after Kurt’s death. “Suddenly there is nothing,” Grass wrote after hearing the news. “The bridgehead is gone. From this perspective you can sense panic but also a realization of how many authors of my generation are indebted to the German emigrants. Those chased from Germany have done more for us than could be expected or hoped for.”

  Shortly before she died, Helen gave me a copy of the final entry in Kurt’s commonplace book, six lines attributed variously to Stephen Grellet and William Penn—“surely,” she wrote in a note, “with his love.” To the end my grandfather seemed preoccupied with “the business of ‘being a good person,’” notwithstanding “the modest raw material” he was working with.

  I shall pass through this world but once

  Any good thing, therefore, that I can do

  Any kindness I can show to any human being,

  Let me do it now.

  Let me not defer it nor neglect it,

  For I shall not pass this way again.

  It’s a variation on the pithier advice Helen liked to give: “Always overtip.”

  Altaf, Hisham, Vedad, Dayot, Ademola: these are the names that populated one of our Berlin Saturdays—young people from points afar who fed us and entertained us, and invited us to consider our good fortune to have a foot in two prosperous countries at peace.

  We paid a visit to the Westend home of Helen’s grandniece Marion Detjen and her husband, Stephan, who live on a property saturated with history. From their garden the Detjens can see the upstairs window of an adjacent house, the room from which the Gestapo seized the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. On the exterior of their own home, the metalwork of a window grate includes the Olympic rings, forged to commemorate the house’s construction for the 1936 games, which took place nearby. Marion and Stephan have taken a photograph of Jesse Owens rising out of the blocks and burned it into a panel of glass, then hung it in the window of a downstairs bathroom so the African American who humiliated Hitler by winning four gold medals is bathed each day in backlight.

  Stephan and Marion relate to all this professionally—he as a political correspondent for Deutschlandradio, she as a history professor at Bard College Berlin, where her classes brim with displaced students from such crisis regions as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. But their neighborhood’s ties to Nazi Germany have personal resonances too. Marion long ago took up the Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung left to her by her family’s business, a Bavarian paper mill that under the Nazis had used forced labor from Ukraine. Today a broader portfolio of motives leads her and Stephan to put up refugees in their home. It’s partly to foster conviviality across cultures and partly to slake their own curiosity about the Middle East. It follows from a wish to strike a blow for transnationalism and to help make right the Federal Republic’s long reluctance to accommodate immigrants after its founding. The Russian émigré history of the family of Marion’s mother, Marie, figures too. Today her father, Michael, now retired from that paper business but living in the same conservative village, volunteers to help refugees integrate, which leaves Marion beaming with pride.

  At Marion and Stephan’s, a well-cultivated Willkommenskultur makes for second chances all the way down. First came Samer, a Syrian refugee they put up three years earlier as he launched a catering business, the Aleppo Supper Club, to parlay his mother’s command of a kitchen into a livelihood for members of their extended family. Now the Detjens host Altaf and Hisham, Yemeni students who have had to flee twice over—first from their homeland, targeted by a Saudi bombing campaign; and then from Turkey, where the universities at which they studied became targets of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s crackdown on civil society after the attempted coup in 2016.

  In the polyglot Heim their house has become, where everyone takes a turn preparing meals, Altaf and Hisham serve us a Yemeni lunch. Afterward we walk to the Olympic Stadium to watch the final game of the season of Hertha BSC, Berlin’s Bundesliga soccer club. Within seconds Dayot Upamecano scores for the visitors, RB Leipzig. A few minutes later Vedad Ibisevic equalizes for the home team. Soon Leipzig’s Ademola Lookman slots the ball past the goalkeeper, adding to what will be a jubilee of goals in a wildly entertaining 6–2 Leipzig victory. Those first three scorers come from Guinea-Bissau, Bosnia, and Nigeria, respectively. To watch the hardcore fans brandish signs like GEGEN RASSISMUS, FÜR TOLERANZ—AGAINST RACISM, FOR TOLERANCE­—­is to see how modern Berlin can retrofit a Nazi-era structure with a new narrative.

  In 1936 the American writer Thomas Wolfe sat in these same stands for the opening ceremony of Hitler’s Olympics. His impressions made their way into his autobiographical novel You Can’t Go Home Again:

  The Germans had constructed a mighty stadium which was the most beautiful and most perfect in its design that had ever been built. And all the accessories of this monstrous plant—the swimming pools, the enormous halls, the lesser stadia—had been laid out and designed with this same cohesion of beauty and of use. The organization was superb. Not only were the events themselves, down to the minutest detail of each competition, staged and run off like clockwork, but the crowds—such crowds as no other great city has ever had to cope with, and the like of which would certainly have snarled and maddened the traffic of New York beyond hope of untangling—were handled with a quietness, order, and speed that was astounding.

  Here, on this very day Wolfe wrote about, the Nazis introduced the pageantry of the torch relay. It has been part of every Olympics since, culminating in a runner who ignites the cauldron with a flame lit in Greece. In 1936 a German weightlifter did the honors, then led the athletes in a recitation of the Olympic oath while he brandished a flag. But that flag wasn’t graced with the Olympic rings that protocol called for. Instead, the German standard-bearer waved a swastika flag. In his seat next to Hitler in the Führer’s box, the International Olympic Committee president, Count Henri de Baillet-Latour, looked on disapprovingly.

  Moments later the Polish ambassador to Germany tapped Baillet-­Latour on the shoulder. “We have to be on our guard against a people with such a talent for organization,” he said, whispering so Hitler wouldn’t hear. “They could mobilize their entire nation just as smoothly for war.”

  Two poles have fixed our place in Berlin. Look north from our upper-floor apartment, beyond where the wall once ran, and the old East German TV tower commands the Brandenburg plain from its position on Alexanderplatz. To the south, the radar tower at decommissioned Tempelhof Airport pokes its sphere above the canopy of trees in the cemetery across our street. These landmarks hold us in their symbolic symmetry, each representing one side in the Cold War—this one to push information out, the other to pull data in.

  The TV tower may be an internationally recognized symbol of modern Berlin, but Tempelhof figures much more in our daily lives. The airport closed in 2008, and since then its runways and taxiways have been folded into Tempelhofer Feld, one of the world’s largest and most striking urban spaces. In a scaled-up version of their well-worn squatting tactics, Berliners began to use the airport grounds for recreation before the city could sell the land off to developers. By the time the bureaucracy moved to act, a public park had become a fait accompli. On a whim we’ll walk Tempelhof’s asphalt and green space, beholding the kitesurfers, breathing deep the kebab smoke from the grills, taking in the apartment blocks that rise hugger-mugger with church spires and the occasional minaret in the cityscape beyond. Our kids might duck out to Tempelhof for an hour, to go for a run or take pictures of urban curiosities for a school project. But it’s Vanessa who has the most meaningful relationship with this expanse and the massive National Socialist terminal at its western end. Licensing issues kept her from practicing nursing in Germany, so she began to volunteer with a group that serves Berlin’s resettled refugee families, including a few that still call several Tempelhof hangars home.

  She and I finally make good on a vow to explore the terminal itself. We walk along the Columbiadamm, past the plaque marking the site of the old Prussian police building, since torn down, that became the Gestapo detention center from which passersby could hear the prisoners’ screams. As aviation minister, Göring ordered the Tempelhof terminal’s construction in 1935. Workers, mostly forced laborers, assembled Junkers and Stuka bombers here for the Luftwaffe during the war; afterward, for the eleven months of the Berlin airlift over 1948 and ’49, the British and American transport planes known as Rosinenbomber (raisin bombers) landed and unloaded their cargo here to break the Soviet blockade—around the clock, up to one plane every three minutes, some two hundred thousand landings in all. When refugees first spotted an old Rosinenbomber left on the tarmac for the edification of tourists, some of them panicked, fearing it was there to fly them back to Syria.

  In a city full of yardsticks by which to measure the new Germany, the Tempelhof terminal is as striking as any. It’s built of the light brown limestone characteristic of Nazi architecture. Red, black, and white flooring still lines its corridors. Forty-meter-long steel trusses hold up the roof of each hangar, because the Nazis wanted to install grandstand seating atop them so as many as one hundred thousand people at a time could watch party rallies and airshows.

  But the fates enjoy the last laugh. Those reinforced roofs designed to support “racially pure” Germans now shelter several hundred mostly dark-skinned people, housed here until they can find a proper home, every one of them a guest of the German government.

  Fifteen

  Mr. Bitte Nicht Ansprechen

  Niko, 1979 to 2003

  Niko and Mary each brought to their marriage a love for Vermont­—­my mother from memories of summer camp, where a proper Fairfield County girl found joy in communal living and getting dirty; my father for how the state’s pastureland and wooded hills supplied accents of Bavaria-in-America. Both loved the work of Carl Zuckmayer, an exile and author of the Kurt Wolff Verlag, who during the late thirties had landed in the same Vermont town where my parents, in 1963, went in with Christian on an old farmhouse. “We must take one step at a time, as one does in new, unexplored territory, moving ahead with vigor, prudently but with determination,” Zuckmayer wrote during his time in this almost literal wilderness. “Then we shall begin to feel . . . that exile is not a flight and a curse but a destiny. And a man must love his destiny.”

  As an emigrant, not an exile, Niko demanded a brisker pace of himself. But it was his own destiny that he—a freelance consultant now—would find his way for good to this most European patch of the United States. In 1979, while their farmhouse was being winterized, my parents moved into a place across the river in New Hampshire so that my youngest sister could finish high school there. After she went off to college, they spent seven years on that dirt road in East Barnard, Vermont, until the isolation and their advancing age persuaded them to move closer to medical care. It was a sound instinct: within months of that final move, to Norwich, Vermont, Niko suffered a heart attack while mowing the lawn. The prostate cancer diagnosis came four years later.

  This man who once rode out an air raid in a Munich basement, and thus knew the fate of “rats in a trap,” had also, in supplying photographs and maps to the Edelweiss squadron, helped lay rat traps himself. I imagine this played a part in leading him during the late eighties to demonstrate his avowed pacifism by participating in the exchange program with Soviet citizens. Niko credited life with eventually setting him up at some casino with a comped suite and a pile of house money. But nothing could completely empty him of memories of war and want. The same day he confided in me that he had once bought fifty thousand shares of Intel at a cost basis of two cents, he fired off an angry letter to Verizon, ripping it for raising the price of in-state long distance by two cents per minute.

  He reserved special contempt for any entity—political, corporate, religious—that tried to pull one over on the common man. After the Eternal Word Network found its way into his basic-cable bundle, the local daily published his letter declaring that he was “not a Catholic” and wondering why some creed was being foisted on him. Lord help the customer-service rep for the cable provider or the phone company if a hiked rate or new fee came with even a whiff of bait and switch. Niko had the receipts. And with telemarketers he took no quarter. He couldn’t avoid them, for caller ID hadn’t yet made it to his home, but neither did he regard hanging up as punitive enough. So he would answer and lay down the receiver and walk away, leaving the caller to speak into the void. My mother considered this unpardonably disrespectful of someone trying to make a living, but I’ve come to understand its roots. The clinical diagnosis would probably be intermittent, low-grade, late-onset episodes of PTSD. It had been decades since his Heimkehr, and still: Bitte nicht ansprechen.

  Over the summer of 1995 he took my youngest sister, Kathy, on a cruise through the Mediterranean. From the Italy that had redeemed his early adolescence they sailed east, to Istanbul and on to Turkey’s Aegean Coast. Their tour group disembarked into the blast-furnace dryness of Kuşadasi, from which a bus took them the half hour to Ephesus.

  The scattered ruins of this ancient Greek settlement told the story of a highly evolved civilization. An amphitheater on the site once accommodated twenty-five thousand people, and more than a hundred columns supported the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Now the most breathtaking surviving structure sat at the end of a long plaza: two levels of the partially reconstructed Library of Celsus, oriented so a reader in AD 200 could catch the morning light.

  At one point Niko separated himself from the group and took a seat on a stone bench alongside this ancient plaza. That’s where my sister found him, weeping.

  In the space of that moment she realized that something had surfaced in him, emotions a half century of striving and assimilation had put off. “It was as if a flap flew open and he was skinless,” Kathy wrote me later. “Here were the markers of a civilization laid bare, ghostly in their sadness and wastefulness­—­something once there, now ruined. He was accessing feelings he never allowed me to see.”

  At Ephesus, Niko had encountered “oozing rubble” and “thick porridge,” visions of the Darmstadt he described in that letter to his father just after the war. A memory socked away, unlocked.

  We had seen this from him before—some suddenly surfaced emotion catching us unawares. It might be triggered by the particular slant of late-afternoon sunlight or the smell of linden blossom or the first few bars of the slow movement of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major. I’ve come to believe that each of these moments thrived in a kind of emotional negative space. The more beautiful the sensation at hand, the more starkly it threw the offsetting memory into relief. And with us he was scrupulous about sharing only the beauty.

  Born during an air raid in 1944, my cousin Jon is Maria’s eldest child and the family genealogist and archivist. I take the high-speed train to Munich, where he lives, to avail myself of his historical thoroughness.

  Almost thirteen years older than me, Jon got to know our grandmother Elisabeth as I never did. Perhaps the most emotionally disorienting event in her life took place on a mid-July day in 1921, exactly one week after she gave birth to my father. It was then, on the twenty-second birthday of her younger sister Annemarie, that Annemarie killed herself. To do so she used the military pistol of her husband, Jesko von Puttkamer, Kurt’s friend from World War I, with whom, as her letters and diaries make achingly clear, Elisabeth had fallen in love.

  If there’s another clan irretrievably tangled up in ours, it’s the Puttkamers of eastern Pomerania. You’ll recall that, in 1926, Jesko von Puttkamer’s sister, another Annemarie, gave birth to Kurt’s illegitimate son, my father’s half brother Enoch Crome. But it’s Jesko himself, pictured here, who nips in and out of the family story like some Zelig from beyond the Oder: as a fellow officer in Kurt’s artillery regiment; as an in-law upon marriage to Elisabeth’s suicidal sister; and, in a final act during the late sixties, as my grandmother’s companion.