Jesko came from an old Junker family with landholdings near the town of Stolp. He had been a difficult adolescent. Twice he ran away with money stolen from his parents. At fifteen he was sent to a youth home, and three years later his secondary school cited a “lack of moral maturity” in refusing to grant him a leaving certificate. Only with the help of private tutors did Jesko earn his Abitur, after which he spent three years at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, where he studied voice, piano, and violin, and—fatefully, I’ll learn—met the Danish conductor and composer Fritz Crome. When war broke out in August 1914, Jesko was sent to the Western Front with Kurt.

  Striking and cultivated, Jesko charmed men and women alike. On his birthday in March 1915, Kurt wrote Elisabeth about “the devilish guy” in his unit who had taken note of Kurt’s birthdate while leafing through personnel files: “Right after breakfast he appeared in my office to present me, as if I were some prima donna, a huge, gorgeous bouquet of orchids.”

  Elisabeth would come to know those charms well. The following month, during a rendezvous with Kurt in Kassel while his unit spent a week there, she met Jesko for the first time. Her diary records her tumbling emotions over the following days, from “he’s a very handsome guy and frightfully snobbish” to “he’s very musical” to regret that Jesko hadn’t handed over to her a bouquet of yellow roses before returning to the front.

  Later that year, with Jesko set to embark on leave from their unit’s posting in Macedonia, Kurt urged him to stop off in Vienna to see Karl Kraus, whom Kurt was then trying to land as an author. Kurt recalled that mission years later:

  Kraus was not the sort of person to whom one casually sent friends and acquaintances. Not until Jesko had left did I realize that my very tall friend would doubtless make Kraus, who was quite short, feel particularly dwarf-like and irritable, a not uncommon phenomenon; in any event, I awaited the outcome of my rather daring initiative with some trepidation.

  My fears were groundless. As I soon learned, Kraus gave my friend Puttkamer a warm welcome and apparently took an immediate liking to this young man whose purity of vision and intellectual gifts were accompanied by equally extraordinary good looks. On his return from Vienna, Puttkamer reported that he had been fascinated and swept away by Kraus’ personality, artful conversation, and the depth and richness of his mind, which could shift with the speed of lightning from deadly satire to the most affable good humor, and from there to a display of aphoristic verbal fireworks.

  In early 1917 Jesko left the front lines after suffering what Kurt described as “a severe nervous breakdown.” He nonetheless soon began courting Elisabeth’s nineteen-year-old sister Annemarie, and in the fall of 1918 the two became engaged. “Everyone’s destiny gets fulfilled, each is God’s to decide, but it is up to us to keep ourselves from being sidetracked by pursuing someone else’s,” Elisabeth wrote her mother, not even half-cryptically. “I am now an old woman”—she was twenty-eight—“but I’ve had my share of luck and wish Annemarie only the greatest happiness with the husband-to-be she loves so much.”

  On February 6, 1919, Annemarie and Jesko, shown here in their engagement photograph, were married. The newlyweds settled in Bonn, where Jesko began to study mathematics at the university as he picked his way back to health. In the meantime Annemarie was dealing with her own difficulties.

  My father hardly shared a word with me about the events of July 14, 1921, but they have nonetheless come down from others through the years. About Annemarie demanding to know of her husband if he truly loved her. About Jesko’s apparently obtuse or too-honest reply. (Whether that reply implicated her sister, we don’t know.) The death certificate indicates that Annemarie shot herself sometime between 10:15 and 11:00 p.m. in their apartment on Buschstrasse. It does not stipulate what Maria told me—that Jesko sat at the end of their bed, watching as she pulled his pistol from beneath a pillow.

  A week later—the day after her sister’s burial—Elisabeth was rushed to the clinic with those postpartum complications from my father’s birth.

  Over many ensuing months, Elisabeth; her mother, Clara; and Jesko’s mother, Margarethe, wrote one another, despairing over the tragedy and Jesko’s depression and aimlessness. Margarethe von Puttkamer implored my grandmother. “Dearest Elisabeth, help poor Jesko!” she wrote. “Be to him a sister, a girlfriend, a mother, all he needs.” The following summer Elisabeth and Jesko spent time together in Berg, on Bavaria’s Starnberger See. Forty-three years later my grandmother would recall those days in a letter to him: “Oh, how vivid the memory of 1922 still is! The two of us in a boat, you in your zip-neck sweater, I in a violet linen dress, finally released from cruel reality, abandoning ourselves to the wind, the water, and our love.”

  But by the summer of 1923, Jesko had gone incommunicado. It took months for my ancestors to sort out the truth. He had apparently fallen in with a married couple, the Fockes, whose interest in him was twofold—as someone who could supply capital for some sort of enterprise and, at least on her part, as a love interest. He had liquidated his possessions, including everything from the Bonn apartment he and his late wife briefly shared, turning the proceeds over to these business partners. For six months he lived with the Fockes in Wiesbaden’s Nassauerhof Hotel, until they realized he had no further money to bring to the business.

  A family from Venezuela, the Guevaras, happened to be staying at the Nassauerhof too. As Jesko fell out with the Fockes, the Guevaras’ daughter Theodora, twenty-nine and single, fell hard for Jesko. The two married the following May, settling in Maracaibo, where Jesko busied himself as a merchant. In 1929 they moved to the United States, where he took a job with Vacuum Oil. By 1930 they had returned to Germany, to Hamburg—but then the Jesko trail goes cold in our family’s papers.

  His place in my grandmother’s life would not pick up again for more than thirty years. In November 1963, Elisabeth made a note in her diary: “Letter from Nino [Jesko] . . . ! Unaware of Kurt’s death. No return address. Il pleut dans mon coeur / comme il pleut sur la ville.”

  Another eighteen months passed, until, on May 31, 1965, Annemarie von Puttkamer phoned my grandmother with news that her brother would be arriving in Munich that evening.

  Two days later he and Elisabeth spent six hours together. “Looks horrible, but otherwise he’s the same,” she wrote in her diary. “Endless conversation. I am happy.”

  Of their reunion, Jesko told his sister, “It was wonderful.”

  Jesko, it turned out, was still married. “Theo wants to hold on to you at any cost and keep you at her disposal,” my grandmother wrote him that fall, when he seems to have landed back in the Americas. “Come on over the big ocean to me, she cannot do anything more than file for divorce, as we will—after all we’ve been through over the years—get through all this together. For now I miss you, you, my other self, every hour without you is a wasted one.”

  Not three weeks later she wrote him again.

  You must have the strength to tell [Theodora] to her face that you no longer want to share a life with her, that you want to be completely free for the rest of your earthly life. . . . Then she can respond as she sees fit: to keep her calm or file for divorce.

  I’m compelled to think back on my own situation. . . . Kurt told me that he “could no longer live in a marriage” (he had not lived in such a thing for a long time). Well, I let him go without any drama, just great sadness—after all I had two children and at the beginning of that year had just lost a third. I would have continued living alone with my children, but in 1930 Hans Albrecht burst into my life, so I divorced Kurt in January 1931. Of course, Kurt took the blame. . . .

  Let’s not waste any more time. . . . We are determined to be together before God and humanity.

  In April 1966, Jesko left for Southampton on an Australian steamer, then traveled onward by train to Munich. He was in failing health, but he had made his decision. “A little over a year ago I wouldn’t have believed, this close to the end of one’s life, one could experience a state of grace as has been granted me now,” he would write Maria several months later. “All the more so because it fulfills destinies I’ve been aware of for fifty years, and which, after many years of greater and ever more hopeless divergence, converge after all.”

  Jesko and Elisabeth visited each other in their respective Munich apartments. They talked about people and places known to them both, filling in the years. When they felt up to it, they would go to the opera or for walks in the countryside. By September 1967 they had moved to a retirement home in Diessen, on Bavaria’s Ammersee, into adjacent apartments, and for nearly two and a half years lived side by side.

  I do remember my father mentioning in passing that one of my grandmother’s sisters had taken her life. But he told me nothing of how she did so or why she might have, or anything about her husband, his uncle Jesko, much less of his mother’s later relationship with him. Niko left unmentioned much of the past, omissions that extended well beyond matters pertaining to the war and the Third Reich.

  Not long after this photograph was taken, Elisabeth died, in February 1970, in Munich, where she was being treated for cancer. Jesko left a note by the urn at her cremation. “In this life we had to wait so long for each other,” it read. “Now you won’t have to wait too much longer. I’ll follow you soon.”

  Alongside the note he placed a bouquet of yellow roses.

  One morning the following June my cousin Jon went to Diessen to clear out our grandmother’s apartment. He looked in on Jesko next door and, finding him in extremis, summoned a doctor. Jesko died that afternoon. Our family honored his wish to be buried alongside my grandmother in Darmstadt’s Alter Friedhof.

  The Jesko saga may have all the earmarks of an Old World tabloid tale, but it helps explain why my ancestors came to be who they were. The most striking thing I learn from Jon is how many emotional blows my father’s mother absorbed during her lifetime. With one late-in-life exception, those days in Leipzig before World War I—young, in love, buoyed by the social whirl—were as good as life got. After Versailles came her sister’s suicide, the Weimar hyperinflation, and Kurt’s funk and infidelities. Then the stillbirth, the sudden death of her mother, and the divorce, all at essentially the same time, as Germany was about to go mad. Cancer took Dr. Albrecht in 1944, after they’d had barely a dozen years together, and during the final months of the war Munich became a charnel house. This all happened before my father turned twenty-four, and Niko witnessed much of it up close.

  Elisabeth’s grip on privilege, her reluctance to adapt, and her flirtation with Christian Science all begin to make more sense. So do my father’s gallantry toward women and his aversion to private complications.

  Sixteen

  Shallow Draft

  Niko and Alex, 1996

  As my father pushed through his seventies, I was closing in on forty. We continued to honor an unspoken understanding that we would look forward, not back—or so we did until a brief stretch during the summer of 1996. A year earlier Niko had taken that Mediterranean cruise with my sister. Now it would be my turn to spend a week with him, this time floating down the Danube. That’s when I pulled from him the fullest accounting of his time in the war. Only later did it occur to me that it might be symbolic that our cruise began in Nuremberg.

  As a “mighty liquid belt that held Europe’s trousers up,” the Danube makes its way through ten countries between the Black Forest and the Black Sea. It’s a fluvial misdirection, the only major river in Europe to flow west to east, along whose banks “different peoples meet and mingle and crossbreed,” writes the Italian academic Claudio Magris, in contrast to the Rhine, “mythical custodian of the purity of the race.” Its transnationalism has made the Danube a witness to serial historical trauma, from the Napoleonic Wars, through both world wars, to the fall of the Iron Curtain and the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia. But whenever the guns fell silent, the river reverted to its role as artery of life. Boatmen trafficked in wine and salt, ore and charcoal, lumber and lime. Centuries before, these waters carried Crusaders to the Middle East; now the cargo tended to be human once more, elderly tourists in narrow cruise ships like ours.

  The Danube-Main-Rhine Canal took us to Kelheim to join Dame Donau herself. We hadn’t yet left Germany when Niko pointed out a spot on the shoreline where he had camped on a trip during his boarding school days. On a hilltop a few kilometers into Austria we picked out Schloss Rannariedl, the castle we visited as a family in 1964, when Niko’s cousin Lukas lived there with his wife, Herta. Soon came the hillside apricot orchards of the Wachau, and the village renowned for the Venus of Willendorf, the thirty-thousand-year-old stone pageant queen unearthed there in 1908. At the edge of the Vienna Woods we passed Kierling, site of the sanatorium where Kafka died while correcting proofs of “A Hunger Artist,” a perfectionist attending to the perfectionist of his own making.

  To cruise the Danube is to run a gauntlet of reminders of the Third Reich, and we took note of these too. The Alpine snowmelt flowing through the Inn doubled the river’s size in Passau, where Hitler lived as a child. Passauers would prefer that visitors instead take note of its church organ, the world’s largest, and overlook that not ten years earlier many residents had shunned, threatened, and ultimately hounded from town one of their own, a young woman who wanted to research the city’s history under the Nazis. Linz is where the Führer-to-be spent his adolescence and planned to retire with Eva Braun after vouchsafing his Thousand-­Year Reich to some successor. Just short of Vienna came Mauthausen, home to the concentration camp that specialized in killing not by gas or gun or starvation but by working inmates to death.

  I recount this travelogue for a reason. Like the boat we had boarded, our draft was not deep, my father’s and mine. It was easier to take up safe subjects in lazy, riverine fashion. Better to share trivia, like how the river gave German its longest word, the insuperable barge convoy that is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitänsmützenabzeichen—the badge on the cap of a captain of the Danube Steamship Company. Or ponder the paradoxes of Hungarian, in which szia (pronounced “see ya”) means “hello,” and hallo can mean “see ya.” Or assign racy biographies to fellow passengers, such as the timorous British couple from the Midlands or the crisply dressed Frenchman with a newspaper always wedged under one arm. Or remark on the signs in the shop windows of Bratislava—unlikely collocations like BALKAN HOLIDAYS and SLOVAKIA STYLE. Or behold how the Human Flowchart preprogrammed his Hewlett-Packard calculator with the exchange rates for currencies of three of the countries we would sail through. Alone with Niko on the observation deck or back in our cabin, I didn’t do anything so grand as interrogate him. Instead I would throw out a subject, and he would pull things from the past, and while writing them down I hoped the lull in conversation might induce him to say more. For the most part that’s how he told me what he told me, and that’s as far as my asking went.

  My father dredged up his earliest childhood memory. It came from a family vacation on the North Sea island of Sylt, where someone took the picture below of him on top of a washed-up naval mine casing. In whatever hotel room his family was staying, the finials of the poster bed were rounded brass, and Niko could still recall his distorted reflection in one of them. “In the background I could see through the window the blue sky beyond,” he said. “And the little person inside would move. I was fascinated. A silly little thing, but it sticks. I must have been . . . about five?”

  I learned that an episode from my own childhood—that snowballing adventure while “making the precinct scene”—echoed one from my father’s youth. During the early thirties a factory on the Gulf of Saint-Tropez manufactured steel cable for submarines and ships. The owner, a Monsieur Gramont, was subsidized handsomely by the French government to supply the military if war were to break out, and with hostilities still some years off, life was good. One day, out for a walk, Niko, Maria, and Helen were eating grapes plucked from vines along the roadside and heedlessly spitting out the skins and seeds. That’s when one of Niko’s expectorations landed on the windshield of a fancy car just then rolling by, with Monsieur Gramont at the wheel.

  The Frenchman slammed on the brakes and demanded an explanation. “Just wait until this boy sees his father,” Helen told him, quickly adding an offer to clean the windshield. As soon as Monsieur Gramont drove off, satisfied, the three laughed, co-conspirators as my father and I would be on a winter’s night years later.

  Back in the cabin one afternoon, Niko told me about a frequent childhood playmate before the Nazis came to power, his mother’s goddaughter Renée-Marie Hausenstein.

  “Will you marry me?” she asked him one day.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, later on you’ll want to.” In German: Später willst du denn doch. Renée-Marie’s hard, alliterative d’s conveyed an accusatory certainty.

  Kurt had published her father, Wilhelm Hausenstein, an art critic and cultural historian. Renée-Marie’s Belgian mother, Margot, whose first husband had been killed in Flanders during World War I, was Jewish. For years the Hausensteins generously supported Munich’s Circus Krone, for which Margot once nursed an elephant with a broken ankle back to health. Some fifteen years after that veterinary duty, she took Niko and Renée-Marie to the circus and brought them backstage to meet the same elephant. “It raised its foot and lifted its trunk and made a trumpeting sound,” Niko told me. “They never forget.”

  As my father shared this story, Margot was still alive, living in Miami with Renée-Marie, who escaped to Brazil in 1941 after marrying not my father but, much more usefully, a young German engineer of Brazilian descent. In 1946 she made it to Florida; her parents lived out the war in the Bavarian village of Tutzing, sometimes under house arrest, sometimes in hiding. Niko believed the Nazis spared Margot in part because she was foreign-born and in part because of the prominence of her Gentile husband—even though Wilhelm was no friend of the regime, having been fired as literary editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung after refusing Goebbels’s demand to purge one of his books of all references to Jews. In fact, I would later learn, Margot survived because she burned the summons to report to Munich that would have led to the fate of her brother, who was murdered in the camps. By the time she received a follow-up order she paid no price for ignoring it, because the Third Reich was disintegrating.