I’m moved to set Stern’s observation alongside what Helen wrote Maria in August 1946, shortly after she and Kurt became American citizens.

  It is a very strange feeling to have status in the world once more, to belong somewhere, and to enjoy protection, after having been an exile and an alien for so long. If one lives long enough, the wheel has time to turn, and fortune and misfortune invert themselves. It seems that just yesterday we were living in France in fear of our lives and completely at the mercy of our hosts. And now to be a citizen of what the oath-taking judge called “the mightiest nation on earth,” with even an atom bomb or two to back you up—I can’t quite get used to “the last shall be first.” This great, strange country, still so much in the making, showed its best face the day I was sworn in.

  But when the wheel next turns, it could do so in the devil’s own direction. That’s why we put our shoulder to it. So on Election Day morning, in that spirit—infused in me by the lives of Kurt and Niko, lifted by the harmonizing voices of Helen and Maria and Elisabeth—I headed off to the white clapboard town hall in our village in Vermont. To be a citizen. To act on my stake in a country “still so much in the making.” To engage the task before us.

  My vote would be consonant with a forty-seat swing to the Democrats in the House of Representatives and the repudiation of a president who had made the midterm campaign a referendum on immigration and asylum seekers. Some 54 percent of voters surveyed that day agreed that “immigrants strengthen our country.” This figure wasn’t remotely high enough, but it outstripped by twenty points the number who disagreed, and came despite nearly two years of anti-immigrant hysteria and lies from the White House and its propagandists.

  Americans have long shared a consensus that we don’t indulge in Nazi analogies to describe our own domestic circumstances. To do so diminishes the singular horror of the Third Reich, and besides, Americans have good reason to consider our institutions more durable than those of Weimar Germany. Of course, Nixon and his Watergate henchmen weren’t just like the Gestapo. But my father held America to a higher standard, and that’s why he regarded the Saturday Night Massacre as a moment of peril for his adopted country.

  From across the ocean I had recognized the parallels, just as my father would have. At the beginning of our time in Berlin, the white supremacists brandishing torches in Charlottesville didn’t constitute some Sturmabteilung formally reporting to the White House, and refugees legally seeking asylum at the border were only detained and deported, not sent to camps. But Trump soon began to give a wink and a nod to followers spoiling for a fight. And agents of Customs and Border Protection now warehoused would-be asylees in flight from violence, even separating children from their parents—and to make that easier, sometimes telling families that a child needed to be taken away “for a bath.” To be sure, this wasn’t comparable to what the Nazis began to do in 1933. But by the light of American norms, it was unprecedented and took place under cover of falsehoods, insults, stunts, and gaslighting from the president and some of his supporters that echoed darker times. Kafka died before the Nazis came to power, but he knew. “Evil,” he wrote, “is whatever distracts.”

  Several weeks after the midterms I showed up for an appointment at the German consulate in Boston. I came to invoke Article 116 of the Grundgesetz, the Federal Republic’s basic law. It provides for German citizenship to anyone stripped of it by the Third Reich for religious or political reasons, as well as to two generations of their descendants.

  A consular official named Herr Brosse summoned me to his window, where I presented documents that detail much of what I’ve recounted here. They included a scholarly investigation of the Kurt Wolff file in the archives of the Emergency Rescue Committee; Kurt’s letter to Varian Fry pleading for a visa; his diary entry from the day after the Reichstag burned; and his unavailing letters from Tuscany during the late thirties, petitioning the Nazi bureaucracy to renew his passport.

  Herr Brosse inspected them all, but he was left unmoved. “Citizenship matters would run first through your father,” he said. Because my immediate forebear never had his German citizenship taken away—Niko held a valid passport of the Federal Republic until the late fifties—Article 116 did not, he explained, apply to me.

  And then through the Plexiglas I could see that something had caught Herr Brosse’s eye.

  He fingered my birth certificate, marked February 3, 1957.

  He set it alongside my father’s US naturalization certificate, dated December 16, 1957.

  “You are German,” he said, looking up at me.

  I hadn’t realized the implication of those two dates.

  “And my children?” I asked.

  “You have children?”

  “Two.”

  “They were born to a German. So they are German too.”

  “And this in no way would affect my US citizenship or theirs?”

  “If you were all born in the United States, no.”

  It would take more than a year for the paperwork to make its way from Boston and reach the front of the queue at the Bundesverwaltungsamt in Cologne, where some bureaucrat might in any case pick nits with Herr Brosse’s interpretation. But I stepped out into the bright sunshine of Copley Plaza that morning on light feet. This development wouldn’t wind back the clock to February 27, 1933, before the Reichstag fire and Kurt’s flight. But because my father’s particulars, not my grandfather’s, could deliver me a German passport, it seemed to acknowledge the Third Reich’s expropriation of his youth. And it cinched tight a tie that now felt immediate and real.

  To embrace my German roots was also a way to signal that, for the moment, Germany is doing a better job of being American than America is. To hold a passport of both countries would be a symbolic way of urging the best of each to regard the other as example. As a product of both, a student of both, invested in both, I recognize that not only Germans and Americans share in the stakes of how we take up what Kurt called “the same task before us.” To move beyond the brutal history of the twentieth century is work that citizens the world over are called to do.

  Acknowledgments and Sources

  This book is an amalgam of history, journalism, and memoir, folded around two biographical chronologies I’ve tried to launch toward some vanishing point of understanding. This is nonetheless not my memoir, nor an attempt to adjudicate versions of history. It’s rather a story I felt called to tell in the form of a journey I took—a journey put off for years and made urgent by the headlines. Sometimes the thread of that story sat in plain sight. Sometimes I benefited from a paradox: rather than further shrouding the past, the passage of time can bring events into sharper focus, as archives place more and more material online and posterity exposes the trivial for what it is, allowing significant moments to stand out.

  For years I’d collected random things family members shared with me. I began to take notes in earnest sometime in the mid-nineties and during several concentrated years between 2017 and 2020 called on relatives in Europe and the United States to fix dates, supply details, and help find supporting material. Again and again I said grace that I come from a long line of writers and pack rats—they kept diaries, wrote reminiscences, hoarded records, and preserved letters—and that so much survived upheaval and relocation. My grandmother kept each letter her son sent home from the front, returning it to the envelope in which it came, often with photographs he had enclosed with his requests for more film. That parade of postmarks and Feldpost numbers maps his movements as a soldier of the Reich, and before he died my father translated and annotated every letter. I’m also grateful to the authors of dozens of books that provided context, the many memorials and research centers dedicated to the Nazi era, and the generous academics, archivists, and scholars who spoke to me. Merck KGaA, the old family business in Darmstadt, maintains a staff of historians who threw open their archives and responded unflinchingly to my queries. As much as Germans reflexively trimmed or looked away during the first decades of the postwar, it’s a ritual of twenty-first-century Germany to let the chips of National Socialism fall where they may.

  “It’s the only immortality I know, living on in the thoughts of others.” So my aunt Maria Wolff Stadelmayer told me—that, and so many things besides. Nor could I have told this story without two other women close to Kurt and Niko, my grandmother Elisabeth Merck Albrecht and step-grandmother Helen Mosel Wolff. Their voices underscore how much this narrative, despite its patrilineal spine, owes the women of our family. It’s a truism borne out to me repeatedly over years of writing about sports figures, many of them alpha males reluctant to reveal their vulnerabilities: all praise to the mothers and sisters and wives who dress the skinned knees, keep the scrapbooks, vividly recall the failures, and thus better sense the full arc of a story.

  My half-uncle, Kurt and Helen’s son, Christian Wolff, let me rummage through boxes of family papers and patiently answered questions, revisiting his fractured childhood as best he could. My first cousin, Maria’s son, Jon Baumhauer, curates the family archives with a fastidiousness and good faith that leaves the rest of us in awe. Marion Detjen, Helen Wolff’s grandniece, is an academic who brings scrupulous care to all her areas of work, including literary history. Each supplied more elaboration and context than I could have hoped for.

  I leaned heavily on kin beyond those three. It’s easiest to tell a family story with family assistance, and in Europe support came in the form of hospitality as much as lent ears and good memories. Thanks especially to Maria’s daughters, Christiane Clemm and Sibylla Schliep, and to Adelheid Baumhauer, Niko Merck, and Ute Frings-Merck, for repeatedly opening their hearts and homes. I’m also grateful to other Baumhauers (Philipp, Luise, Elisabeth, Johannes, Caroline, Matthias, and Laura), Clemms (Christoph, Emanuel, and Raphael), Mercks (Jonja and Lilly), Millers (Norbert and Gabi), and Schlieps (Gregor, Charlie, Niko, and the late Peter), as well as to Harald Binder, Annemarie Crome, Stephan Detjen, Martin Gillan, and Hanne Helfrich, for Gemütlichkeit and then some. It was a gift to be able to spend a year in their company. Stateside, my stalwarts included Katherine Wolff, Steve D’Amato, Hope (Holly) Wolff, Nicholas (Tico) Wolff, Dena Wilkie, and the late Ann James, as well as those who made it to Kreuzberg: Ethan Wolff-Mann, Tamsen Wolff, Charles Ireland, Tristram Wolff, Corey Byrnes, and Sadie James.

  At archives on both sides of the Atlantic, I relied on the professionals who know their collections so well. In Germany, they included Nikola Herweg and Dörthe Perlenfein at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach; Sabine Gresens at the Bundesarchiv in Berlin-Lichterfelde; Monika Haidt-Nass and Katja Schmalholz at the Stadtarchiv in Karlsruhe; Sabine ­Bernschneider-Rief and Peter Conradi at the Merck Corporate History Archive in Darmstadt; Lupold von Lehsten and Volkhard Huth at the Institut für Personengeschichte in Bens­heim; and Claudia Heinreich at the Deutsche Dienststelle (Wehr­machtauskunftstelle) in Berlin-Reineckendorf. In the United States, I was welcomed by Erin Farley, collections manager for Connecticut Landmarks, and site administrator Peg Shimer to the Bellamy-­Ferriday House in Bethlehem; by Jessica Aldi, Ellen Doon, John Monahan, and Adrienne Sharpe to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library; and by the collections staff to Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  With David Meola, professor of history and director of the Jewish and Holocaust Studies Program at the University of South Alabama, I discovered two happy coincidences—that my ancestors, the von Habers of Baden, are a focus of his academic work; and that one of his research trips to Karlsruhe fell during my year in Germany. I’m particularly grateful for his time and insights.

  Fiction helped inform my feel for the times and places I’ve tried to evoke in these pages, so it’s worth highlighting several historical novels cited in the bibliography that follows. Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw captures the southern France where on-the-lam Germans like Kurt and Helen holed up during the thirties. Anna Seghers’s Transit and Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio re-create the occupied Marseille in which Varian Fry and the Vichy French sparred with each other. Lara Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept conveys the intersection of fifties culture and Cold War geopolitics in which Doctor Zhivago landed. Martha Hall Kelly’s Lilac Girls has introduced my ancestor Caroline Ferriday to countless readers. And there’s my ur-text, Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries. “This seems to be the only appropriate way to speak and think . . . in the interplay of generations and across two continents,” Hannah Arendt wrote Johnson after reading a draft of his opus. The book served as inspiration not just because of its time-shifting, venue-switching daybook structure but also because the author signed for me what I would come to regard as a kind of invitation to tackle this project—a copy of an interim edition of Anniversaries that Helen published in translation in 1974, almost a decade before Johnson completed the final installment of a work that would ultimately run more than seventeen hundred pages. With his invention of Marie Cresspahl, the inquisitive ten-year-old of that novel, Johnson nods both forward to the W. G. Sebald epigraph that opens this book and back at a leitmotif in the work of Günter Grass—children asking questions of their elders. In Anniversaries the author also sounds a cautionary note I tried to keep in mind while looking back. “The moment of recall,” he wrote, “the fact of bringing it into the present, corrodes both at once: past memory and present view.” (Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, vol. 1, trans. Damion Searls [New York: New York Review Books, 2019], 446.)

  In most cases, information of oral provenance—as well as material drawn from unpublished or privately circulated family letters, diaries, appointment books, essays, stories, speeches, monographs, genealogies, and reminiscences—goes unattributed in the text. Everything else comes with a corresponding endnote. If an endnote indicates a published English-language version of a German or French source, I used that translation from the original. Otherwise translations are mine.

  The Israeli writer Etgar Keret likes to say that translators are the ninjas of the literary world: if you notice them, they’re lousy at their job. The bibliography name-checks no fewer than eight winners of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, established by the Goethe Institute shortly after Helen’s death to recognize masters of rendering German into English. To Susan Bernofsky, Shelley Frisch, Michael Hofmann, Damion Searls, and Krishna Winston, as well as the late Anthea Bell, Margot Bettauer Dembo, and Michael Henry Heim, herzlichen Dank and huge thanks for all that they’ve done or do.

  For assistance with my own translations I’m grateful for the resourcefulness, patience, and imagination of Deborah Cohen of Sprachwerk in Kreuzberg. And I thank Christina Ilgner of the School of German at Middlebury College for her tenacity in riddling out the handwriting of several of my ancestors and their correspondents.

  To Bettina Matthias, director of Middlebury’s School of German, as well as Middlebury Language Schools administrators Stephen Snyder and Beth Karnes Keefe, a special thanks for facilitating my matriculation as a day student for several weeks during the summer of 2017 in advance of our relocation to Berlin. Isabel Meusen, Alexis Smith, Sören Steding, and Friederike Tebben all helped scrape rust off my German.

  These pages surely contain errors, and not simply because I relied on memories—those of others as well as my own. For any mistakes I take full responsibility; that there aren’t more is to the credit of Amy Hughes and Hilary McClellen, who expertly copyedited and fact-checked the manuscript, respectively.

  Andrew Blauner, my agent, midwifed this project from start to finish. On the front end he helped persuade the Federal Republic to grant our family a year’s residence permit. On the back end he found a home for the book at Grove Atlantic, where I’ve been in the sure hands of Julia Berner-Tobin, Emily Burns, Salvatore Destro, Amy Hundley, Gretchen Mergenthaler, Erica Nuñez, Elisabeth Ruge, Deb Seager, Sara Vitale, the polyglot Peter Blackstock, and the Kurt Wolff of latter-day Manhattan, Morgan Entrekin. Every manuscript, my grandfather once said, “is an adventure when it arrives, one that makes my heart beat faster.” After surviving palpitations occasioned by mine, Morgan and Peter supplied the notes that made for a better book.

  At Merck Darmstadt—or Merck KGaA, to distinguish it from its stateside cousin—I thank Frank Stangenberg-Haverkamp and Cornelia Nitsch, who keep me connected to the family firm. Thanks also to supportive friends we made in Berlin, including Joshua Hammer and Cordula Krämer; Bill and Laurel Martin; the Berlin Brandenburg International School community; Vanessa’s crew at Give Something Back to Berlin’s Open Art Shelter; Christine Gerkrath, who helped settle us into the Bergmannkiez; and Jörg Hecker, Christian Schulze Aquack, Moritz Micalef, and all the hospitable Mitarbeiter at the AHA Factory in Kreuzberg. From the beginning, Craig Neff, Thomas Powers, and Carol Rigolot championed my efforts to get to Germany. Those beyond my family who read drafts and offered invaluable feedback include Robert Cohen, Andreas Kossert, and Amy Trubek. And I was buoyed at one time or another by the support of Rob Alberts, Bruce Anderson, Kelli Anderson, Alex Belth, David Brenner, Bill Burger, Jim Callahan, Michael Collier, Maria Considine, Nicholas Dawidoff, Richard Deitsch, Luzi Dressler, Rainer Dressler, Dick Friedman, Philip Glouchevitch, Jack Goodman, Will Goodman, Céline Gounder, Susan Greenberg, Diane Hare, Peter Hare, Carrie Herzog, Teresa Hyndman, Pico Iyer, Woody Jackson, Claude Johnson, Rachael Joo, Greg Kelly, Alden King, Jerry Kirshenbaum, Ernest Kolowrat, Lloyd Komesar, Lindsay Krasnoff, Alex Laskaris, Tim Layden, Franz Lidz, Maggie Lidz, Karl Lindholm, Eva Mantell, Andrew Maraniss, Jack McCallum, Jamie McCallum, Gabe Miller, Brett Millier, Anette Neff, the late Merrell Noden, Todd Purdum, Michael Roy, Steve Rushin, Pierre Sauvage, David Shields, Timothy Snyder, Tim Spears, Mike Unger, Edward Vasquez, Will Voigt, Grant Wahl, Barbara Weidle, Stefan Weidle, Jon Wertheim, and Doug Wilhelm.