But the story only begins here. The world into which this fully formed young man was launched would not be kind to Bildungsbürger who shunned the grubbiness of politics. For Germans content to lose themselves in books and art and music, history held out consequences—and left clues to what might be in store.

  It’s impossible to fully understand my family without excavating a strange and historically significant series of events that took place in Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden in Germany’s southwest, during the first half of the nineteenth century.

  Kurt Wolff’s great-great-grandfather Salomon von Haber, pictured overleaf, served three grand dukes of Baden, first as an independent financier and, beginning in 1811, as banker for the grand duchy. By the early nineteenth century, Baden had developed extensive material needs, and Salomon knew the levers to pull to pay for them. If the state needed tack for cavalry horses or satin for ladies’ dresses, “court Jews” called on trusted co-religionists around Europe to move gold or float loans. At the same time, Salomon was active in Karlsruhe’s Jewish community, advocating for such reforms as a modernized liturgy and worship in German rather than Hebrew. With Grand Duke Louis I taking his cues from the Habsburgs’ Edict of Toleration, my ancestor the Hofbankier seemed safe and content in his identity as both a member of the elite and a practicing German Jew.

  But in 1819 antisemitic riots broke out among university students in the Bavarian city of Würzburg and soon spread across Germany. Mobs of citizens, many of them members of the educated middle class, chanted Hep, hep, Jude verreck! (Death to the Jews!) as they trashed shops and homes and chased Jewish citizens into the countryside. In Baden, even the grand duke’s court banker wasn’t safe. On the night of August 27, a mob gathered outside the Haber palace, Salomon’s home across Markt­platz from Karlsruhe’s main synagogue, pelting it with rocks and chanting anti-Jewish slogans. Escorted by a detachment of bodyguards supplied by the grand duke, Salomon fled to safety in the town of Steinach, sixty miles south.

  A Jewish-born Berliner named Ludwig Robert, a playwright and recent convert to Christianity who happened to be in Karlsruhe visiting his fiancée, witnessed the riot and its aftermath: troops on horseback patrolling rubble-strewn streets; placards that read DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO THE JEWS; townspeople not just laughing at the spectacle but grumbling that the commandant had shut down the city’s taverns to quell the unrest. This was antisemitism as festival. The emancipation of Jews within the German Confederation, decreed by Prussia seven years earlier, meant little, a disgusted Robert wrote to his sister in Berlin: “How corrupt people really are and how inadequate their sense of law and justice—not to mention their love of humanity—is clear from the fact that there was no indignation expressed at these incidents, not even in the official papers.”

  It took days to restore order, which came only after the grand duke sent cannons into the streets. In place of incendiary posters, new ones appeared: EMPERORS, KINGS, DUKES, BEGGARS, CATHOLICS, AND JEWS ARE ALL HUMAN AND AS SUCH OUR EQUALS. In a carriage pulled by six horses, Louis I personally escorted Salomon back from Steinach before making a show of solidarity by temporarily moving into the Haber palace.

  Louis I so appreciated Haber’s work on behalf of the grand duchy that in 1829, a year before his own death and two years before Salomon’s, he bestowed on him the title that permitted the family to use the noble “von.” The von Habers had done much to earn the honor. They had developed Baden’s three largest industrial sites—a sugar factory, a cotton mill, and a machine works that built railway locomotives. After Salomon’s death, two of his sons, Louis and Jourdan, took charge of those enterprises, and Louis assumed his father’s role as court banker.

  Even as these two von Haber sons remained Jewish, their older brother, Model (Moritz) von Haber, pictured here, had long since converted. In 1819, at twenty-two, he married the daughter of a Parisian banker in a Catholic ceremony and over the following two decades lived a life of social prominence in Paris and London. With the help of agents around the continent, Moritz tended to a portfolio of interests, including mining enterprises in France and Portugal. He also handled the financial affairs of both the French king Charles X and Don Carlos, the Bourbon pretender to the Spanish throne.

  Sometime in the late 1830s, Moritz had a run-in that touched off what would come to be known throughout Europe as the Haber Affair. The story goes that an English officer named George Hawkins was carrying documents from Spain to England when French authorities with Carlist sympathies detained him. Hawkins suspected Moritz of engineering his arrest and challenged him to a duel. Insisting that the Englishman lacked any standing to do so, Moritz sloughed Hawkins off.

  Around the same time, after two decades of consorting with nobility around Europe, Moritz returned to Karlsruhe with the swagger of a man of the world. Thanks to the marriages of his brothers Louis and Jourdan, the prodigal son now had connections to the Rothschild banking family, and he took to describing himself as “a man of private means.” Moritz became a regular at the court of Sophie, the Swedish-born grand duchess of Baden, who shared his worldly outlook and high-spirited nature. Soon gossips had Moritz trysting with the grand duchess at Schloss Favorite, the royal hunting lodge south of the city, and eventually pegged him as father of her youngest daughter, Princess Cäcilie. Officers and courtiers around the ducal palace—to say nothing of Sophie’s husband, Leopold, Louis I’s son and the new grand duke—disapproved of this interloper and the loose talk he was touching off.

  At one point Moritz’s old nemesis George Hawkins turned up in Karlsruhe looking for him. Hawkins died before he could get satisfaction in their dispute, but in 1843, Julius Göler von Ravensburg, a Badenese army officer who had sided with Hawkins, decided to take up the late English officer’s cause. He called Moritz ein Hundsfott—a scoundrel. Moritz refused to take the bait and challenge Ravensburg to a duel, and there matters might have ended. But soon the social season in the spa town of Baden-Baden was in full swing, and it seems that Moritz had been dropped from the guest list for one of the fancy balls on the calendar. When he pressed social arbiters for an explanation, Moritz was told that he wasn’t “a man of honor” because he had let a slur go unanswered—at which point Moritz concluded he had no choice but to take Ravensburg on.

  In Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century, a man of rank or social standing who had been wronged didn’t seek redress through the police or the courts. He insisted instead on an engagement with deadly weapons under prescribed rules. If you had been insulted and didn’t demand a duel, you forfeited your right to associate with people of good repute. For Jews, matters were more complicated; it wasn’t unusual for a German Jewish university student with pistoling skills, slighted by some anti­semitic remark, to challenge the offender—but this only touched off a movement among non-Jewish fraternities at German universities to declare Jews categorically “unworthy of satisfaction.” In 1843, such was the disposition, at first, of Moritz’s challenge to Ravensburg: a court of honor declared Moritz too disreputable to be party to a duel—he wasn’t, as the Germans would say, satisfaktionsfähig. And that appeared to be that.

  But the protocol of dueling held that each principal nominate a “second,” someone to hammer out logistics and act as a go-between. As his second, Moritz had selected a Russian officer named Mikhail von Werefkin. Ravensburg’s chosen second, a Spanish-born officer of the Baden court, Georg von Sarachaga-Uria, didn’t simply reiterate to Werefkin his patron’s refusal to duel—he also joined Ravensburg to assault the Russian on a Karlsruhe street.

  As a result of that incident, Werefkin and Ravensburg hastily agreed to duel each other at a riflery range in the Forchheimer forest south of the city. There, on September 2, Werefkin mortally wounded Ravensburg with his first shot. But as he lay on the ground, Ravensburg was able to squeeze off a shot of his own, killing Werefkin.

  The death of both duelists set Baden on edge. Three days later, in the aftermath of Ravensburg’s funeral, a procession of mourners made its way along Langestrasse, Karlsruhe’s main east-west thoroughfare. As the funeral train reached the Haber palace, pictured here, and dusk settled over the city, a rumor spread that Moritz himself was watching from an upper window.

  At that, the ranks of the mourners dissolved. Students and soldiers led a mob of 150 people that stormed and ransacked the same home Moritz’s father had been chased from during the Hep, Hep riots two dozen years before. “Down with the Jews!” the crowd shouted, and “Tonight we’ll finish the Hep, Hep over there!” Rioters set upon two Jewish-owned businesses nearby, throwing the owners through their shop windows. David Meola, director of the Jewish and Holocaust Studies Program at the University of South Alabama and an expert on the history of the Haber Affair, told me that the attack lasted hours, with soldiers egging on townspeople, who yelled things like “drown them in blood!” The rioting caused tens of thousands of florins in damage, the equivalent of at least several million dollars today. This time the incumbent grand duke supplied no protection. During those intervening years, the status of even Karlsruhe’s most prominent Jews had grown ever more tenuous.

  In fact, as the riot raged, Moritz was no longer in the family home. A half hour earlier police had remanded him to Rastatt, south of the city. There he was quickly convicted of inciting the Ravensburg-Werefkin duel and sentenced to fourteen days in prison. As soon as he served his sentence, the authorities deported him to Hesse.

  Over the following weeks Sarachaga-Uria vowed to avenge the death of his comrade. He challenged Moritz in an open letter, using language so inflammatory that it made clear he had no misgivings about dueling someone he would call in print ein geborener Israelit, a Jew by blood. Moritz accepted, and on December 14—this time well north of Karlsruhe, near the Hessian village of Roggenheim—my ancestor killed Sarachaga-Uria with his second shot. Afterward Moritz was detained, charged with illegal dueling, and convicted by a Hessian military court, which sentenced him to six months in prison, four of them suspended for good behavior and community service. Upon his release Moritz filed and won libel suits against a Karlsruhe newspaper and a Frankfurt-based journalist, donating the settlement monies to charity.

  As it unspooled over those months, the Haber Affair caused a sensation around the continent. Moritz had his sympathizers, especially in the Rhenish press. Many Germans knew of the family’s public spiritedness and Moritz’s own charitable giving, including a large donation to recovery efforts in Hamburg after the city’s fire of 1842. But much of the coverage pandered to the basest instincts of an inflamed population. To most Badeners, the events of late 1843 came down to a simple accounting: on one side, three dead Christians; on the other, one uppity and still-at-liberty Jew.

  At the time of the Haber Affair, Baden’s Jews stood on the cusp of emancipation. The legislature of the grand duchy had taken up the issue for a dozen consecutive sessions, and only a few months earlier the parliament of the nearby Prussian Rhineland had voted to grant Jews full civil rights. As Baden celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its constitution, the Jewish-born writer Heinrich Heine was hailing full freedom as “the call of the times.” Yet even though Jews in 1843 made up no more than 1.5 percent of the grand duchy’s population, and perhaps 5 or 6 percent within Karlsruhe’s city limits, Badenese Christians feared Jewish emancipation.

  At trial, Moritz’s liberal, Christian lawyer had enumerated the many ways his client had been done wrong. His home had been invaded, his property destroyed, his freedom taken away. Yet because of press censorship, the public could take only some of this into account. Then, upon his release, Moritz was summarily expelled from Baden. All these injustices were visited upon a citizen of the grand duchy—one whose family had been ennobled by the grand duke’s father—just days after Baden celebrated its status as a Rechtsstaat, a government of laws.

  In the years afterward, framing of the Haber Affair took on an increasingly antisemitic cast. The publisher of a manifesto that Sarachaga-­Uria had written before the second duel, distributed after the Spanish officer’s death, chose to pair the text with an engraving of Sarachaga-Uria alongside Ravensburg and Weref­kin over the caption Duell-Opfern (Duel Sacrifices). Popular accounts called Ravensburg a Landeskind, a “child of the nation” who had given his life for the fatherland.

  That story line would persist into the next century with the publication in 1926 of the historical novella King Haber. The book doesn’t bother to change the name of its main character, “the banker, Moritz Haber, or to give him his recent title, Baron von Haber.” In it Moritz cuckolds the grand duke, fathers a child with the grand duchess, and meets his comeuppance after a procession of mourners leaving the funeral of a “Baron Raven” spot him on the balcony of his own home and pelt him with rocks. Someone in the crowd finally fires the shot that kills him. The story has such defamatory resonances that in 1947 one of Salomon’s descendants, Willy Model, tried to claw back some of our common ancestor’s reputation with an affidavit sorting out what was hearsay from what was known to have happened.

  The Haber Affair foreshadowed atrocities to come. The timing of the publication of King Haber—on the cusp of the Nazis’ seizure of power—helped stoke the antisemitism that Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would step in to exploit. And the episode conformed with Jud Süss, the 1940 film based on an eighteenth-­century Jewish court banker who became a recurring figure in Nazi propaganda.

  In the anti-Moritz manifesto written before his death in the second duel, Sarachaga-Uria declared that “religion and honor” would prevent Moritz from ever being “true and straight.” Whatever the outcome of the duel, the Badenese officer further proclaimed, it would be “a judgment of God between good and evil, right and wrong.”

  After winning his duel with Sarachaga-Uria, Moritz couldn’t resist a triumphant riposte. In January 1844, having served out his sentence in Hesse, he bought space in newspapers around the German states. “So!” read one of his Erklärungen, or declarations. “The highest driver of all human fate has judged according to his wisdom between good and evil, right and wrong.”

  David Meola puts it this way in a scholarly article about the Haber Affair: “As victor of the duel, Haber can be seen as having been judged—by God—to be both good and right. Moreover, in the public sphere, Haber would also have the last word, defeating his opponent again posthumously using his adversary’s own words and beliefs.”

  For Uncle Moritz, it must have made for the most satisfying touché.

  I have few clues to how my ancestors processed the life and trials of Moritz von Haber through the years. Kurt’s grandfather August, the eldest son of Moritz’s sister Henriette von Haber, would go on to handle some of his uncle’s business affairs, so it’s hard to imagine my grandfather not having heard of his notorious forebear. But my father never mentioned Moritz. I learned of him and this entire saga only after arriving in Berlin, from pursuing a throwaway line in a genealogical essay by my aunt Holly, Kurt’s daughter-in-law. She refers to “an internationally known rake, duelist, and adventurer” and suggests that, in his great-great-uncle’s cosmopolitan instincts, generous spirit, nose for commerce, and eye for women, Kurt may have found both inspiration and template.

  Kurt and Moritz shared one more thing. Both believed they enjoyed all the rights of a citizen of a constitutional state, only to discover that they didn’t.

  The journeys of my exile grandfather and emigrant father stand as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant mood in much of the United States, the country that once took them in. Today the German chancellor, not the American president, is welcoming asylum seekers, denouncing neo-Nazism, and banging the drum for global integration and liberal democracy. The contrast appears even more stark when viewed from Berlin, perhaps the most radically welcoming city on earth—not just over the previous few years, as Angela Merkel threw Germany open to more than a million refugees, mostly from Syria, but also through much of the city’s history, dating back to when the Duke of Prussia invited fifty Viennese Jewish families to settle there after the Thirty Years’ War.

  Not all Germans are offering an embrace. Merkel has failed to win over followers of the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland party, the AfD, which is especially popular in the villages and countryside of the old East Germany encircling the city. But in Berlin proper, particularly where we’ve landed, in Kreuzberg, a defiant cosmopolitanism obtains. We see it in graffiti like NAZIS RAUS (Nazis out) and find it in clubs like SO36, which hosts a monthly dance night for gay Muslims. It’s heralded by a banner reading ISLAMOPHOBIA DAMAGES THE SOUL, hung from the facade of the church around the corner, where we’re as likely to hear world music as Lutheran liturgy. It comes with the lingering spirit of the activists who once organized squats in abandoned buildings, and shortly before the fall of the Wall declared the Free Republic of Kreuzberg, issuing “visas” and building “customs posts” of papier-mâché. And it validates what the exiled journalist Sebastian Haffner wrote from the safety of England on the eve of World War II: “Berlin was, let us say it with Prussian precision, the very essence of an international metropolis. It had, so to speak, roots in the air. It extracted its life force not from the native soil of the surrounding country . . . but from all the great cities of the world.”

  The six-hour time difference between Washington, DC, and Berlin ensures that a sleep-cycle’s worth of backed-up US news alerts greets us each morning. Three days after our arrival comes news that ethnonationalists have engineered a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump fails to condemn the neo-Nazis who assembled, one of whom struck and killed a protestor, Heather Heyer, with his car. The president goes on to describe the day’s actors as including “very fine people, on both sides.”