With Grand Duke Louis I Heinrich Schnee, “Hofbankier Salomon von Haber als badischer Finanzier,” Zeitung für die Geschichte des Oberrheins 109, no. 2 (1961); and Jürgen Schuhladen-Krämer, “Salomon von Haber,” Stadtlexikon Karlsruhe, 2013, https://stadtlexikon.karlsruhe.de/index.php/De:Lexikon:bio-1013.

  Mobs of citizens Jürgen Schuhladen-Krämer, “Hepp!-Hepp!-Unruhen 1819,” Stadtlexikon Karlsruhe, 2012, https://stadtlexikon.karlsruhe.de/index.php/De:Lexikon:ereig-0216. Historians differ over whether the rioters shouted “Hep!” because shepherds used this interjection when putting a crook to their flock, or it’s an acronym for the Latin phrase Hierosolyma est perdita (Jerusalem is destroyed).

  Escorted by a detachment Ibid.

  “How corrupt people” Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of Jews in Germany, 1743–1933 (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 106–7. The sister to whom Ludwig Robert wrote, Rahel Varnhagen, was a noted Berlin saloniste of the time. Hannah Arendt, her biographer, called Varnhagen “my closest friend, although she has been dead some hundred years.” Cited in Annette C. Baier, “Ethics in Many Different Voices,” in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, eds. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 336.

  In place of incendiary Ibid., 106.

  In a carriage Wolfgang Behringer, “Climate and History: Hunger, Anti-Semitism, and Reform During the Tambora Crisis of 1815–1820,” in German History in Global and Transnational Perspective, ed. David Lederer (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 19.

  Sometime in the late 1830s The recounting of the Haber Affair here et seq. relies on Annette Borchardt-Wenzel, “Das Duell—Seltsamer Ehrbegriff fordert viele Opfer,” Badische Neuesten Nachrichten, September 3, 2016; as well as Jürgen Schuhladen-Krämer, “Moritz von Haber,” Stadtlexikon Karlsruhe, 2013, https://stadtlexikon.karlsruhe.de/index.php/De:Lexikon:bio-0802; and “Haber Skandal,” Stadtlexikon Karlsruhe, 2012, https://stadtlexikon.karlsruhe.de/index.php/De:Lexikon:ereig-0279. But it’s based foremost on conversations with David Meola, professor of history and director of the Jewish and Holocaust Studies Program at the University of South Alabama, as well as on his “Mirror of Competing Claims: Antisemitism and Citizenship in Vormärz Germany,” Antisemitism Studies 4, no. 1 (Spring 2020).

  Thanks to the marriages Ute Frevert, “Bourgeois Honour: Middle-Class Duellists in Germany from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century,” in The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, eds. David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans (Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Routledge Revivals, 2014), 273.

  Soon gossips had Moritz What may have been an innocent act of generosity only fueled the rumors. When Cäcilie was born, Moritz donated 100,000 gulden, about $2 million today, in her name to support the poor of Karlsruhe. In 1857 Cäcilie married the Russian Grand Duke Mikhail Nikolaievich, son of Czar Nicholas I.

  For Jews, matters were Elon, The Pity of It All, 243.

  As soon as Of the thirty-six members of the mob put on trial, most were acquitted or jailed only briefly. Sarachaga-Uria wound up being sentenced to four weeks of house arrest, which the grand duke commuted to sixteen days. According to the diary of Karlsruhe banker and politician Eduard Kölle, an eyewitness to the attack, “The officers call to the rioters: ‘Fear not! Nothing will happen to you, and leave room, so that the mob can continue going through.’” Translation by David Meola, of Eduard Kölle, “Aus meinem Leben,” from Die Handschriften 67/715, in Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe, cited in Rainer Wirtz, “Widersetzlichkeiten, Excesse, Crawalle, Tumulte und Skandale”: Soziale Bewegung und gewalthafter sozialer Protest in Baden, 1815–1848 (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1981), 135.

  All these injustices In mid-nineteenth-century Baden, the concentration of wealth among Jews was relatively high. A typical Christian resident, already squeezed by the elites, came to regard politics as a zero-sum game. All of which made Moritz “the perfect fall guy,” David Meola says. “He was a transgressive figure, a Jewish parvenu who hung out with the elites. But all Moritz wanted was personal satisfaction, to have his honor upheld and be treated as a deserving member of the upper class. He gave generously to charity. He was an investor in a widely read liberal newspaper, the Oberdeutsche Zeitung. His sister Leonie had converted and married a prominent Christian army officer. His family had started those three factories and, as part of the inner workings of the state, helped make for its success.” Meola likens Salomon and his sons to the Americans Louis Brandeis and Henry Morgenthau, pioneering Jews who faithfully served their government at the highest levels.

  The story has Affidavit by Willy Model, “Der Fall Moritz von Haber: Eine Episode aus der Geschichte von Karlsruhe,” New York, 1947, Stadtarchiv-Karlsruhe, 7/N/Model 61. Model swore out his affidavit in New York, to which he had emigrated; King Haber had been published in translation in the United States in 1930. The author of the novella, Alfred Neumann, was Jewish himself. He and Kurt struck up a friendship during exile in Nice through late 1940 and early 1941, as both socked away money for boat passage and made the consular rounds applying for visas. “He’s a pleasant gentleman with the requisite self-confidence and an essential fearlessness,” Neumann wrote in his diary after running into Kurt at Nice’s Kuoni travel agency on November 4, 1940. But an entry a month later records a crack in that bravado: “Kurt Wolff comes and confesses to me fears about his and his family’s life in the US. . . . I don’t share his concerns and can refute them all very persuasively.” From Alfred Neumann, “Tagebücher,” in Exil am Mittelmeer: Deutsche Schriftsteller in Südfrankreich von 1933–1941, eds. Ulrike Voswinckel and Frank Berninger (Munich: Allitera, 2005), 222–64. I have no idea whether Neumann knew that his new friend Kurt counted Moritz von Haber as an ancestor. Or why Neumann would make such a black hat of Uncle Moritz, whom he describes in the novella as “a hard, ambitious man, and not too nice in the choice of his means for the attainment of his ends.” Alfred Neumann, King Haber, trans. Marie Busch (New York: Alfred H. King, 1930), 3.

  In the anti-Moritz Georg von Sarachaga-Uria, Vermächtnis oder neue Folgen in der Göler-Haber’schen Sache, cited in Meola, “Mirror of Competing Claims.”

  “So!” read one Moritz von Haber, Beilage, Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, January 11, 1844, cited in Meola, “Mirror of Competing Claims.”

  “As victor of the duel” Meola, “Mirror of Competing Claims.”

  But my father Holly Nash Wolff says my father told her of several childhood trips to Frankfurt to meet for tea with his great-aunt Mathilde, a baroness and Louis von Haber’s daughter. This niece of Moritz was known formally as Mathilde Auguste, Freiin Haber von Linsberg.

  She refers to Moritz would live another thirty years before dying a natural death. Despite his exile from Baden, and the failure of several of the family’s banking and business interests during the financial crisis of 1847–48, he landed on his feet. In 1853 he cofounded the Bank für Handel und Industrie Darmstadt, which in 1931 would be subsumed into Dresdner Bank; in 1855, with his brother Louis, he helped launch Austria’s Creditanstalt, which is today part of the Italian holding company UniCredit. Schuhladen-Krämer, “Moritz von Haber.”

  The contrast appears Notwithstanding the roundups and partitions of the twentieth century, Berlin has renewed itself again and again by looking far afield. By 1900, immigrants or their offspring made up some 60 percent of the city’s population. Displaced Poles, Russians, and Hungarians arrived after the First World War; after the Second, ethnic Germans expelled from the east flooded into the city, from Silesia, Pomerania, and East Prussia. Over the three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, waves of the world’s restless or turned-out washed up on the banks of the Spree: Bosnians fleeing war in the Balkans; Palestinians drawn to the stretch of Neukölln known as “the Gaza Strip”; two hundred thousand Russians, forty thousand of them Jews, who poured into the city with reunification; and left-wing and LGBT Israelis disturbed enough by the rightward turn of the Zionist state that they found even the site of Hitler’s envisioned “Germania” a place to breathe more freely.

  “Berlin was, let us” Sebastian Haffner, Germany Jekyll & Hyde: A Contemporary Account of Nazi Germany, trans. Wilfrid David (London: Abacus, 2008), 288–89.

  Chapter Two: Done with the War

  And he launched Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 192. Sitting in a Leipzig bar one evening in 1913, mulling over what to call their new journal, Kurt, Hasenclever, Werfel, and another editor, Kurt Pinthus, were at a loss—until someone proposed jabbing a pencil randomly at the proofs of Werfel’s latest work, which lay on the table. The pencil landed on a line that began O jüngste Tag—O Judgment Day. Gert Ueding, “Mit Hirn und Herz,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, March 3, 1987.

  “Tall. Slim.” Robert Musil, Tagebücher: Hauptband, ed. Adolf Frisé (Reinbek, Germany: Rowohlt, 1976), 293.

  “The house often functioned” Willy Haas, “Kurt Wolff: 3 März 1887–22 Oktober 1963,” Die Welt, December 28, 1963.

  Kurt had no interest Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 10.

  “I only want to publish books” Undated note in family papers, translation after Marion Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 5, ed. R. Daniel Wadhwani, German Historical Institute, 2012, ImmigrantEntrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=83.

  his fiancée, Felice Bauer Just after the fall of the Wall, a café called Briefe an Felice opened in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg, at the address on Immanuelkirchstrasse to which Kafka wrote the famous letters to the fiancée he never married. Paul Hockenos, Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, the Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin (New York: New Press, 2017), 285.

  “He is a very beautiful man” Stach, Kafka: The Decisive Years, 334.

  “In the beginning” Kurt Wolff acceptance speech upon receiving the medal of honor of the German Booksellers Association, May 15, 1960, cited in Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 197.

  Though my grandfather “We must remain as open to the present as to the past,” Kurt liked to say. Alfred Kazin, “A Legend among Publishers,” New York Newsday, October 20, 1991.

  And it was an exhilarating Elon, The Pity of It All, 273.

  Eleven of the thirteen Reiner Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, trans. Shelley Frisch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 36.

  “I flatter myself” Kurt Wolff, “Tagebücher, October 23, 1914, to June 28, 1915,” DLA-Marbach.

  “The dead lie in” Ibid.

  who had passed Ibid.

  a loud and consistent critic Elon, The Pity of It All, 305.

  “great annihilative nothingness” Cited in Geert Mak, In Europe: Travels through the Twentieth Century, trans. Sam Garrett (New York: Vintage Books, 2008), 125.

  The Kurt Wolff Verlag Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 37.

  I drive into the darkness Kurt Wolff, “Tagebücher,” DLA-Marbach.

  “The British simply assume” Ibid.

  “I do not know if the weather” Ibid.

  I don’t want to go Ibid.

  When I think Ibid.

  We climbed up Ibid.

  “that sloshed back” Mak, In Europe, 75.

  Dust, columns of troops Kurt Wolff, “Tagebücher,” DLA-Marbach.

  How long the war Ibid.

  My grandfather’s redeployment Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 37.

  “I extend my” Franz Kafka letter to Kurt Wolff, October 11, 1916, in Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1977), 127.

  “I am entranced” Cited in Helmut Frielinghaus, “Vorbilder,” in Kurt Wolff zum Hundertsten.

  The publication of Der Untertan Inspiration for the novel came to Mann after he witnessed an incident in 1906, when the kaiser happened to pass by the Berlin café in which the author sat: “Almost to a man, the patrons of the café flung themselves outside to cheer His Majesty; and as they returned they noticed a rather shabbily dressed man sitting in the corner, unperturbed by the event. The manager was immediately summoned, and the unfortunate individual forcibly ejected; he was, the patrons considered, unfit to sit in the same café as men who had just saluted His Imperial Highness. The incident may sound trifling; but for Heinrich Mann it reflected a spirit rampant and disquieting: a spirit of fanatic obedience, servitude, followed by sickening brutality.” Nigel Hamilton, “Heinrich Mann and the Underdog,” Times (London), June 24, 1972.

  In fact, Kurt knew Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 133–34.

  “Your criticism of” Franz Kafka letter to Kurt Wolff, October 11, 1916, in Kafka, Letters to Friends, 127.

  In its 1918 catalog Klaus Wagenbach, “Kurt Wolff,” in Kurt Wolff zum Hundertsten.

  “[The Germans] will” Elon, The Pity of It All, 354.

  With supply chains disrupted Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 313.

  “More than ever” Kurt Wolff letter to Walter Hasenclever, November 9, 1920, in Kurt Wolff: Briefwechsel, 265.

  Nine months later Stach, Kafka: The Years of Insight, 532.

  “If the Kurt Wolff Verlag” Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 46. Kurt was more tactful in the rejection letter he sent Joyce. He cited postwar production challenges that made it “at the moment almost impossible to do justice to the requirements of our regular authors.” KW Papers, box 5, folder 162.

  As the worst Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 35.

  “condemns Berlin forever” Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin, 123–24.

  Yet a protean cityscape Mak, In Europe, 36.

  During the Reichstag’s restoration George Packer, “The Quiet German,” New Yorker, November 24, 2014.

  Visible to the south To place a solemn memorial in the heart of a major tourist destination cuts two ways. In 2017, seeing young visitors to Berlin taking selfies and playing hide-and-seek in the labyrinth of stelae that make up the site, the Israeli artist Shahak Shapira was moved to juxtapose posts culled from social media with images from concentration camps. He called his exhibition Yolocaust; see Yolocaust.de.

  “the only people” Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, “Germany’s Extreme Right Challenges Guilt over Nazi Past,” New York Times, January 18, 2017.

  “You cannot delegate” “A Tale of Two Germanys,” Alan Riding, New York Times, December 14, 2000.

  In late 1944 The roughly nine hundred thousand members of the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the SS, took an oath of personal loyalty to Hitler. About one-third of the membership consisted of conscripts like Grass and foreign volunteers.

  “cultures of memory” Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 408.

  one particular person The Stolpersteine themselves come engraved with only basic information, but researchers have fleshed out the lives of many memorialized victims on the project’s Berlin website, Stolpersteine-Berlin.de.

  And I really don’t For her 2019 book Learning from the Germans, the Berlin-based political philosopher Susan Neiman traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, to speak with James Meredith, the African American who integrated the University of Mississippi in 1962, and his wife, Judy. Meredith listened intently as Neiman described to him the Stolpersteine. “Like the Hollywood stars?” he asked. “Right in the sidewalk?” Judy Meredith couldn’t believe it: “Get out of here,” she said. Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 172.

  “I grew up” Economist, “Special Report: The New Germans,” April 14, 2018.

  Her refugee policy In his May 8, 1985, speech marking forty years since the end of the war, German president Richard von Weizsäcker encouraged Germans to “use the memory of our own history as a guideline for our behavior now.” Indeed, at the height of the 2015 refugee crisis, Weizsäcker seemed to be whispering this to Merkel from the grave: “If we remember how people persecuted on grounds of race, religion and politics and threatened with certain death often stood before the closed borders with other countries, we shall not close the door today on those who are genuinely persecuted and seek protection with us.” “Speech by Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker during the Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the End of War in Europe and of National-Socialist Tyranny on 8 May 1985 at the Bundestag, Bonn,” Bundespräsidialamt, Bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Reden/2015/02/150202-RvW-Rede-8-Mai-1985-englisch.pdf?__blob=publicationFile.

  “If the French” Reuters, “AfD Co-Founder Says Germans Should Be Proud of Its Second World War Soldiers,” Guardian (UK), September 14, 2017.

  Another, a judge Jefferson Chase, “AfD Candidate in Hot Water over Breivik Statements,” DeutscheWelle.com, April 21, 2017, dw.com/en/afd-candidate-in-hot-water-over-breivik-statements/a-38537022; Justin Huggler, “Five Names to Watch as the Anti-Immigrant AfD Looks to Stir up Trouble for Angela Merkel,” Telegraph (London), October 1, 2017.