Without at least In 1937, after my step-grandfather delivered the Hesses’ son Wolf, Ilse Hess sent Hans Albrecht a cigarette case as a thank-you gift. Thirty-five years later Maria returned the case to her, suggesting that she pass it on to her now-adult son. My grandmother, who during the war had volunteered with Ilse Hess at Dr. Albrecht’s lazaretto on Rotkreuzplatz, testified before a de-Nazification tribunal that Ilse Hess had been opposed to the regime.

  A folder for Bundesarchiv-Lichterfelde, NS/21, 1953.

  Yet the fattest folder Bundesarchiv-Lichterfelde, R/9361//III, 131140.

  And they put Wilhelm himself relied on the mercies of Elfriede Wischmann, a.k.a. Schescha, the family nanny and maid who, amidst the postwar shortages, would make runs up to Frankfurt to buy morphine on the black market to satisfy the habit he traced to wounds suffered during World War I. Wilhelm died in 1952.

  Three years later Gudrun Azar, Ins Licht gerückt: jüdische Lebenswege im Münchner Westen, eine Spurensuche in Pasing, Obermeuzing und Aubing (Munich: Herbert Utz, 2008), 122.

  Käthe’s ex-husband died Anette Neff, “Merck, Ursula,” Stadtlexikon Darmstadt, Historischer Verein für Hessen (Darmstadt: Konrad Theiss, 2006), 628. Upon being forced to leave Schondorf in 1943, Ernst Lange survived the war and went on to become a distinguished Protestant theologian before taking his life at age forty-seven. Decades after his death he was hailed as “an ecumenical visionary in Bonhoeffer’s footsteps.” Werner Simpendorfer, “The Strange Must Cease to Be the Strange: In Memoriam Ernst Lange (1927–1974),” Ecumenical Review 49, no. 2 (April 1997).

  After her graduation Johannes Lange himself performed research into “racial hygiene” and served as a judge on a Nazi-era Erbgesundheitsgericht, one of the “hereditary health courts” that determined who the state could forcibly sterilize. Wolfgang Rose, Diagnose “Psychopathie”: Die urbane Moderne und das schwierige Kind (Vienna: Böhlau, 2016), 260n.

  Chapter Twelve: Second Exile

  I am completely happy Kurt Wolff letter to Curt von Faber du Faur, May 11, 1958, in Kurt Wolff: Briefwechsel, 482–83.

  Man bröckelt ab Schuyler, “Kurt Wolff and Hermann Broch.”

  “the great miracle” Kurt Wolff letter to Curt von Faber du Faur, March 18, 1962, in Kurt Wolff: Briefwechsel, 484.

  younger than Niko William Jovanovich was in fact a year older than my father.

  William Jovanovich had Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship.

  After being beholden Ibid.

  “Kurt’s is, I believe” Helen told me this story herself but also related it in a letter to Günter Grass, July 21, 1974. Günter Grass and Helen Wolff, Briefe 1959–1994 (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2003), 210.

  The Esplanade permitted Helen Wolff letter to Katharine Rosin, December 19, 1959. H&KW Papers, 2019 genm 0032, box 3.

  “I’ve often wondered why” Wolfram Göbel, “Ernst Rowohlt und Kurt Wolff,” in Kurt Wolff zum Hundertsten.

  “It’s great that” Barbara Weidle, “Gespräch mit Christian Wolff,” in Kurt Wolff: Ein Literat und Gentleman, 177.

  When Kurt would travel Schuyler, “Kurt Wolff and Hermann Broch.”

  In 1960, after accepting Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 197.

  Members of Gruppe 47 Wagenbach, “Kurt Wolff,” in Kurt Wolff zum Hundertsten. Gruppe 47 took its name from how its members envisioned themselves—to adapt Kafka, as a collective ax for the frozen sea of Germany’s epic winter of 1947, the one that turned out to be my father’s last in the land of his birth.

  Years later the Independent John Calder, “Obituary: Helen Wolff,” Independent (London), April 20, 1994.

  The end bore Schuyler, “Kurt Wolff and Hermann Broch.”

  “He had one special quality” “Mr. Kurt Wolff,” Times (London), October 29, 1963.

  The German catastrophe Stern, Five Germanys, 250.

  Technically true Nikola Herweg, “Helen und Kurt Wolff in Marbach,” Deutsches Literaturarchiv-Marbach, Spuren 106, 2015.

  “It’s lovely and comforting” “Von Herzen Ihnen Beiden: Briefe von Hannah Arendt an Kurt und Helen Wolff,” in Kurt Wolff: Ein Literat und Gentleman, 268. In New York, Kurt and Helen had both forged relationships with the exile philosopher and political theorist—Kurt first, helping Arendt with the details of drafting contracts after she began work as an editor at Schocken Books; then Helen, who, after the Nazis invaded France, had traced almost the identical path of incarceration and flight as Arendt, from Paris’s Vél d’Hiv, to the camp in Gurs, to a post-armistice limbo before escaping through Lisbon with Varian Fry’s help. Although Arendt’s sanctuary in Vichy France, a peasant’s barn near Montpellier, was more spartan than Helen’s château in Saint-Lary, “she and [her husband] Heinrich [Blücher] had been able to procure bicycles, and far from giving in to anxiety, they explored the beautiful countryside,” Helen wrote following Arendt’s death. “Hannah, in her high-spirited way, made of this anguishing experience a kind of gift of time, a vacation in which one slept in the hay, a hiatus within a life of work and duties.” Undated and apparently unpublished reminiscence, H&KW Papers, box 73, folder 2056.

  “He was able to discover” Herweg, “Helen und Kurt Wolff in Marbach.”

  “put the emphasis” Ibid.

  Christian beginning to make Christian was started on the piano, not the cello—but quickly discovered his interest and aptitude lay not in performance but composition. His piano teacher, Grete Sultan, knew that the dancer who lived in the apartment above her, Merce Cunningham, counted as a friend the composer John Cage, and an introduction was made. Christian began working with Cage shortly after turning sixteen; by the time he left high school, he had become a member of “the New York School” of avant-garde composers that included Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman, who years later would recall the teenage prodigy as “Orpheus in tennis shoes.” Cage was reluctant to charge the still-struggling Wolffs for those lessons, so in barter Christian would bring copies of Pantheon’s latest, including the Bollingen edition of the I Ching that would help inspire Cage to develop the compositional chance procedures for which he became renowned. Kurt and Helen also hosted gatherings at which Cage mingled with such Pantheon collaborators as Alan Watts and Joseph Campbell, who influenced him too. See Michael Hicks and Christian Asplund, American Composers: Christian Wolff (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 17–18.

  For another thirty years After Harcourt, Brace & World shareholders voted to substitute William Jovanovich’s surname into the posterior position of the company name, Günter Grass’s reaction was, “I guess the World wasn’t big enough for him.”

  Every beginning offers Hermann Hesse, “Stages,” in The Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance and Spiritual Wisdom of Hermann Hesse, trans. Ludwig Max Fischer (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2011), 113. The German is In jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne / Der uns beschützt und der uns hilft, zu leben.

  Chapter Thirteen: Schweinenest

  “Home is the land” Cited in Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 160. Jean Améry lived the rootlessness of which he wrote. Born in Vienna as Hanns Chaim Mayer, he was raised Catholic by his mother following his Jewish father’s death in World War I. Upon Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, he and his Jewish wife fled to France and then Belgium, only for him to be captured and tortured by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz. After the war he settled in Belgium, where he wrote under a Gallic-sounding anagram of his surname and, refusing to be published in Germany or Austria, contributed to newspapers in German-speaking Switzerland. Améry’s 1964 treatise on how to responsibly process the crimes of the Nazis, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (Beyond Guilt and Atonement), was published in English as At the Mind’s Limits (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980).

  “ignorant and rootless” Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday (New York: Dial Press, 1999), 20.

  Pained, my father My friend Luzi and I took the train out to Dachau anyway. As lasting as any memory of that visit—as vivid today as the sight of the crematorium and the striped uniforms—was the woman on the S-Bahn platform who handed out flyers urging visitors not to hold young Dachauers like herself responsible for what had taken place in their town several decades earlier. That encounter introduced me to the early stirrings of the Federal Republic’s Erinnerungskultur.

  lines of verse Three lines from Paul Verlaine’s “Chanson d’automne,” broadcast on the eve of the invasion, directed the French Resistance to begin coordinated sabotage: Blessent mon coeur / D’une langueur / Monotone (Wounds my heart with a monotonous languor).

  “We must find” “Speech by Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker,” May 8, 1985. While Germany’s chancellors wield executive power, its presidents tend to be philosopher kings. On May 8, 2020, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nazis’ defeat, president Frank-Walter Steinmeier delivered remarks that picked up where Weizsäcker had left off. “Germany’s past is a fractured past—with responsibility for the murdering of millions and the suffering of millions,” he said. “That breaks our hearts to this day. And that is why I say that this country can only be loved with a broken heart.” Speech by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, “75th Anniversary of the End of the 2nd World War,” May 8, 2020. https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/EN/Frank-Walter-Steinmeier/Reden/2020/05/200508-75th-anniversary-World-War-II.html.

  “It is not a case” Ibid.

  “From our own history” Ibid.

  But to Alexander Gauland Taub and Fisher, “Germany’s Extreme Right Challenges Guilt over Nazi Past.”

  Are the German people The Federal Republic provided a kind of answer to this question in 2000, when the Bundestag passed a law easing the path to citizenship for children born to residents without German blood.

  The percentage of Germans Taylor, Exorcising Hitler, 382.

  As the Green Party Cem Özdemir, “Cem Özdemir Compares Germany’s Far-Right AfD Party to the Nazis in Hard-Hitting Speech,” European Greens, February 22, 2018, EuropeanGreens.eu/news/cem-özdemir-compares-germanys-far-right-afd-party-nazis-hard-hitting-speech.

  But as she worked Neiman, Learning from the Germans, 20.

  Chapter Fourteen: Turtle Bay

  “Suddenly there is” Günter Grass, laudation for Helen Wolff upon posthumous awarding of the Friedrich Gundolf Prize, April 30, 1994, DeutscheAkademie.de/en/awards/friedrich-gundolf-preis/helen-wolff/laudatio.

  The Germans had constructed Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: Scribner Classics, 2011), 531.

  “We have to be” Oliver Hilmes, Berlin 1936: Sixteen Days in August, trans. Jefferson Chase (London: Bodley Head, 2017), 16–17.

  When refugees first spotted Central Airport THF, dir. Karim Aïnouz, Lupa Film, Les Films d’Ici, Mar Films, 2018, documentary film.

  Chapter Fifteen: Mr. Bitte Nicht Ansprechen

  “We must take one step” Carl Zuckmayer, Second Wind, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (London: G. G. Harrap, 1941), 236.

  town of Stolp Now Słupsk, Poland.

  “Right after breakfast” Kurt Wolff, “Tagebücher,” DLA-Marbach.

  Kraus was not Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 91.

  Il pleut dans mon My grandmother is quoting Verlaine: “It rains in my heart / As it rains on the town.”

  Chapter Sixteen: Shallow Draft

  “mighty liquid belt” Andrew Eames, Blue River, Black Sea: A Journey along the Danube into the Heart of the New Europe (London: Black Swan, 2010), 15.

  “different peoples meet” Claudio Magris, Danube, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989), 29.

  Passau, where Hitler The Nazi regime marbled its madness with myth and lore. The wolf is the symbol of Passau, where Hitler moved as a three-year-old, and he spent his life vaunting the qualities of that animal—loyalty, ferocity, courage, cruelty, and fealty to hierarchy. Wolf was Hitler’s code name, and the Führer liked to say that Adolf was a portmanteau of the Old High German word adal, meaning noble, and Wolf. In 1934 the German government even placed the wolf under protection—a purely symbolic act, for the animal had been extinct in Germany since the mid-nineteenth century. But by doing so the Nazis invoked “a promise of the discipline sometimes associated with ‘civilization’ without its accompanying decadence. Of nature without anarchy.” Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich (Pittsburgh: Yogh & Thorn Press, 2013), 68.

  Passauers would prefer Marc Fisher, After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 24–28. As a teenager during the mid-eighties, Passau native Anna Rosmus won a nationwide essay prize for a piece she wrote about “Freedom in Europe.” Townspeople cheered and feted her, so she decided to enter another contest, this time choosing as her topic, “My Hometown during the Third Reich.” Suddenly neighbors and friends shunned her. The city refused to grant her access to archives in the public library, including back issues of the local newspaper. But every act of official recalcitrance made her more determined. During a four-year legal battle, Rosmus received death threats, her husband divorced her, and a neo-Nazi attack in a Munich restaurant left her unconscious. Finally she was able to conduct her research and write up her findings, among them that a Passau clergyman had denounced a Jewish merchant, which led to the man’s deportation and death; and that the editor of the local Catholic newspaper, who since the war had cultivated a reputation as a resister, had in fact praised Hitler and the Nazis in print. In 1994, exhausted by the threats and harassment, Rosmus moved to the United States with her daughters. Her story is told in the 1990 film The Nasty Girl, dir. Michael Verhoeven.

  In 1946 she made After Renée-Marie tracked Kurt down in New York, he swore out one of the two affidavits of support that allowed her to emigrate from Brazil to the United States. Renée-Marie Croose Parry, “Life in Brazil,” in Odyssey of Exile: Jewish Women Flee the Nazis for Brazil, ed. Katherine Morris (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 225.

  By the time she received In 1950 the Hausensteins moved to Paris, where Wilhelm served as the new Federal Republic of Germany’s first ambassador to France. After his death in 1957, Margot founded the Teilhard de Chardin Association, which she ran until 1975, when she moved with Renée-Marie and her daughter’s second husband, Kenneth, first to London and ten years later to Florida. “Margot Hausenstein: The Life of 100 Years,” privately published annotated timeline. H&KW Papers, box 14, folder 463.

  “inducing a vanquished” Sereny, The German Trauma, 60.

  In 1967 Ibid., 65.

  “the massive weight” Grass, Peeling the Onion, 415–16.

  Gnade der späten Geburt Chancellor Helmut Kohl coined this phrase in 1984—amidst the furor touched off by US president Ronald Reagan’s visit to the graves of Waffen-SS soldiers in Bitburg—to distance himself from Germany’s Nazi past. But in the years since, others have repurposed “the grace of a late birth,” often to ironic ends. By the end of his political career, Kohl and his center-right Christian Democratic Union had actually embraced Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. Neiman, Learning from the Germans, 270, 290, 370.

  Cue the elephant’s trumpet For generations, “Jesko” or “Jesco” has been a popular given name for first-born males in the sprawling von Puttkamer clan. The man we heard being paged in the Budapest airport was definitely not the diplomat Jesco von Puttkamer, who served as the Federal Republic’s ambassador to Israel during the Black September terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, for he had died nine years earlier.

  her landed parents Jesko and Annemarie von Puttkamer had another sibling, Emmy von Krockow, whose daughter Lubissa engaged in derring-do that surpasses anything outlined in these pages. In April 1945, as the Red Army closed in on their Pomeranian estate, Lubissa’s stepfather stood before the family in full uniform, carrying pistols. He announced that they would all now take their lives in accordance with the Prussian military code of honor. More than eight months pregnant, Lubissa felt her baby kick in dissent. She ordered her stepfather to get out of his bemedaled monkey suit, throw it with the weapons into a pond on the property, and get on with the urgent business of survival. Over the following weeks this niece of Jesko and Annemarie somehow gave birth, dodged Soviet soldiers bent on rape and pillage, fed both herself and her infant daughter, escaped to the west, stole back into Pomerania to spring that same balky stepfather from a Soviet camp, and ultimately reached the western Allies’ zone, where she embarked on a new life. Lubissa’s brother, the late historian Christian von Krockow, told the entire saga in Hour of the Women, trans. Krishna Winston (London: Faber and Faber, 1993).

  near Karzin Now Karsina, Poland.

  In a codicil added According to Kurt’s will, he had provided Maria with her share of his estate during his lifetime.

  Chapter Seventeen: Play on the Bones of the Dead

  His own father’s disapproval Weidle, “Gespräch mit Christian Wolff,” 172–73.

  The Nazi leaders Haffner, Germany Jekyll & Hyde, 48.

  For a citizen Alexander Wolff, “When the Terror Began,” Sports Illustrated, August 26, 2002.

  At that, Sieber Ibid. After finishing the interview with Sieber, I swung by to visit my cousin Jon, a Nymphenburger and trained psychologist himself, and explained why I was in the neighborhood. “I know Georg Sieber,” Jon told me. “He’s a clever man. For years he served as president of the Bavarian Psychologists Association.” It turned out Jon had succeeded him in that position.

  All of which Our daughter was a Vermont summer-camp cabinmate of Mafalda von Stauffenberg, a great-granddaughter of Berthold von Stauffenberg, one of the participants in the Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler. In 2014, while hiking a trail with other visiting parents over midseason weekend, I chatted with Mafalda’s father, Philippe, about Germany’s World Cup soccer victory a few days earlier but never broached our common German ancestry. It occurred to me later—in light of Clara having asked, “Isn’t there some way Opa could have been a spy?”—that this man’s own Opa had indeed been a kind of spy, and paid for it with his life.