Kurt had surely noticed. At the same time, the flight of the kaiser and the promise of democracy seemed to foretell the kind of Germany in which the Kurt Wolff Verlag would flourish. In its 1918 catalog the house foreswore “prejudices of a literary, political, national nature” and vowed instead simply to “consider the question of whether a book is good.” But post-traumatic social conditions and an economy shackled by reparations imperiled the book business. Bureaucrats with authoritarian sympathies remained in place. The first democracy in Germany’s history, established in the cultural capital of Weimar, lacked the hardheadedness to enforce the lofty values in its constitution. Communists and reactionaries clashed violently with one another from their respective camps, and the idealism and confidence that had marked German literary culture before 1914 became collateral damage. Karl Kraus put it succinctly: “[The Germans] will have forgotten that they lost the war, forgotten that they started it, forgotten that they waged it. For this reason, it will not end.”

  The Wolffs now had an infant daughter, my aunt Maria, and in October 1919 Kurt moved the firm from Leipzig to Munich. With supply chains disrupted and habitable apartments for its employees scarce, he nonetheless set up shop in a neo-Baroque villa on Luisenstrasse. It quickly became a house of culture, accommodating Kurt’s still-substantial library and hosting regular readings, concerts, and exhibits. But my grandfather soon fell into a funk. “More than ever, Kurt Wolff is a slave to the Kurt Wolff Verlag,” he wrote Hasenclever in November 1920. Nine months later it was Werfel’s turn to hear out one of my grandfather’s lamentations—that their generation had groomed “no young creative successors.”

  Kurt began to choose titles that were more bourgeois and less adventurous. He shut down Der jüngste Tag and threw his house open to European writers, not just German ones. All good as it went, but crotchets and peeves sometimes rushed in where sure-handed seismography once prevailed. In 1920, when a “Professor James Joyce” offered him the German rights to a novel that was probably A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kurt wondered who “this idiotic ‘professor’ who has written me from Trieste in bad German” could be. Forty years later my grand­father confessed, “If the Kurt Wolff Verlag had published an early book by Joyce, it would certainly also have acquired Ulysses, the most important work to be written in English in our century.”

  In Munich he turned more often to the arts, to painters of Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider), such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, whom he had begun to patronize before the war. During his exile to come, Kurt would pawn some of their works to support himself and his family.

  Carrying a payroll of one hundred, the firm in 1923 began steadily shedding staff. “The times are bad,” Kurt wrote his mother-in-law, Clara Merck, that June, “and the publishing business accords with the times.” Kurt started to hedge his bets. Instead of the new, he published more of the tried-and-true, including authors from countries with which Germany had just been at war—Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov, even Sinclair Lewis. Hoping to become less dependent on the fragile German economy, he founded a house in Florence, Pantheon Casa Editrice, the first pan-European firm to specialize in art books. He brought out volumes with text in five languages, cutting deals with foreign publishers to share costs. But the uncertainty of the times left even wealthy continental book buyers reluctant to spring for lavish editions, and rising nationalism began to subvert the cosmopolitan assumptions at the heart of these copublishing arrangements. The firm’s prewar reputation as safe harbor for avant-garde playwrights, poets, and authors of fiction vanished as these kinds of writers seemed to disappear too. As the worst of the hyperinflation set in, Kurt paid his staff daily, so that, he wrote, “they could spend it the same day for purchases that would be unaffordable the day after.”

  My father was born into this gathering chaos, in July 1921. When Niko was two, my grandfather made an entry in his diary that is almost unimaginable today: “A KW novel now priced at 5 million marks.”

  The Berlin skyline is almost too jumbled to qualify as one. It’s as if city planners took instructions from Karl Scheffler’s 1910 observation that fate “condemns Berlin forever to become and never to be.” Yet a protean cityscape is somehow appropriate for a place that, during the lifetimes of my grandfather and father, has been by turns imperial, impoverished, heedlessly carefree, fascist, ruined, occupied, and divided, until its ultimate reunification and position at the center of the European project.

  The renovated Reichstag is an exception to all this visual unruliness. To tour the building and its dome, you ascend the ramp that spirals up underneath the distinctive glass dome, then gaze down at the seats of the MPs in the chamber below. Symbolism is at play here twice over: government should be sheathed in transparency, and there’s no better way to remind a parliament of its proper place than to have constituents literally look down on it from above.

  Germans can be relentless in their remembrance. During the Reichstag’s restoration, project managers chose to preserve Cyrillic graffiti left by some triumphant Soviet soldier that reads I FUCK HITLER IN THE ASS. Visible to the south is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; it’s no accident that the site, known informally as “the Holocaust memorial,” goes by such a precise and explicit official name or that it occupies a spot so central that no visitor to Berlin is likely to miss it. This historical humility informs much of current German political life, keeps memory alive, and drives the far-right Alternative für Deustchland crazy. If, as the AfD legislator Björn Höcke has grumbled, Germans are “the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital,” it’s because they’re discerning enough to recognize that they need to, especially as long as politicians like Höcke have a following.

  One of the authors Kurt and Helen published in New York, Günter Grass, served as the moral compass of postwar West Germany, even as he felt uncomfortable in the role. “You cannot delegate your conscience to writers or anyone else,” Grass said in 2000. “I don’t speak out because I am a writer. My profession is a writer, but I speak out because I am a citizen. I think the Weimar Republic collapsed and the Nazis took over in 1933 because there were not enough citizens. That’s the lesson I have learned. Citizens cannot leave politics just to politicians.”

  In late 1944, as a seventeen-year-old responding to a draft notice, Grass joined the Waffen-SS. He never admitted having done so until the end of a career in which he hectored Germans to engage with their past. In that, he was surely wrong. But Grass is right about the lesson worth carrying forward: there were not enough citizens.

  The AHA Factory occupies much of an upper floor in an old Mietskaserne, one of countless five-story “rental barracks” built to accommodate workers who flocked to Berlin during the Industrial Revolution. Around me turn the cogs of the creative economy. Moritz, a jazz guitarist and arts impresario, swans into our shared office aglow from his success fishing over the weekend. Aidan, an Irishman married to a German of Turkish descent, is performing motion analysis for dancers. Ed, a computer programmer from Holland, is busy coding an app for parents of preschoolers, while Francesco, a filmmaker from Italy, creates videos for corporate clients and humble AHA Factory cohabitants alike. Each contributes to Berlin’s status as home to more start-ups than any other city in Europe. The cost of living is still cheap enough for the starving artist, and any day can deliver an energizing encounter with someone in flight from convention or repression. All of which leaves you with the thrill of being on the crest of a wave.

  But this wave comes with an undertow that can yank you from the present when you least expect it. Each morning our kids go off to school on an S-Bahn headed for the Wannsee, where in January 1942 the Nazis signed off on the Final Solution; in the afternoon they return on a train bound for Oranienburg, from which the Schutzstaffel (SS) oversaw it. We buy meat and produce in the market hall in which Carl Herz, the Jewish mayor of Kreuzberg, after being chased from city hall and dragged through the streets by Brownshirts of the Sturmabteilung (SA), was beaten on a spring day in 1933. Walking around our Kiez, as Berliners call a neighborhood, we come across some of the more than five thousand Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones—brass cobblestone memorials nested in the sidewalks of the city, each commemorating a Berliner victimized by the Nazis and set outside the last home he or she freely chose. Dates of detention and murder come inscribed beneath each name in recitative simplicity. The power of the Stolpersteine lies in their subtle obtrusiveness. Whereas you must consciously make a destination of immured, monochromatic gravestones in a cemetery, stumbling stones glint up at you throughout the open city, nuggets in the creek bed. To read an inscription you bend at the waist in a kind of bow of respect. As memorials go, Stolpersteine derive an animating power from being a work in progress, as tens of thousands of Berliners are yet to be memorialized.

  It’s a sobering fact, the historian Timothy Snyder points out, that “cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero.” That’s precisely why each stone in our neighborhood calls out as it does, testifying to the meaning of one particular spot in the life of one particular person, insisting on its place in our daily routine. Cross the street to the ice-cream stand, weighing whether to enjoy one scoop or two, but only after you remember Wilhelm Böttcher, the widower with a wooden leg who, rather than finger other gay Berliners, killed himself in September 1936 in the Alexanderplatz jail two weeks after police took him into custody. Fill out a transfer slip at the bank on the corner, and you do so steps from where, a month apart in early 1943, the Jewish cousins Ruth Gerstel and Erwin Rones were detained and deported, Schicksal ???, fate unknown, their stone tells us. Approach the threshold of the nearest chain store to buy sundries, and you’re reminded that a tailor and postal worker named Martin Jaffé, who performed six years of forced labor at a chemical plant in nearby Tempelhof, lived here in a third-floor apartment before being arrested at work in February 1943—whereupon the Nazis, having decided to bring in captured Slavs from the east to replace Jews like Jaffé, sent him first to the ghetto at Theresienstadt and then to his death.

  Just around the corner from where we live, the stumbling stone nearest to us, ERNA WOLFF, deported on December 14, 1942, murdered in Auschwitz. No relation, as far as I know. And I really don’t know.

  My writ as a journalist often ran beyond sports, to how the games we play and watch spill into the world at large. So it’s hard not to see two events scheduled for the same day—the Berlin Marathon and the German election—as an invitation to find a spot along the marathon route a block from our apartment and riddle out what both mean.

  The procession begins with outriding cop cars, follows with the African favorites, and soon delivers the pack, its riot of color at odds with a slate-gray sky. This being Kreuzberg, no one gets a bigger cheer than the competitors the Nazis would have eliminated: the handcyclists and a man with one arm. To watch anyone run is to realize how much this enterprise of the legs depends on swinging whatever arms you have.

  Despite the breadth of candidates and parties on the ballot, most Germans regard today’s election as a binary choice. On one side stands Merkel, with her decision to welcome those million-plus refugees. Taking seriously the Christianity in the pedigree of her party, the Christian Democratic Union, she invoked the biblical injunction to welcome the stranger. Her mantra of Wir schaffen das—“We’ll manage it”—was an appeal to German practicality and willingness to tackle challenges. “I grew up behind a wall,” Merkel liked to say, “and have no desire to repeat the experience.” Her refugee policy was a spectacularly risky political choice, but it was the brave one, the righteous one, and, once asylum seekers had massed at the border, given German history, really the only one.

  On the other side there’s the Alternative for Germany. The AfD began as an anti-European protest movement and gained strength after Merkel led the European Union’s bailout of Greece. Soon the party became a catch basin for anyone with a gripe about immigrants, Islam, or the ostensibly uncontroversial matter of whether National Socialism should be held up as a national shame. Some party members no longer even bother to cloak their Nazi sympathies. A regional AfD official, Alexander Gauland, said, “If the French are rightly proud of their Emperor, and the Britons of Nelson and Churchill, we have the right to be proud of the achievements of German soldiers in two world wars.” Another, a judge from Saxony named Jens Maier, once called racially mixed people “unbearable” and said that Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist and anti-Islam extremist, “became a mass murderer out of pure desperation.”

  It’s a vocational tic of mine to be attuned to sports references: Of course, Gauland said, he cheered for Jérôme Boateng, the defender on the German national soccer team whose father comes from Ghana. But to have Boateng as a neighbor, Gauland went on to say—that would be another matter altogether.

  The AfD winds up capturing 13 percent of the vote, enough to qualify for representation in the Bundestag, the federal assembly, for the first time. But Merkel easily wins reelection as chancellor. Opinion polls suggest that Germany has built a firewall against extremism. Some 80 percent of the population identifies with the political center, almost 30 percent more than the French do. Historian Konrad Jarausch credits the Federal Republic’s extraordinary political stability to an aging generation of peace-prizing, centrist, small-d democrats, many of whom have faced up to what happened during the Nazi era and their own ancestors’ complicity in it. That a country so late to democracy, and until the mid-twentieth-century so apparently indifferent to it, is now its beau ideal, surely qualifies as “an irony of history.” The trauma of Nazism—and for those in the east, the ensuing oppression by the Stasi, the secret police of the German Democratic Republic—will do that to a people. Which leads me to conclude hopefully that, even with one impaired political limb, Germany can count on its others to keep moving forward.

  Three

  Technical Boy and the Deposed Sovereign

  Niko, 1921 to 1939

  Kurt, 1924 to 1933

  A child’s life in the Wolff home on Munich’s Königinstrasse came circumscribed and regimented. The upstairs nursery lay beyond a padded leather door with brass buttons and smelled of buffed linoleum and tar soap. Here Niko and his older sister, Maria, were confined, for this was the domain of the family nanny. Only occasionally did the children cross paths with some visiting literary figure, such as Rabindranath Tagore, who came by for lunch just before my father was born. “With his long grayish-white beard and great dignity he presented a most impressive figure,” Kurt would recall forty years later. “So that it seemed a completely natural error when my three-year-old daughter assumed God was paying us a visit, and settled contentedly in the lap of the Lord.”

  Except for the Sunday midday meal, the Wolff siblings ate apart from their parents and always a custom menu. Lunch might be Tafelspitz, boiled beef and spinach, which Niko would hamster in his cheeks until naptime gave him a chance to spit it out. Melanie Zieher, the nanny everyone called Bulle (Cop), was expected to enforce the rules: no water with meals, for it filled up the stomach before a child could be properly nourished; and strict adherence to Fletcherism, which calls for chewing food until it liquifies. With little salt in their diet, Maria and Niko sometimes took to licking the walls.

  Though she never married, Bulle once had to give up a baby for adoption. So she channeled unfulfilled maternal instincts into proxies, championing the children in their battles with Kurt and Elisabeth, sometimes slipping her charges food on the sly. “Bulle and Maria and I were in one camp,” Niko once told me. “My mother was in another. My father, we never saw.” Bulle, pictured here with her campmates, treated my father’s stuffed bear Zoschl—a gift from the Italian consul in Munich, a friend of my grandparents’, when Niko was three—as another child in her care.

  On a family trip during the mid-twenties, Kurt’s Buick broke down in the Bergell Valley of Switzerland’s Engadine, on a steep and narrow unpaved road up to the village of Soglio. Niko got out and beat the car angrily with his fists. Kurt the technophobe sat there in his characteristic way, white gloves unsoiled, confident a handy Samaritan would turn up. Someone always did.

  My father was curious about how things worked in a way his father wasn’t. Listening to the family gramophone, Niko strained to find the tiny instrumentalists inside. “Be still!” a photographer might say before pressing the bulb attached to his camera. “Watch for the birdie!” No birdie ever appeared, and logical little Niko came to regard photographers as loathsome con men. But suffering minor betrayals like these failed to subvert an otherwise cheerful constitution. Niko had few of the anarchic instincts of his sister. Wearing a Sunday dress for a walk through the English Garden, ten-year-old Maria once responded to the oohing and cooing of two elegant ladies by throwing herself into a mud puddle, rolling around, and popping up to scream, Schweine Dame! (Pig Lady!) A gap would soon open up between Kurt and Elisabeth, leading to divorce, and you could see the fracture in just such a moment, when Maria’s mother cringed and her father beamed at this behavioral equivalent of Expressionism. Scrawnier than his sister, unable to win Kurt’s favor the way she could, Niko was cursed with more than just being the beta male of the family­—­he was the beta sibling. Maria would invite her little brother to play a game of “Kurt Wolff Verlag,” insisting that she be Kurt Wolff; my father could join her only if he agreed to be Frau Hertlein and take dictation. Niko would object, but with the advantage of three years and more than a head in size, Maria got her way.