Yet a flip side to all this redounded to my father’s benefit. He didn’t yearn for the attention of remote or absent parents, not as palpably as his sister, who would sneak into her mother’s dressing room, shut herself in the wardrobe, and press silk against her face to luxuriate in its texture and scent. Niko grew up obliging and relatively angst-free, with a knack for self-amusement that others in the family came to envy. To be a budding homo faber among aesthetes—the son of a man who wouldn’t deign to pick up a hammer and chisel unless he needed to open a case of wine—left plenty of running room to define oneself. So Niko took apart clocks to see how they worked and, satisfied, put them back together. One time he dismantled and reassembled his mother’s sewing machine and got it to work with a part to spare. “You will win the Nobel Prize someday,” Maria announced, “and support me in my old age!” In time Niko would come around to books and painting and music, but for the moment none could compete with gadgets and cars and planes. When Bulle had enough of taking him to the Deutsches Museum to ogle the locomotives and flying machines, the family hired others to do it.

  My grandparents spent the spring of 1925 in the Villa Cantagalli, a rental in the Florentine suburb of Fiesole, where the Italian artist Felice Casorati painted these portraits. Those months would constitute the last extended idyll of Niko and Maria’s childhood as an intact family. Somewhere over the Tuscan hills, beyond that garden wall by which Elisabeth sits, a storm is about to break.

  The following year Kurt auctioned off another tranche of his first editions and incunabula. The sale grossed more than 375,000 Reichsmarks, roughly $1.26 million today, a nut he would rely on for nearly twenty years, until he finally earned a steady income again. For all of Kurt’s delight in life’s pleasures, the hyperinflation­—­“to see wealth just melt away before your eyes,” as my uncle Christian puts it—had taught him caution with money. Yet the worldwide economic collapse of 1929 would soon leave his firm financially spent. And sandwiched around the crash came two unravelings of the most intimate kind.

  “I want to share something wonderful with you,” Elisabeth wrote her widowed mother, Clara Merck, just after Christmas 1928. “This summer we’ll be welcoming a long-anticipated visitor, a sibling for Maria and Niko. I look unspeakably forward to this child, whom we’ve wanted for years, even if we have some serious concerns, about which we’ll want to speak to you face-to-face.”

  Those concerns might have been business ones, given that Kurt had by now largely halted his publishing activities. They might have been anxieties over Elisabeth’s ability to bring another child to term, for she had just turned thirty-eight and, after giving birth to my father seven years earlier, been hospitalized with a renal pelvis inflammation. What she’s probably not alluding to, but was real nonetheless, is the wobbly state of their union.

  Soon after his wedding, Kurt had begun a faithful correspondence with his mother-in-law. The two exchanged scores of letters over the next two decades, and Kurt came to rely on Clara’s advice. At the end of February 1929, Kurt wrote her about her daughter’s pregnancy. “Elisabeth hasn’t felt herself over the past weeks,” he reported. “Since Monday she’s been flat on her back with a fever and frightful case of the flu.” A week later: “Things aren’t developing according to our hopes, and Elisabeth’s illness is proceeding downright unfavorably.” And two weeks after that: “She’s had a case of bleeding, which given her condition is of particular concern. As a precaution the obstetrician sent her to the hospital.”

  The ordeal ended two days later, on March 21. “Today I must share my latest letter, full of horrible news,” Kurt wrote Clara. “Early today, more than forty hours of labor resulted in a stillbirth. (It would have been a baby boy, Dr. Albrecht told me.)”

  I never knew I’d lost an uncle. But then my father never told me, and I’d never asked.

  My grandmother wound up spending two more months in the hospital recovering from sepsis.

  Years later Kurt would describe a feeling of imprisonment early in his marriage, crystallized one evening when he came home from the office to find Elisabeth waiting at the door. For her part, my grandmother told Maria much later, “I was too young. I didn’t understand him.”

  It’s unclear exactly when Kurt began to conduct affairs with other women, and there seems to be a question about what kind of philanderer he was—one who liked to maintain a brace of girlfriends, or one in it for the thrill of the hunt and then ready to move on. Support for the first theory comes from a cousin who tells of how Kurt would regularly assemble mistresses for coffee in the lobby of a Munich hotel and lead the conversation, inquiring after each in a roundelay of solicitude. (These Kaffeeklatsch signaled that, lest there be any misunderstanding, each woman was on an equal footing, and it was not a full-time domestic one.) Support for the second theory comes from another cousin, who says Kurt’s nocturnal activities on lengthy railroad journeys earned him the nickname Night Train.

  He may have embodied both types. And in his own mind Kurt seems to have been less a predator than an ingratiator. “If another person’s good qualities far outshine one’s own, there is no recourse but love,” goes one of his favorite quotes from Goethe. It’s the creed of the impresario, of someone who wants to lift others up. Yet those words might also be read as lending polyamory a sheen of inevitability. Maria once told me that Kurt, late in his life, confessed to her that he would have been a better publisher if not for all the women, for they took up so much time. “It was never the making love,” she said. “It was the seduction. And he hated to be alone.”

  His affairs led to one out-of-wedlock child—and only one, as far as I know. On July 7, 1926—five years to the day after my father was born—Annemarie von Puttkamer, a translator for the firm and a sister of an old World War I friend of Kurt’s named Jesko von Puttkamer, gave birth to a son she named Enoch. No one was more excited for Annemarie, pictured here, than my grandmother. She made a baby gift of a layette set, unaware that her gesture was dedicated to the child of her husband’s mistress. But the truth would become clear soon enough.

  Sometime in the late spring of 1929, soon after Elisabeth had recovered, Kurt told his wife that he didn’t want to remain “in a marriage.” During Clara Merck’s visit to Munich that June, the couple shared news of their impending split, and my great-grandmother took it especially hard. On the morning of June 15, Kurt drove his mother-in-law to Munich’s main station and settled her into a train compartment for her trip back to Darmstadt. Before the train pulled out of the station, Mutti Merck died of a massive stroke.

  To cease to remain “in a marriage” didn’t necessarily require a divorce, and over the near term the four still functioned as a nominal family, even vacationing together in the Engadine as late as Christmas 1930. Meanwhile, Elisabeth had won the heart of Dr. Albrecht, the obstetrician who had nursed her back to health following the stillbirth. Kurt’s diary records the jumble their lives had become before the split. February 5: E [Elisabeth], Albrecht, AvP [Annemarie von Puttkamer] . . . E with Albrecht. March 13: Evening with Albrecht. May 3: AvP brings Enoch.

  On the morning of May 16, 1930, Elisabeth wrote in her diary, “Kurt breakfasts with me for the last time. At eight he drives off.” She called it “this worst of days.” A Darmstadt physician and psychoanalyst who had once treated Elisabeth for a case of nerves spent the afternoon with her in Munich’s botanical garden, sharing passages about reconciliation.

  After Hans Albrecht made clear his wish to marry her, Elisabeth initiated the divorce, which was granted early the following year. To dissolve a marriage, one party was obliged to assume guilt and stipulate with whom the marriage vows had been broken. Kurt did so, but to protect the reputations of his socially prominent mistresses, a working-class woman took the fall with him. It’s unclear whether she had actually been one of his girlfriends or was simply cajoled or paid to testify in court. But the divorce decree states that Kurt confessed to engaging in an “unethical relationship with the baker’s wife Ida Pollinger . . . since the spring of 1930 by exchanging kisses and caresses.”

  Niko and Maria might have suffered more from the split if it had been rancorous or if their parents had been a bigger part of their lives. Instead, they both seem to have pledged to make the best of their new circumstances. “Niko is a very secretive person,” his sister would tell me shortly before her death in 1996. “He never talks about things. He’s absolutely marvelous because he feels everything. We really were enriched by new people in our lives instead of thinking we had a broken home. We thought it was normal. As a child I wanted to get married twice and have a nice extended family.”

  My grandmother formalized her relationship with Dr. Albrecht, seen here with a day’s harvest, in March 1931, and Niko and Maria joined them in a comfortable home in Munich’s Nymphenburg district. No one was surprised by the match: family members recalled Dr. Albrecht being a nervous wreck while delivering my father, so smitten was he by the woman who a decade later would become his wife.

  Niko and Maria quickly warmed to their new stepfather. He played the violin and viola, painted watercolors, and had the informal manner of rural Bavaria. An amateur magician who belonged to Der Magische Zirkel, a magicians’ guild, he would go into private homes and perform tricks. With his stepchildren he shared stories from the delivery room, tales welcomed even more for how they discomfited their mother—including one about the frantic nurse who would meet him at the curb outside the hospital in the middle of the night and cry, Herr Doktor! Ihr Muttermund ist ein Fünf-Mark-Stück gross! (Her cervix is dilated to the size of a five-mark piece!)

  As if to guard against all this uninhibited medical talk, Elisabeth threw herself into Christian Science, assigning her children passages by Mary Baker Eddy and dragging them to services at the Tonhalle. Yet Maria continued to act out, and in 1931 she was expelled from boarding school. Her mother and father were so absorbed in their own lives that neither bothered to fetch her from Munich’s main station, and as a thirteen-year-old she was left to schlep her suitcases home by herself.

  Meanwhile, as an expectant little Bildungsbürger, Niko began to work toward his Abitur at Munich’s Maximilians-­Gymnasium. Student and school made for a poor match. Niko turned in homework only on cold or rainy days when, riding the tram instead of walking, he could do assignments en route.

  By now Germany had begun its march toward fascism. In March 1933 came the Enabling Act, an amendment to the Weimar constitution passed after the Reichstag fire that granted Hitler broad lawmaking power without any parliamentary restraints. In August 1934 my father and his mother were vacationing in Switzerland when word reached them that German president Paul von Hindenburg was dead, and Hitler had declared himself Führer. A year later the Nazis pushed through the Nuremberg Laws at their annual party rally in that city. At a stroke, 450,000 German Jews were reduced from citizens to “state subjects.” But another 50,000 Germans—those descended from Jews who had undergone conversions­—­posed a dilemma. The Nazis regarded Jewishness as a racial construct, so they were unimpressed by baptisms, like those of Kurt’s maternal grandparents, unless an act of Christian affirmation had taken place no further back than one’s great-grandparents. Nonetheless, if you were what the Nazis called a “Mischling,” or a German of mixed background—whether a “first-degree Mischling,” with one parent of Jewish descent, like Kurt, or a “second-degree Mischling,” like Niko—you could for the moment retain your citizenship, even if the Nazis didn’t regard you as belonging fully to the German race and nation.

  That same year, after he repeated the equivalent of sixth grade, Niko and the Max-Gymnasium had become exasperated with each other. “The student failed to bring to bear even a modicum of diligence and was wholly indifferent to every subject,” reads his report card from the end of the 1934–35 school year. “Despite having repeated the grade, he met the standard by the barest of margins.”

  All parties were relieved when Niko, now fourteen, left the following fall for Landheim Schondorf, a boarding school on Bavaria’s Ammersee. There he flourished. Latin and math came leavened with instruction in sailing and photography and the chance to design and build theater sets. He entered a contest to come up with a logo for a publishing house called Bruckmann, and his entry—an intertwined bridge (Brücke) and man (Mann)—won first prize. “He got on well at Schondorf, intellectually and physically,” Maria once told me. “And out of the shadow of his sister. With no malicious intent, I terrorized him.”

  By 1939, Niko’s mother would take the Schondorf directory and mark swastikas next to the names of a handful of students with prominent Nazi parents. Those notations survive today, indicating the children of Elk Eber, the painter who glorified National Socialist themes; Hermann Boehm, the admiral from Kiel; and Ernst Boepple, the SS-Oberführer who would be hanged in Krakow in 1950 for his role in implementing the Holocaust in occupied Poland. But at the time Niko enrolled, Schondorf was still a relative refuge from the Gleichschaltung, the Nazification of so much of German life. The school had a headmaster devoted to Bildung and could count a number of “Mischlinge” in its student body.

  Nonetheless, after dinner on Wednesday evenings my father would pull on a brown uniform and swastika armband and, under the leadership of an older student, go off to the weekly meeting, known as Heimabend, with the school’s Hitler Youth troop. “They indoctrinated us with crap, with distorted history, half-truths about World War I, that Germany had been overrun and stabbed in the back,” he once told me. “Antisemitic stuff and innuendo. You had to pretend to like it or you’d get your parents or the school in trouble.”

  Niko recalled several students of more fully Jewish descent than he who weren’t allowed to take part: “We envied them, of course.”

  However he conducted his personal life, my grandfather hewed to a strict code as he wound down his business. On June 23, 1930, he wrote to Werfel:

  I cannot, I will not keep the Kurt Wolff Verlag going. . . . The firm has exhausted me, both physically and materially; for the past six years I have been slowly bleeding to death. When the inflation ended and the mark became stable again, I was left with no cash assets . . . but I did have an immense stockpile of books, most of them printed on paper of poor quality. At first sales continued to be good, and this misled me to believe, like so many others, that I had a large operation requiring a large staff. And obviously I also felt that the employees who had stood by me during the hard times of inflation should be kept on as long as possible. . . . There was no cash; the vast majority of the books we had in stock were not selling well, since the public’s taste had changed so thoroughly. . . . I refuse to declare bankruptcy, even though these days that is not considered a dishonorable step, nor am I inclined to do what so many of my colleagues have done and become a front man for the manipulations of my creditors, printers, and bookbinders. What money I had of my own is gone. . . . I will sell off enough to get us out of debt (that, actually, is the case already, since we never failed to pay what we owed and do not intend to do so now).

  “Why did I stop?” Kurt later asked in a note to himself. “There was nothing new in sight. No sign of anything new.” He had made a living off, or a kind of life out of, the new or exotic: Expressionism, Tagore, Fletcherism. Some of the books he published sold briskly right away. But after five years, half of his eight-hundred-copy printing of Kafka’s first standalone book remained warehoused, and many other writers—Musil, Roth, Robert Walser—took years to find a following. Kurt published them just the same, as if each were a bond scheduled to mature ten, twenty, fifty years on, time-lapse vindications of his judgment. “That so many of his authors are now part of [the] canon,” the Times Literary Supplement wrote in 1970, “gave Kurt Wolff the right to claim that he had balanced out any mistakes into which enthusiasm might have led him.”

  My grandfather doesn’t specify what accounted for the public’s changing taste. But the Nazis would soon implement the Gleichschaltung, and many of the events that fueled their rise, including the crash of 1929, also jeopardized the book business at large and Kurt’s firm in particular. Together these circumstances left my grandfather, as another German publisher put it years later, “like a deposed sovereign after a revolution.”

  He and his old wingman from Leipzig commiserated in an exchange of letters. In March 1930, Werfel urged Kurt to hold fast to what they had once shared. “The Kurt Wolff Verlag was the literary instrument of the last poetic movement to exist in Germany,” he wrote. “Regardless of how highly or lowly esteemed its names are today, one thing is clear, that these were poetic-minded people, the last poets to be sacrificed to the war.— The world we see today is so altered that only a look backward from some point in the future could do justice to this movement to which we both belonged.”

  Even as he let employees go over the course of the decade, in 1925 Kurt hired the person who would change the course of his life and, ultimately, make a significant impact on the publishing business in America.

  Helen Mosel, my step-grandmother, was born in 1906 in Vranjska Banja, a spa town in southern Serbia. Her mother, Josephine Fischhof, was a Viennese-born journalist; her father, Ludwig (Louis) Mosel, an engineer from the Rhineland, had been sent to the Ottoman Empire to work on the electrification of Turkey. Afraid that Helen and her three younger siblings would be exposed to cholera in public schools, her parents hired private tutors. Helen was reading by age four. Born with one leg shorter than the other, she walked with a slight limp, but that only encouraged her immersion in books and the languages to be unlocked in their pages.