Soon after the outbreak of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and ’13, Helen’s parents split up. Louis eventually abandoned the family entirely, and Helen would vow not to bring his name up again. Josephine moved with the children first to Vienna, then to Berlin, and in 1918, with World War I ongoing and food scarce, to the Bavarian countryside. Amidst this vagabonding childhood and the instability of her parents’ marriage, books helped provide Helen with the ballast to turn herself into a precocious young woman.

  In 1920 her mother enrolled Helen as a day student, and one of the first females, at Schondorf, the same Bavarian boarding school Niko would attend. By fifteen she had mastered English and French and read through many of the classics, so the school pushed her several grades ahead. At seventeen she benefited from the patronage of a few wealthy families near Frankfurt, who learned of her through a school connection and hired her as a nanny and governess. One employer—the mother of a schoolmate­—­also knew Kurt and helped arrange a three-month position as an unpaid trainee with his firm. Helen went on to work as his secretary; as an editor for Pegasus Press, the Paris-based art-book house that had absorbed what was left of Pantheon Casa Editrice; and then, after that firm also ran into financial trouble, as a translator for a UNESCO-like bureau at the League of Nations in Geneva.

  By the fall of 1928, Helen’s name appears more and more often in Kurt’s diary, in entries datelined Grenoble, Menton, Nice, Paris. For much of that year and the next, the two traveled together through France, as well as England, Spain, Switzerland, and North Africa. In letters to her family she makes clear that a love affair has begun, albeit one encumbered by uncertainty. Kurt continued to avail himself of a range of women, most of higher social standing and from more comfortable circumstances than those of his penniless, twenty-two-year-old protégée. Helen had to content herself with “scraps of time,” she wrote her brother Georg in March 1930—“torn, secret, every word heartfelt, but always knowing the car could stop at the corner a couple of minutes from now and it will all be over.”

  As she realized how much Kurt was beginning to rely on her emotionally, Helen more firmly reconciled herself to his liaisons with other women. “It’s better to spend one week a year with someone like [Kurt], and the rest alone, than to compromise and not be alone for the whole year,” she wrote Georg the following September. “One doesn’t need to own one’s loved one; one has to love that person properly, so as to know each other, to be indestructibly connected by the power of emotion—then there’s no distance, no jealousy, no begrudging.” By the summer of 1931, Helen—pictured here during the early thirties in the south of France—had become the closest Kurt then had to a permanent partner.

  During their travels around Europe, Kurt and Helen had avoided Germany, which was “already gloomy and sickening,” Kurt wrote Walter Hasenclever in November 1931. “You can detect it within the first five minutes . . . [a] doomsday mood that has become a common mass psychosis.” Otherwise, Kurt wrote Werfel, “I rest, swim, go for walks. In the fall when fully rested, I may think about what to do next.”

  But what to do next was already weighing on him. Through the late twenties, eating and drinking too much, Kurt had put on almost thirty pounds. In letters he was now bemoaning his “agitation” and “debilitating fatigue.” To be so far from the arena was “paralytically exhausting . . . infinitely more difficult than any clearly defined active task.” In March 1931, he relayed to a friend, “how much I yearn for a reasonable job, commensurate with my capabilities and skills.”

  So when Kurt and Helen found their way to Berlin in early January 1933, it was specifically to pursue an opportunity for him with the foreign ministry’s Cultural Policy Department, a forerunner of the modern-day Goethe Institute. Moving into a pension on the Kurfürstendamm, they spent what would turn out to be their last weeks in Germany until after the war. Kurt made several visits to the dentist. He and Helen checked out apartments. They socialized with friends who shared their fear that the Nazis would gin up some pretext to abolish any check on their seizure of power. Roth, the former Kurt Wolff Verlag author, was then taking note of what he called the “periodical forest” sprouting in the kiosks of Potsdamer Platz: “The saplings are called the Völkischer Ratgeber, the Kampfbund, the Deutscher Ring, the Deutsches Tagblatt, and all are marked with the inevitable swastikas cut deeply these days into every bark.”

  If Kurt’s Jewish ancestry wasn’t enough to attract the Nazis’ attention, his patronage of “degenerate” art and literature ensured his status as their enemy. So with Hitler’s installation as chancellor on January 30, the cultural post with the foreign ministry became a nonstarter. Defeated, Kurt soon relocated with Helen from their Ku’damm pension to an artsy neighborhood in Friedenau, into the furnished apartment Hasenclever had just abandoned when he chose to light out for France. The plate by the doorbell was graced with the name of another prior tenant, a Sigrid Engström, whose “Aryan” appellation seemed to promise protection from incursions by SA thugs. “We are now in the midst of fascism,” Helen wrote her brother on February 17, the day they moved in. “Have you heard Hitler on the radio? It’s enough to make you cry. . . . I look forward to my arrest for impolitic statements about ‘the Führer,’ because one of these days I won’t be able to keep my mouth shut.”

  Nine days later Helen wrote her brother again, declaring that National Socialism promised a “lapse into barbarism,” under which she could scarcely imagine “room to live for a halfway decent person.” She added a diagnosis: “The original problem of the German people is that what is real is not enough for them. They don’t adapt to what is given; life leaves them bored, thus they throw it away. . . . Those for whom normalcy is insufficient always create chaos and destruction.”

  The Reichstag burned the following night, and Helen and Kurt listened as Nazi parliamentarian Hermann Göring ranted over the radio. “These are madmen,” Kurt barked. “Pack!”

  They left two days later, alighting in Paris, before continuing on to London, where on March 27 they married. In the meantime, from his home in Switzerland, Hermann Hesse sent Kurt a letter that must have come with a homing device to find him at some address. “The news is sad and strange,” Hesse wrote. “I lay [the newspapers] aside and try to remain unaffected by it all. There is no front one could join; everywhere one would have to espouse a creed of cannons and terror. But there is always the ‘Kingdom of God’ or the ‘universitas literarum’ or the ‘invisible church,’ whose doors remain open to us.”

  In front of the opera house on Berlin’s Bebelplatz that May, egged on by Brownshirts and with Goebbels’s blessing, students would make a bonfire of books, many of them from the catalog of the Kurt Wolff Verlag.

  How had Kurt known to flee? How would anyone know when to take such an irrevocable step, so shot full of capitulation and foreclosure? “Deciding whether to get out today or whether you’ve still got until tomorrow,” Bertolt Brecht would write, “requires the sort of intelligence with which you could have created an immortal masterpiece a few decades ago.” Whatever it was—self-preservationist genius or some primal survival instinct—Kurt, now with Helen, would call on that intuition again and again.

  My father had no sense yet of having been left behind. Over school vacations he and Maria would now travel to one Mediterranean idyll or another to visit their father and his new wife, whom they both took to right away. For Niko, boarding school came with the hallmarks of a civilized Germany, those Hitler Youth meetings notwithstanding. At Schondorf a teenage boy could still cultivate learning and arts and crafts, oblivious to the gathering doom.

  “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” wrote Hannah Arendt, a friend of Kurt and Helen’s, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience), and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought), no longer exists.”

  What Arendt pays less attention to in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism is the complicity of the deceived in their own deception. Today citizens of Germany and the United States presumably have agency to inspect and sort the fruits of a free press. But under the Nazis many Germans were content to let propaganda distract and mislead them. With the help of Sebastian Haffner, the journalist who spent much of his exile trying to explain the Nazi phenomenon, it’s worth exploring why.

  My father’s first years of sentient childhood fell during the Stresemann era, Germany’s interval of calm between 1924 and 1929, which historians have named after the country’s sure-handed foreign minister. But a generation of German men born just after 1900 were maladapted to this normalcy. They had grown up treating dispatches from the front as if they were sports scores, and then—after Versailles, during the Weimar-era hyperinflation—watched their mothers and young wives fill laundry baskets with cash simply to go to market. Through the decade beginning in 1914, this cohort had been trained, Haffner explains, to have

  the entire content of their lives delivered gratis, so to speak, by the public sphere, all the raw material for their deeper emotions, for love and hate, for joy and sorrow, but also all their sensations and thrills—accompanied though they might be by poverty, hunger, death, chaos, and peril. Now that these deliveries suddenly ceased, people were left helpless, impoverished, robbed, and disappointed. They had never learned to live from within themselves, how to make an ordinary private life great, beautiful, and worthwhile, how to enjoy it and make it interesting. So they regarded the end of the political tension and the return of private liberty not as a gift, but as a deprivation.

  This would not be the case for my father and his Bildungsbürger family. But most Germans in the half generation Niko looked up at felt wrong-footed by the postwar era, and that experience scarred and radicalized many of them. Haffner again:

  Only a certain cultured class—not particularly small, but a minority of course—used to find, and still finds, similar sustenance and pleasure in books and music, in independent thought and the creation of a personal “philosophy.” . . . Outside this cultured class, the great danger of life in Germany has always been emptiness and boredom. . . .

  The menace of monotony hangs, as it has always hung, over the great plains of northern and eastern Germany, with their colorless towns and their all too industrious, efficient, and conscientious businesses and organizations. With it comes a horror vacui and the yearning for “salvation”: through alcohol, through superstition or, best of all, through a vast, overpowering, cheap mass intoxication.

  You can apply these words to some of the same parts of Germany today. There, descendants of the people Haffner referred to find their lives subsumed once more by a menacing monotony. Fear, hate, or some other base motivation rushes in to fill the vacui in their lives, and they turn on the thin scattering of immigrants among them.

  Haffner believed he knew what accounted for this. “In animals [it] is called ‘breeding,’” he wrote. “This is a solid inner kernel that cannot be shaken by external pressures and forces, something noble and steely, a reserve of pride, principle and dignity to be drawn on in the hour of trial. It is missing in the Germans. As a nation they are soft, unreliable, and without backbone.”

  Albert Einstein also remarked on the “inborn servility” of the German people, and more than three decades before the Nazis’ rise to power described his countrymen as being under the spell of Autoritätsdusel, a foolish faith in authority that he considered “the worst enemy of truth.”

  On this, Einstein and Arendt—German exiles turned Americans, one a physicist who sounded an early warning, the other a philosopher who performed a postmortem—agreed. In the end and above all, what matters is truth.

  After Günter Demnig, the Berlin artisan who engraves and lays virtually every brass Stolperstein himself, learned that his father flew bombing missions during the war, Demnig refused to speak to him for five years.

  It never occurred to me to force so pointed a reckoning with my own father. But I find myself hunting for evidence that, given a choice, my ancestors made one I can be proud of. At the same time I’m skeptical of any story that casts some relative in a virtuous light, for each raises the question: Has it survived the years only because it’s flattered by the perspective of history?

  Maria once told me of her first inkling that something horrific was going on. One day in the late thirties, Hans Albrecht’s brother-in-law, then the director of a Munich hospital, came by Hans and Elisabeth’s home in an agitated mood. Two SS officers had just brought in a couple of ailing men and insisted on remaining in the operating room for the requisite procedures. He believed the patients were inmates at Dachau, and that the SS was afraid of what they might say under anesthesia.

  Maria shared a second story, a kind of bookend to the first. During the fall of 1944 she was driving her mother to the Tegernsee, south of Munich, on a day so warm and clear that they left the top down on the car. Hearing an air-raid siren near Sauerlach, they stopped to take cover in the shade of trees by the roadside. “Suddenly we spotted three men with shaved heads creeping around in the brush,” Maria told me. “We called out ‘Don’t be afraid’ in English and French. They told us they had escaped from Dachau.”

  Hustling the fugitives into their car, they drove off, praying they wouldn’t be pulled over. They headed for the nearby home of the widow of a Munich doctor, a woman named Uschi, whom they knew and trusted, because her anti-Nazi sympathies had surfaced during a visit several months earlier, shortly after the abortive attempt on Hitler’s life. Uschi fed the escapees and let them bathe before sending them off toward the Swiss border in civilian clothes and with a map.

  Or so goes this story passed down to me. “True heroism in such times takes place not only on the battlefields,” Helen had written Maria from New York in early 1940, “but works in those souls who still try to live as if there were some eternity, and an accountability to that eternity.”

  With those words Helen had put Maria on a kind of notice. And my aunt and grandmother seem to have indeed performed an act of bravery and decency that day in the Bavarian countryside. But if I allow myself to feel good that several ancestors bucked the Nazis, how am I to feel upon learning of those who didn’t?

  When Günter Demnig fields a request for a Stolperstein, it’s more likely to come from the descendants of perpetrators than the families of victims. This seems to me to be a just and salutary thing. Whether a memorial takes the form of a lone stumbling stone in the sidewalk or a more expansive Gedenkstätte, a place of reflection, these impositions of the past unsettle the contemporary conscience. We are raised to regard shame as something to avoid or bury—to not speak about. But shame can be a great animating, activating force if we let it. “Detached from the question of guilt, [shame] seizes anyone who lets themselves be seized,” the German scholar, activist, and philanthropist Jan Philipp Reemtsma has written. “To waken and practice consciousness and shame—that is the reason for these monuments.”

  As I try to construct a frame in which to fit discoveries that lie in wait for me, it’s worth considering a few guidelines for what looking back at a Nazi past isn’t and is about—or at least ought to be about. For those of us in successor generations, it isn’t a matter of collective guilt so much as collective responsibility. And the point of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung isn’t just to remember but also to confront and engage and respond. As the political philosopher Susan Neiman puts it in her book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, “You cannot choose your inheritance any more than you can choose your parents. You can only choose your relationship to them.”

  If only Americans were as scrupulous and imaginative in the excavation of our past. To take up our most shameful historical chapters wouldn’t be to perform penance, exactly, for penance, voluntary and self-imposed, usually follows from some sort of personal implication. Germans who today underwrite Stolpersteine that memorialize people they never knew are engaging in atonement, an act of repair—but that doesn’t fully capture what I have in mind either. To alight on what feels right, it’s worth turning over the topsoil around the German word Erbsünde, which means both original sin and inherited sin, double duty that highlights the binding of one generation to another. Perhaps there we could find the basis for an American Erinnerungskultur (remembrance culture) that puts a current-day frame around a Confederate monument and regards the Stars and Bars as a homegrown swastika.

  Since 1993 a museum of and memorial to the Holocaust has stood steps from the Mall in Washington, DC. It’s telling that, until the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in 2011, the US capital had nothing resembling a prominent and standalone Gedenkstätte related to slavery and racial violence.

  Four

  Mediterranean Refuge

  Kurt and Niko, 1931 to 1938

  Beginning in 1931, Niko and Maria spent four summers in the south of France, where their father lined up a succession of rentals. It would be their only extended time with Kurt during this span. As the train carrying the Wolff children clattered its way from Munich, cold and order gave way to the sunshine and languor that has long fueled the German yearning for the south. They would use their small fingers to manipulate the signage on the toilet doors, switching VACANT TO ENGAGED and delighting in the lines that formed at the ends of the cars. During station stops Niko might get off to run the platform, boarding again only after the train began to move, mortifying their chaperone, their mother’s Jewish friend Elisabeth Krämer.