Endpapers. Alexander Wolff
war, writing the author that he feared its gruesome subject would be too “painful” for readers. In fact, Kurt knew that this book too would have run afoul of the censors. “Your criticism of the painful element accords completely with my opinion, but then I feel the same way about almost everything I have written so far,” Kafka had replied. “Have you noticed how few things are free of this painful element in one form or another?”
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