Endpapers. Alexander Wolff
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.
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