Endpapers. Alexander Wolff
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.
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