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 broke down in the Bergell Valley of Switzerland’s Engadine, on a steep and narrow unpaved road up to the village of Soglio. Niko got out and beat the car angrily with his 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
