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 of the station, Mutti Merck died of a massive stroke.
To cease to remain “in a marriage” didn’t necessarily require a divorce, and over the near term the four still functioned as a nominal family, even vacationing together in the Engadine as late as Christmas 1930. Meanwhile, Elisabeth had won the heart of Dr. Albrecht, the obstetrician who had nursed her back to health following the stillbirth. Kurt’s diary records the jumble their lives had become before the split. February 5: E [Elisabeth], Albrecht, AvP [Annemarie von Puttkamer] . . . E with Albrecht. March 13: Evening with Albrecht. May 3: AvP brings Enoch.
On the morning of May 16, 1930, Elisabeth wrote in her diary, “Kurt breakfasts with me for the last time. At eight he drives off.” She called it “this worst of days.” A Darmstadt physician and psychoanalyst who had once treated Elisabeth for a case of nerves spent the afternoon with her in Munich’s botanical garden, sharing passages about reconciliation.
After Hans Albrecht made clear his wish to marry her, Elisabeth initiated the divorce, which was granted early the following year. To dissolve a marriage, one party was obliged to assume guilt and stipulate with whom the marriage vows had been broken. Kurt did so, but to protect the reputations of his socially prominent mistresses, a working-class woman took the fall with him. It’s unclear whether she had actually been one of his girlfriends or was simply cajoled or paid to testify in court. But the divorce decree states that Kurt confessed to engaging in an “unethical relationship with the baker’s wife Ida Pollinger . . . since the spring of 1930 by exchanging kisses and caresses.”
Niko and Maria might have suffered more from the split if it had been rancorous or if their parents had been a bigger part of their lives. Instead, they both seem to have pledged to make the best of their new circumstances. “Niko is a very secretive person,” his sister would tell me shortly before her death in 1996. “He never talks about things. He’s absolutely marvelous because he feels everything. We really were enriched by new people in our lives instead of thinking we had a broken home. We thought it was normal. As a child I wanted to get married twice and have a nice extended family.”
My grandmother formalized her relationship with Dr. Albrecht, seen here with a day’s harvest, in March 1931, and Niko and Maria joined them in a comfortable home in Munich’s Nymphenburg district. No one was surprised by the match: family members recalled Dr. Albrecht being a nervous wreck while delivering my father, so smitten was he by the woman who a decade later would become his wife.
Niko and Maria quickly warmed to their new stepfather. He played the violin and viola, painted watercolors, and had the informal manner of rural Bavaria. An amateur magician who belonged to Der Magische Zirkel, a magicians’ guild, he would go into private homes and perform tricks. With his stepchildren he shared stories from the delivery room, tales welcomed even more for how they discomfited their mother—including one about the frantic nurse who would meet him at the curb outside the hospital in the middle of the night and cry, Herr Doktor! Ihr Muttermund ist ein Fünf-Mark-Stück gross! (Her cervix is dilated to the size of a five-mark piece!)
As if to guard against all this uninhibited medical talk, Elisabeth
