Yet Maria continued to act out, and in 1931 she was expelled from boarding school. Her mother and father were so absorbed in their own lives that neither bothered to fetch her from Munich’s main station, and as a thirteen-year-old she was left to schlep her suitcases home by herself.
Meanwhile, as an expectant little Bildungsbürger, Niko began to work toward his Abitur at Munich’s Maximilians-Gymnasium. Student and school made for a poor match. Niko turned in homework only on cold or rainy days when, riding the tram instead of walking, he could do assignments en route.
By now Germany had begun its march toward fascism. In March 1933 came the Enabling Act, an amendment to the Weimar constitution passed after the Reichstag fire that granted Hitler broad lawmaking power without any parliamentary restraints. In August 1934 my father and his mother were vacationing in Switzerland when word reached them that German president Paul von Hindenburg was dead, and Hitler had declared himself Führer. A year later the Nazis pushed through the Nuremberg Laws at their annual party rally in that city. At a stroke, 450,000 German Jews were reduced from citizens to “state subjects.” But another 50,000 Germans—those descended from Jews who had undergone conversions—posed a dilemma. The Nazis regarded Jewishness as a racial construct, so they were unimpressed by baptisms, like those of Kurt’s maternal grandparents, unless an act of Christian affirmation had taken place no further back than one’s great-grandparents. Nonetheless, if you were what the Nazis called a “Mischling,” or a German of mixed background—whether a “first-degree Mischling,” with one parent of Jewish descent, like Kurt, or a “second-degree Mischling,” like Niko—you could for the moment retain your citizenship, even if the Nazis didn’t regard you as belonging fully to the German race and nation.
That same year, after he repeated the equivalent of sixth grade, Niko and the Max-Gymnasium had become exasperated with each other. “The student failed to bring to bear even a modicum of diligence and was wholly indifferent to every subject,” reads his report card from the end of the 1934–35 school year. “Despite having repeated the grade, he met the standard by the barest of margins.”
All parties were relieved when Niko, now fourteen, left the following fall for Landheim Schondorf, a boarding school on Bavaria’s Ammersee. There he flourished. Latin and math came leavened with instruction in sailing and photography and the chance to design and build theater sets. He entered a contest to come up with a logo for a publishing house called Bruckmann, and his entry—an intertwined bridge (Brücke) and man (Mann)—won first prize. “He got on well at Schondorf, intellectually and physically,” Maria once told me. “And out of the shadow of his sister. With no malicious intent, I terrorized him.”
By 1939, Niko’s mother would take the Schondorf directory and mark swastikas next to the names of a handful of students with prominent Nazi parents. Those notations survive today, indicating the children of Elk Eber, the painter who glorified National Socialist themes; Hermann Boehm, the admiral from Kiel; and Ernst Boepple, the SS-Oberführer who would be hanged in Krakow in 1950 for his role in implementing the Holocaust in occupied Poland. But at the time Niko enrolled, Schondorf was still a relative refuge from the Gleichschaltung, the Nazification of so much of German life. The school had a headmaster devoted to Bildung and could count a number of “Mischlinge” in its student body.
Nonetheless, after dinner on Wednesday evenings my father would pull on a brown uniform and swastika armband and, under the leadership of an older student, go off to the weekly meeting, known as Heimabend, with the school’s Hitler Youth troop. “They indoctrinated us with crap, with distorted history, half-truths about World War I, that Germany had been overrun and stabbed in the back,” he once told me. “Antisemitic stuff and innuendo. You had to pretend to like it or you’d get your parents or the school in trouble.”
Niko recalled several students of more fully Jewish descent than he who weren’t allowed to take part: “We envied them, of course.”
However he conducted his personal life, my grandfather hewed to a strict code as he wound down his business. On June 23, 1930, he wrote to Werfel:
I cannot, I will not keep the Kurt Wolff Verlag going. . . . The firm has exhausted me, both physically and materially; for the past six years I have been slowly bleeding to death. When the inflation ended and the mark became stable again, I was left with no cash assets . . . but I did have an immense stockpile of books, most of them printed on paper of poor quality. At first sales continued to be good, and this misled me to believe, like so many others, that I had a large operation requiring a large staff. And obviously I also felt that the employees who had stood by me during the hard times of inflation should be kept on as long as possible. . . . There was no cash; the vast majority of the books we had in stock were not selling well, since the public’s taste had changed so thoroughly. . . . I refuse to declare bankruptcy, even though these days that is not considered a dishonorable step, nor am I inclined to do what so many of my colleagues have done and become a front man for the manipulations of my creditors, printers, and bookbinders. What money I had of my own is gone. . . . I will sell off enough to get us out of debt (that, actually, is the case already, since we never failed to pay what we owed and do not intend to do so now).
“Why did I stop?” Kurt later asked in a note to himself. “There was nothing new in sight. No sign of anything new.” He had made a living off, or a kind of life out of, the new or exotic: Expressionism, Tagore, Fletcherism. Some of the books he published sold briskly right away. But after five years, half of his eight-hundred-copy printing of Kafka’s first standalone book remained warehoused, and many other writers—Musil, Roth, Robert Walser—took years to find a following. Kurt published them just the same, as if each were a bond scheduled to mature ten, twenty, fifty years on, time-lapse vindications of his judgment. “That so many of his authors are now part of [the] canon,” the Times Literary Supplement wrote in 1970, “gave Kurt Wolff the right to claim that he had balanced out any mistakes into which enthusiasm might have led him.”
My grandfather doesn’t specify what accounted for the public’s changing taste. But the Nazis would soon implement the Gleichschaltung, and many of the events that fueled their rise, including the crash of 1929, also jeopardized the book business at large and Kurt’s firm in particular. Together these circumstances left my grandfather, as another German publisher put it years later, “like a deposed sovereign after a revolution.”
He and his old wingman from Leipzig commiserated in an exchange of letters. In March 1930, Werfel urged Kurt to hold fast to what they had once shared. “The Kurt Wolff Verlag was the literary instrument of the last poetic movement to exist in Germany,” he wrote. “Regardless of how highly or lowly esteemed its names are today, one thing is clear, that these were poetic-minded people, the last poets to be sacrificed to the war.— The world we see today is so altered that only a look backward from some point in the future could do justice to this movement to which we both belonged.”
Even as he let employees go over the course of the decade, in 1925 Kurt hired the person who would change the course of his life and, ultimately, make a significant impact on the publishing business in America.
Helen Mosel, my step-grandmother, was born in 1906 in Vranjska Banja, a spa town in southern Serbia. Her mother, Josephine Fischhof, was a Viennese-born journalist; her father, Ludwig (Louis) Mosel, an engineer from the Rhineland, had been sent to the Ottoman Empire to work on the electrification of Turkey. Afraid that Helen and her three younger siblings would be exposed to cholera in public schools, her parents hired private tutors. Helen was reading by age four. Born with one leg shorter than the other, she walked with a slight limp, but that only encouraged her immersion in books and the languages to be unlocked in their pages.
Soon after the outbreak of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and ’13, Helen’s parents split up. Louis eventually abandoned the family entirely, and Helen would vow not to bring his name up again. Josephine moved with the children first to Vienna, then to Berlin, and in 1918, with World War I ongoing and food scarce, to the
