In 1920 her mother enrolled Helen as a day student, and one of the first females, at Schondorf, the same Bavarian boarding school Niko would attend. By fifteen she had mastered English and French and read through many of the classics, so the school pushed her several grades ahead. At seventeen she benefited from the patronage of a few wealthy families near Frankfurt, who learned of her through a school connection and hired her as a nanny and governess. One employer—the mother of a schoolmate—also knew Kurt and helped arrange a three-month position as an unpaid trainee with his firm. Helen went on to work as his secretary; as an editor for Pegasus Press, the Paris-based art-book house that had absorbed what was left of Pantheon Casa Editrice; and then, after that firm also ran into financial trouble, as a translator for a UNESCO-like bureau at the League of Nations in Geneva.
By the fall of 1928, Helen’s name appears more and more often in Kurt’s diary, in entries datelined Grenoble, Menton, Nice, Paris. For much of that year and the next, the two traveled together through France, as well as England, Spain, Switzerland, and North Africa. In letters to her family she makes clear that a love affair has begun, albeit one encumbered by uncertainty. Kurt continued to avail himself of a range of women, most of higher social standing and from more comfortable circumstances than those of his penniless, twenty-two-year-old protégée. Helen had to content herself with “scraps of time,” she wrote her brother Georg in March 1930—“torn, secret, every word heartfelt, but always knowing the car could stop at the corner a couple of minutes from now and it will all be over.”
As she realized how much Kurt was beginning to rely on her emotionally, Helen more firmly reconciled herself to his liaisons with other women. “It’s better to spend one week a year with someone like [Kurt], and the rest alone, than to compromise and not be alone for the whole year,” she wrote Georg the following September. “One doesn’t need to own one’s loved one; one has to love that person properly, so as to know each other, to be indestructibly connected by the power of emotion—then there’s no distance, no jealousy, no begrudging.” By the summer of 1931, Helen—pictured here during the early thirties in the south of France—had become the closest Kurt then had to a permanent partner.
During their travels around Europe, Kurt and Helen had avoided Germany, which was “already gloomy and sickening,” Kurt wrote Walter Hasenclever in November 1931. “You can detect it within the first five minutes . . . [a] doomsday mood that has become a common mass psychosis.” Otherwise, Kurt wrote Werfel, “I rest, swim, go for walks. In the fall when fully rested, I may think about what to do next.”
But what to do next was already weighing on him. Through the late twenties, eating and drinking too much, Kurt had put on almost thirty pounds. In letters he was now bemoaning his “agitation” and “debilitating fatigue.” To be so far from the arena was “paralytically exhausting . . . infinitely more difficult than any clearly defined active task.” In March 1931, he relayed to a friend, “how much I yearn for a reasonable job, commensurate with my capabilities and skills.”
So when Kurt and Helen found their way to Berlin in early January 1933, it was specifically to pursue an opportunity for him with the foreign ministry’s Cultural Policy Department, a forerunner of the modern-day Goethe Institute. Moving into a pension on the Kurfürstendamm, they spent what would turn out to be their last weeks in Germany until after the war. Kurt made several visits to the dentist. He and Helen checked out apartments. They socialized with friends who shared their fear that the Nazis would gin up some pretext to abolish any check on their seizure of power. Roth, the former Kurt Wolff Verlag author, was then taking note of what he called the “periodical forest” sprouting in the kiosks of Potsdamer Platz: “The saplings are called the Völkischer Ratgeber, the Kampfbund, the Deutscher Ring, the Deutsches Tagblatt, and all are marked with the inevitable swastikas cut deeply these days into every bark.”
If Kurt’s Jewish ancestry wasn’t enough to attract the Nazis’ attention, his patronage of “degenerate” art and literature ensured his status as their enemy. So with Hitler’s installation as chancellor on January 30, the cultural post with the foreign ministry became a nonstarter. Defeated, Kurt soon relocated with Helen from their Ku’damm pension to an artsy neighborhood in Friedenau, into the furnished apartment Hasenclever had just abandoned when he chose to light out for France. The plate by the doorbell was graced with the name of another prior tenant, a Sigrid Engström, whose “Aryan” appellation seemed to promise protection from incursions by SA thugs. “We are now in the midst of fascism,” Helen wrote her brother on February 17, the day they moved in. “Have you heard Hitler on the radio? It’s enough to make you cry. . . . I look forward to my arrest for impolitic statements about ‘the Führer,’ because one of these days I won’t be able to keep my mouth shut.”
Nine days later Helen wrote her brother again, declaring that National Socialism promised a “lapse into barbarism,” under which she could scarcely imagine “room to live for a halfway decent person.” She added a diagnosis: “The original problem of the German people is that what is real is not enough for them. They don’t adapt to what is given; life leaves them bored, thus they throw it away. . . . Those for whom normalcy is insufficient always create chaos and destruction.”
The Reichstag burned the following night, and Helen and Kurt listened as Nazi parliamentarian Hermann Göring ranted over the radio. “These are madmen,” Kurt barked. “Pack!”
They left two days later, alighting in Paris, before continuing on to London, where on March 27 they married. In the meantime, from his home in Switzerland, Hermann Hesse sent Kurt a letter that must have come with a homing device to find him at some address. “The news is sad and strange,” Hesse wrote. “I lay [the newspapers] aside and try to remain unaffected by it all. There is no front one could join; everywhere one would have to espouse a creed of cannons and terror. But there is always the ‘Kingdom of God’ or the ‘universitas literarum’ or the ‘invisible church,’ whose doors remain open to us.”
In front of the opera house on Berlin’s Bebelplatz that May, egged on by Brownshirts and with Goebbels’s blessing, students would make a bonfire of books, many of them from the catalog of the Kurt Wolff Verlag.
How had Kurt known to flee? How would anyone know when to take such an irrevocable step, so shot full of capitulation and foreclosure? “Deciding whether to get out today or whether you’ve still got until tomorrow,” Bertolt Brecht would write, “requires the sort of intelligence with which you could have created an immortal masterpiece a few decades ago.” Whatever it was—self-preservationist genius or some primal survival instinct—Kurt, now with Helen, would call on that intuition again and again.
My father had no sense yet of having been left behind. Over school vacations he and Maria would now travel to one Mediterranean idyll or another to visit their father and his new wife, whom they both took to right away. For Niko, boarding school came with the hallmarks of a civilized Germany, those Hitler Youth meetings notwithstanding. At Schondorf a teenage boy could still cultivate learning and arts and crafts, oblivious to the gathering doom.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” wrote Hannah Arendt, a friend of Kurt and Helen’s, “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience), and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought), no longer exists.”
What Arendt pays less attention to in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism is the complicity of the deceived in their own deception. Today citizens of Germany and the United States presumably have agency to inspect and sort the fruits of a free press. But under the Nazis many Germans were content to let propaganda distract and mislead them.
