frame around a Confederate monument and regards the Stars and Bars as a homegrown swastika.
Since 1993 a museum of and memorial to the Holocaust has stood steps from the Mall in Washington, DC. It’s telling that, until the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in 2011, the US capital had nothing resembling a prominent and standalone Gedenkstätte related to slavery and racial violence.
Mediterranean Refuge
Kurt and Niko, 1931 to 1938
Beginning in 1931, Niko and Maria spent four summers in the south of France, where their father lined up a succession of rentals. It would be their only extended time with Kurt during this span. As the train carrying the Wolff children clattered its way from Munich, cold and order gave way to the sunshine and languor that has long fueled the German yearning for the south. They would use their small fingers to manipulate the signage on the toilet doors, switching VACANT TO ENGAGED and delighting in the lines that formed at the ends of the cars. During station stops Niko might get off to run the platform, boarding again only after the train began to move, mortifying their chaperone, their mother’s Jewish friend Elisabeth Krämer.
At first their destination wasn’t the grandest part of the French Riviera but the more modest Petit Littoral, that coastal stretch anchored by the still-undiscovered fishing port of Saint-Tropez, where Frau Krämer, at right in the photograph, has joined Niko, Helen, and Maria for a swim. The uprooted German Jewish litterateur Sybille Bedford captured the cultural landscape of this patch of meridional France at that time: “The conjunction of the perennial austere beauty of climate and nature—scouring mistral, the unfudging sun—with the sweetness and sharpness and quickness, the rippling intelligence, the accommodating tolerance of the French manière de vivre gave one a large sense of living rationally, sensually, well. As no other place in Europe, no other place in the world, France between the wars made one this present of the illusion of freedom.”
After their mother’s fussy domestic standards, Niko and Maria found relief in homes with no running water or electricity, like Le Cabanon, a bungalow set in a vineyard, and the seaside Villa Schlumberger, to which Kurt and Helen brought oil lamps, a hand-cranked gramophone, and a tube radio with a rechargeable lead acid battery. Of the two siblings, one could pull rank as Kurt’s favorite. “My father thought Niko illiterate,” Maria once told me. “With me he could talk about books and art.” And he would take Maria, nearly five foot ten by age twelve, to the Saint-Tropez Fisherman’s Ball, where he ran interference for her with the men who asked, Permettez, monsieur?
My father and his sister, shown here with Kurt in Saint-Tropez in 1931, spent days free of care, picking figs and pawing through the bonbon bins at the Patisserie Senequier. Outside the nearby villa La Treille Muscate, they checked the lantern that glowed green if its occupant, the writer Colette, was receiving visitors and red if she wasn’t. Mail would mistakenly arrive for a German aristocrat named Baron von Wolff, who lived in a nearby nudist colony, and my grandfather could be counted on to announce, in a put-upon tone, Ich muss die Post wieder den Nudisten zustellen (I’ve got to deliver the mail to the nudists again). For siblings from the steadily Nazifying north, to shuttle across the cleft of a broken home had its compensations.
During their last summer in Saint-Tropez, Niko announced to his astonished father that he had figured out how to drive. Every bit the man of letters, Kurt asked his son to prove it in writing. So Niko, only just twelve, put together an illustrated Gebrauchsanweisung (instruction booklet) so thorough that his impressed father might have been tempted to publish it. Behind the wheel of a 1929 Buick four-door convertible, with a spare tire surmounting each running board, Kurt gave his son a place on his lap, and the two set out on the back roads of Provence—until a gendarme waved them over.
Niko slid sheepishly on to the shotgun seat.
“He has a hard time seeing over the windshield,” Kurt told the policeman preemptively.
“I hope he’s not driving.”
“Oh, no.”
“May I see your driver’s license?”
Kurt produced his license. But he also flashed his Friends of the Saint-Tropez Police membership card, and the gendarme let them go.
Idyllic though it was, their sojourn in Saint-Tropez did nothing to alter Kurt and Helen’s status as Gesinnungsemigranten, emigrants of conviction. By the fall of 1933 they had moved east along the coast to La Chiquita, a house in the hills above Nice. There they took in boarders to help cover the rent. My father’s half brother Christian was born the following March.
During these years on the lam Kurt auctioned off more books and sold paintings. He stashed liquid assets in banks in Switzerland and England, a hedge that would pay off after the Nazis imposed restrictions on foreign exchange. Whether buying gold or joining organizations like the Friends of the Saint-Tropez Police, Kurt stayed tuned to a kind of defensive wavelength while keeping an anxious eye on the news.
By the end of 1934, with Italy’s fascist government still reasonably independent of Hitler, Kurt and Helen were plotting one more move, to the village of Lastra a Signa outside Florence. In December Kurt wrote Hesse from Nice:
We cannot remain here, much as we love the house and the countryside. Living here required the presence of paying guests, and although we had a steady stream of them, in the form of German friends, until the fall, the new German currency regulations have prevented them from coming [and spending Reichsmarks] since October. And so we decided to mobilize all our reserves and take advantage of the opportunity to acquire a lovely small property in Tuscany: a house with some good land that will supply us with wine, oil, grain, fruit and vegetables, as well as chickens, eggs, milk, etc. There we hope—Mr. Mussolini and the demons of politics willing—to be able to stay.
Kurt makes himself out to be some back-to-the-lander. In fact, the villa Il Moro, to which they moved in March 1935, included an adjacent casa colonica housing a farm family that pulled enough from the property to feed everyone. If an emergency came up, villagers knew they could call on the German in the big house for the use of his car; in return, locals looked out for Kurt and Helen during an unsettled time. Meanwhile Kurt continued to engage in his dalliances. In Italy the Wolffs could take on paying guests again, and Kurt declared to his wife one day that they had on their hands “ein florierendes Geschäft,” a flourishing business. Helen came right back at him: “Rather more like ein deflorierendes Geschäft”—a deflowering business.
Exile did nothing to diminish Kurt’s self-image as a grand seigneur who loved to foist high culture on those around him. Willy Haas, one of the original readers from the Kurt Wolff Verlag’s Leipzig days, recalled a trip in 1937 to another Wolff rental, this one on that most felicitous of exile landing spots, Elba. Upon meeting Haas at the final train station on the Italian mainland, Kurt demanded to know what his old colleague had seen while passing through Florence.
“I know Florence pretty well,” Haas replied.
“Do you know the Castagno frescoes in the Sant’Apollonia?”
“No.”
“Then go back to Florence immediately. I’ll be here this evening waiting for you.”
Haas backtracked and maintained
