alt=""/>
As their father and stepmother settled into Italian country life, Niko and Maria learned to look forward to school breaks and trips to Il Moro, including the visit during which the photograph of my teenage father was taken. In the meantime Kurt kept a literary hand in. He prepared the translation of a French text for a Munich publisher, using a pseudonym to keep himself and his client out of trouble. During two weeks in 1935 he hosted the conductor Bruno Walter and his wife, Elsa, as well as Alma Mahler Werfel and her husband, with whom he weighed plans to start an Exilverlag. But it became more and more unnerving to live in one fascist country while holding the passport of another, renewable only at the whim of some Nazi.
After the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, Kurt and Niko weighed how to secure the Nachweis der arischen Abstammung—the certificate of “Aryan” ancestry the regime required of anyone who wanted to remain a German citizen.
Niko’s Nachweis, pictured and filled out in his father’s hand, carries the mark of success. The purple eagle-and-swastika stamp of a Nazi Amt on the reverse looks as if it has been affixed yesterday. Kurt indicates his own profession as Landwirt, or farmer—no publisher of Jewish authors or patron of “degenerate” artists he. The religion of Niko’s paternal grandmother, Kurt’s mother, Maria, is listed as evangelisch, Protestant, which she claimed by birth to two baptized Christians as well as baptism in her own right. (The parenthetical auch frühere, “also earlier,” could be an invitation to indicate Maria Marx’s Jewish background, but Kurt has pointedly ignored it.) The form, notarized in Munich at the Justizrat Heinrich Himmler, confirms “that the information contained in the evidence above accords with the content of the corresponding documents submitted to me in original form.”
My grandfather’s application, just as neatly filled out, survives too. But it was never certified, because it was never submitted. A flurry of letters and forms, mostly from 1937, document Kurt’s initial efforts to renew his passport, which was set to expire in November 1938. He signs one letter “mit deutschem Gruß,” with German greetings, the closest thing to a Heil Hitler his dignity would apparently allow. In the end, he and Helen chose to apply for, and secured, French travel documents called titres de voyage—“because,” Kurt wrote Hasenclever in August 1938, “we both simply don’t want the German passport anymore.” But he surely knew too that applying to the Nazis for renewal was not a battle to be won, not by someone controversial enough to be suspect for reasons beyond any Jewish ancestry. Several years later, before she would settle with her new husband in Freiburg, Maria was let go from a job at a Munich bookshop. The reason, the proprietor told her, was that her father was ein Kulturbolschewik.
At my father’s boarding school, “Mischlinge” at least had an ally in headmaster Ernst Reisinger. Through 1938, Reisinger used the mit deutschem Gruß dodge in official communications, including several invitations to Parents’ Day that I unearth. Only in 1939 did he begin to employ Heil Hitler! My father remembered Reisinger making tactical compromises to retain influence with the authorities, including a high-ranking local Nazi official, the husband of the school’s piano instructor. The Schondorf headmaster did so, Niko told me, to protect “first-degree Mischlinge” like Ursula Lange, a student one grade ahead of my father who would marry his first cousin Emanuel Merck after the war.
How one “identifies” is a personal prerogative, a choice we regard today as reserved for every individual. But this photograph, taken at Schondorf during the late thirties, reminds me that, in Germany under Nazi rule, to identify was a verb deployed not in the active sense but the passive. Then and there, you were identified. To do the identifying, party bureaucrats could access centuries of civil and ecclesiastical records and trot out crude charts and calipers to back up any judgment they cared to make. Niko stands in the middle at the back here, his dark and curly hair bobbing in a sea of towheads. Did classmates and teachers fully accept him? Or, Nachweis notwithstanding, did they regard him as having a secret to keep? To see him as so striking an outsider invites me to consider his and Kurt’s and my own Jewish roots. And to do that leads back to the imperiled status of the German Jew long before the Holocaust. The tighter he embraced his Germanness, the more acutely he was made to feel his Jewishness.
I pay a visit to the Jewish Museum Berlin, a labyrinth of canted corridors and disorienting spaces that architect Daniel Libeskind designed to look from above like a shattered Star of David. The permanent exhibition, with its broad focus on the history of German Jewry, fills in the backstory. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Germany could count only a few hundred thousand Jews, most of them poor and uneducated. Yet some had become prosperous, like the ancestors of Kurt’s mother, Maria Marx, and these arrivistes tended to live in cities, where they could integrate themselves into the cultural life to be found there. Excluded from university professorships and denied commissions in the military or civil service, ambitious German Jewish men instead practiced law or medicine, or became merchants, engineers, or entrepreneurs. And to improve prospects for themselves and their children, many adult Jews converted to Christianity. Most of these converts didn’t pray to a Catholic or Protestant god so much as the Enlightenment polestars of reason and humankind, and thus made the library, museum, and concert hall their houses of worship. Many well-to-do Germans of Jewish ancestry could recite by heart passages from Goethe, who had endorsed the malleability of faith and the supremacy of Bildung with his declaration, “He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them needs religion.”
My ancestors were among the roughly twenty-two thousand German Jews who chose to convert during the nineteenth century. My great-great-grandfather August Karl Ludwig Marx was baptized in 1837, as a fifteen-year-old, although he would go on to donate much of his wealth, accumulated as a civil engineer and mining and railroad baron, to Jewish charities. August married another convert, his first cousin Bertha Isabella, the daughter of a doctor and art and book collector, who with his wife had cultivated friendships with the families of Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer—the evidence of which Kurt had stumbled upon as a teenager while visiting his grandmother. Bertha’s own parents were first cousins too, descended from several generations of prominent Jewish Rhinelanders. In addition to serving as a health administrator for the city of Bonn, Bertha’s father owned part of the railroad line that ran between the city and Koblenz.
The phrase “baptized Jew” is among the most striking things I encounter while walking the halls of the Jewish Museum. By modern and secular lights, a Jew who chooses to convert would no longer be considered Jewish. As it happens, rabbinical law and Nazi ideology both hold that a child born to a Jewish mother is a Jew, regardless of any subsequent event. And the persistence of the epithet “baptized Jew” in nineteenth-century Germany shows how conversion from Judaism hardly made it socially so. The writer Heinrich Heine, who grew up in the Rhineland as Harry Heine, once vowed never to convert, yet in 1825 did so in hopes of purchasing what he called “the admission ticket into European culture.” He came to bitterly regret having “crawled to the cross,” for it left him “hated by Christian and Jew alike.” Heine embodied a paradox that the German Jew came to know well. To be “the arriviste who never arrived” left him “mocked by the elites, vilified by the rabble,” writes the German-born historian Fritz Stern, himself the son of “baptized Jews” who escaped to the United States before the war. “Lamentable efforts at being accepted made him the object of backstage malice. . . . [And] his putative power made him the ideal target for the rising anti-Semitism of the 1870s.”
For all the complications this duality posed in the private realm, its effect on public life would be dazzling. Germans of Jewish descent accounted for an outsize portion of the culture for which the nation would earn renown. By the middle of the twentieth century they had achieved distinction in the sciences (Albert Einstein, Paul Ehrlich,
