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A jab of his elbow, and my father: “It’s like the Gestapo!”
For me, a teenager during the seventies in suburban Rochester, New York, access to what my father called “the Glotzofon” was strictly limited: a sitcom on weekend evenings, a game on Saturday or Sunday, nothing on school nights, until the great exception, that stretch during 1973 when, weekdays in prime time, public television rebroadcast hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate.
Until that point I had suffered my father’s interests. At sixteen, I hardly wanted a place on his turf of chamber music and kit radios and things to be found under the hood of a car. Nor would he edge toward mine, where British art rock and the fortunes of the Knicks ruled. But Washington blood sport engrossed us both. We followed our team and scouted out theirs, memorizing rosters of names with Rs and Ds attached. And we agreed that some cosmic casting director had had a hand in Senator Sam Ervin’s jowls and John Dean’s wife and a witness named Anthony Ulasewicz, who was Runyonesque relief to American viewers but to my father the kind of cop with a conscience that the Germany of his youth had failed to sufficiently produce.
I would come to understand what drew my father to the TV each evening. Born into the Weimar Republic, not quite twelve when Adolf Hitler came to power, he was now a citizen of another country and savored this second chance to stand up for democracy. Homework could wait. On school nights I found a place on the couch next to him, to share the first thing over which we really connected.
Until one day our weeknight miniseries spilled into the weekend, with what came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre. First one Justice Department official, then a second, was dismissed for failing to carry out President Nixon’s demand to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. Nixon’s assault on the rule of law helped lead the House to pass the articles of impeachment that led to his resignation.
For my father this all came more than thirty years too late. But he kindled to the thrill of it—the thrill of watching public servants of this country to which he now belonged refuse on principle to follow orders.
In the Footsteps of Kurt and Niko
This is a story that spans the lives of my grandfather and father, two German-born men turned American citizens. It recounts the fortunes of each—the first an exile, the second an emigrant—based on a year I spent in Berlin, taking the measure of blood and history in the midst of rising rightist populism on both sides of the Atlantic.
My grandfather was a book publisher who commanded the German literary landscape before World War I. Kurt Wolff had been born to a mother of Jewish descent, but it was his eye for das Neue, the new, that would put him at odds with the times, as Adolf Hitler and his repressive and hateful politics grew more and more popular. A balky peace, hyperinflation, and social turmoil conspired to undermine the Kurt Wolff Verlag, until he was forced to shut down his publishing house in 1930. Three years later Kurt fled Nazi Germany, eventually landing in New York, where in 1941 he founded Pantheon Books. He left behind my father, Nikolaus Wolff, who served in the Wehrmacht—the armed forces of the Third Reich—and wound up in an American POW camp before emigrating to the United States in 1948.
Cover of 1927 Almanac of Art and Poetry, published by Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich. Woodcut by Frans Masereel from the graphic novel Le Soleil, published by KWV in 1920 as Die Sonne
Street scene in Lübeck, August 1936. Photograph by Nikolaus Wolff, age fifteen
From my birth in 1957 until my father’s death fifty years later, the prevailing winds of assimilation kept his eyes trained ahead. I contented myself with a seat in that boat, facing those calm waters. The fresh-start conformism of postwar America did nothing to encourage him to glance backward, and if he didn’t look back, I was hardly moved to do so. I joined him in making our way through the world with purpose and hard work. Germans call this therapy by industriousness “taking the Arbeitskur.”
But a decade after my father’s death, having just turned sixty, I found myself being pulled back through the years. I wanted a better sense of the European chapters in the lives of my forefathers and the bloody period in which they unfolded. I was moved more than anything by a nagging sense of oversight—a feeling that I had failed somehow in not investigating my family’s past. Germans of my generation grilled their elders about National Socialism, asking parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, what they had known and what they had done. In Germany the convulsions of the sixties and early seventies came with dope and rock and civil unrest, to be sure, but also with the belief that the Wirtschaftswunder, the West German economic boom, had been enabled by a corporate and political establishment studded with ex-Nazis. A younger generation charged its elders with suspending accountability and remembrance and indulging in an Arbeitskur writ large. A broadly held willingness to take up and work through questions of guilt, shame, and responsibility, known as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, or “working off the past,” has since become a marker of modern Germany.
A German cousin—my father’s godson and his namesake, exactly my age and a fellow journalist—asked me pointedly why we decided to up and move to Berlin. You, I replied, took up the whole “working off the past” thing long ago. As an American, I never did. Cousin Niko understood right away. He had spent his youth brandishing his countercultural sympathies, taking part in the “purification ritual for the sins of the fathers.” But surely I could be excused for being late to that work. Our family—the Wolffs of Wilmington, Delaware; Princeton, New Jersey; and Rochester, New York—was hardly German anymore. What historical stocktaking I’d done dealt with American evils, slavery and Jim Crow, sins that implicated my mother’s ancestors. Though my father arrived in the United States as a twenty-seven-year-old speaking only basic English, his new country’s integrative ways ensured that he was quickly regarded as no less American than the Connecticut-raised WASP he would marry.
So it was, after thirty-six years on the staff of Sports Illustrated, that I took a buyout and wired the severance payment to a German bank. My wife, Vanessa, gave notice at the agency where she worked as a visiting nurse. We found a couple to move into our old farmhouse in Vermont and look after our dog and cat, and enrolled our teenage children, Frank and Clara, in an international school on the outskirts of Berlin. We signed a year’s lease on an apartment in Kreuzberg, where our neighbors would hail from more than 190 countries and gentrification hadn’t entirely sanded down a gritty, Levantine edge. Berlin is infested with co-working spaces, so it was easy to find a desk only a few doors away, in the AHA Factory, whose very name seemed to promise that tenants would push out some kind of revelation every few minutes.
When our
