freshness,” Gundolf wrote to George, describing Kurt in advance of bringing him by for an introduction. “[He is] one of those young men so essential to creating an atmosphere and elevating standards.”
Soon after that meeting, at the risk of mortifying academic Bonn, Kurt sailed to São Paulo, Brazil, for a six-month training program sponsored by the German banking industry. But he threw himself back into books as soon as he returned. With the 100,000 gold marks he inherited upon his mother’s death, a sum that would be worth more than $1 million today, he had begun to buy up first editions and incunabula, books produced during the fifteenth century shortly after the invention of the printing press. He would eventually count some twelve thousand volumes in his collection. But much like his father, a champion of music both old and new, Kurt let his eye wander from literature gathering dust to what was then being written—to those writers challenging the staid assumptions of the Wilhelmine era. Migrating from campus to campus in a fashion common at the time, he studied German literature at universities in Marburg, Munich, Bonn, and, most fatefully, Leipzig, then the seat of the country’s book publishing industry. In 1908, at twenty-one, he set aside work on a PhD in literature to take an editorial position there with Insel Verlag. “I loved books, especially beautiful books, and as an adolescent and student collected them even as I knew it to be an unproductive pursuit,” he would recall. “But I knew I had to find a profession in books. What was left? You become a publisher.”
One of his first projects came out of the family archives. As a teenager, while helping his maternal grandmother, Bertha, clear out a bookshelf in her home one day, he had discovered notes and visiting cards from Adele Schopenhauer, sister of the philosopher, and Ottilie von Goethe, the writer’s daughter-in-law. Kurt pressed his grandmother for details. It turned out that Bertha’s mother, Jeanetta, had been friendly with both women. Bertha unearthed further correspondence, and in 1909, supplementing those letters with a diary of Adele’s he’d found in private hands, Kurt assembled it all into two volumes to be published by Insel.
He turned next to the work of an associate of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s, the writer Johann Heinrich Merck, an ancestor of the seventeen-year-old woman Kurt had begun courting while posted with the military in Darmstadt and would later marry—my grandmother, Elisabeth Merck. Her family, with its international pharmaceutical business, at first balked at him as a suitor for the opposite reason the professoriat in Bonn might have found him wanting: Kurt struck them as a man too much of letters and not enough of commerce. But book publishing plausibly split the difference, and by the end of 1907 the Mercks had signed off on the marriage, which took place in 1909, shortly after these portraits were taken.
In 1910 Kurt hitched himself as silent partner to the publisher Ernst Rowohlt, who had just launched what would become one of Germany’s most important houses. With his lean frame and drawing-room manners, now installed with his wife in a Leipzig apartment with household help, Kurt cut a starkly different figure from Rowohlt, a bluff and earthy character who would conduct business in taverns and wine bars around town and sometimes sleep in the office. By June 1912, having abandoned his doctoral work, Kurt found more time to stick his nose into the affairs of the publishing house. Thus he was in the office the day Max Brod, a writer from Prague, turned up with a protégé named Franz Kafka. Kurt recalled that visit years later:
In that first moment I received an indelible impression: the impresario was presenting the star he had discovered. This was true, of course, and if the impression was embarrassing, it had to do with Kafka’s personality; he was incapable of overcoming the awkwardness of the introduction with a casual gesture or a joke.
Oh, how he suffered. Taciturn, ill at ease, frail, vulnerable, intimidated like a schoolboy facing his examiners, he was sure he could never live up to the claims voiced so forcefully by his impresario. Why had he ever gotten himself into this spot; how could he have agreed to be presented to a potential buyer like a piece of merchandise! Did he really wish to have anyone print his worthless trifles—no, no, out of the question! I breathed a sigh of relief when the visit was over, and said goodbye to this man with the most beautiful eyes and the most touching expression, someone who seemed to exist outside the category of age. Kafka was not quite thirty, but his appearance, as he went from sick to sicker, always left an impression of agelessness on me: one could describe him as a youth who had never taken a step into manhood.
One remark of Kafka’s that day helped account for Kurt’s impression of him as an innocent with wobbly confidence: “I will always be much more grateful to you for returning my manuscripts than for publishing them.”
The relationship with Ernst Rowohlt fell apart a few months later, after Kurt retained Franz Werfel, the Prague-born novelist, playwright, and poet, as a reader on lavish terms without clearing the arrangement with his business partner. By February 1913, using money from both his late mother’s prosperous ancestors and the Merck family of his bride, Kurt had bought out Rowohlt, eventually christening the new firm Kurt Wolff Verlag and bringing Kafka and Brod with him. He raised more cash needed for the business by auctioning off parts of his book collection, and in case anyone missed the symbolism—may the old underwrite the new!—Kurt adopted a credo he articulated in a letter to the Viennese critic and editor Karl Kraus: “I for my part consider a publisher to be—how shall I put it?—a kind of seismographer, whose task is to keep an accurate record of earthquakes. I try to take note of what the times bring forth in the way of expression and, if it seems worthwhile in any way, place it before the public.”
In 1912, at Werfel’s urging, Kurt had gone to Vienna to meet Kraus for the first time. Kurt found himself overcome by the exhausting intensity of this literary provocateur. Whether discussing literature or leading him on a tour of the city, Kraus, then thirty-eight, wanted the full attention of his twenty-five-year-old visitor. “If he wants to walk you back to your hotel, you mustn’t take it for a polite gesture and refuse,” Werfel had warned him. “Kraus walks people home. He can’t bear the thought that they would meet someone else after being with him. If you want to disentangle yourself, there’s only one excuse that Kraus will accept, though with bad grace. Somewhere between midnight and one o’clock, you may hint at a rendezvous with a woman. It’s your only chance.”
Kurt’s first visit to Kraus’s apartment spilled into the early hours of the morning, whereupon his host pulled a book of poems from a shelf and began reciting several favorites. “The poetry itself barely penetrated the fog of my fatigue,” Kurt recalled. “I was spellbound not by the familiar verses, but by the singular man who was reading them. Mechanically I began to recite the last few lines of the ‘Mondlied’ [‘Moon Song,’ by the poet Matthias Claudius] along with him, but soon found myself speaking alone as Kraus fell silent:
Spare thy wrath, Lord, we entreat;
Let our sleep and dreams be sweet,
And our sick neighbor’s too.
“He stared at me in astonishment and asked in a tone of voice that betrayed dismay as well as surprise, ‘But how do you know that? Matthias Claudius is completely unknown!’
“‘Perhaps in Austria,’ I replied, ‘but not where I’m from. When I must have been between five and eight and tired of the usual bedtime prayers for children, my mother used to recite the “Mondlied” with me every night.’
“His joy at finding someone to share his enthusiasm was greater than the disappointment over not being the first to introduce me.”
The first had been Maria Marx Wolff, the acculturated Rhinelander of Jewish descent. A young rebel in turn-of-the-century
