viewed from Berlin, perhaps the most radically welcoming city on earth—not just over the previous few years, as Angela Merkel threw Germany open to more than a million refugees, mostly from Syria, but also through much of the city’s history, dating back to when the Duke of Prussia invited fifty Viennese Jewish families to settle there after the Thirty Years’ War.
Not all Germans are offering an embrace. Merkel has failed to win over followers of the anti-immigrant Alternative für Deutschland party, the AfD, which is especially popular in the villages and countryside of the old East Germany encircling the city. But in Berlin proper, particularly where we’ve landed, in Kreuzberg, a defiant cosmopolitanism obtains. We see it in graffiti like NAZIS RAUS (Nazis out) and find it in clubs like SO36, which hosts a monthly dance night for gay Muslims. It’s heralded by a banner reading ISLAMOPHOBIA DAMAGES THE SOUL, hung from the facade of the church around the corner, where we’re as likely to hear world music as Lutheran liturgy. It comes with the lingering spirit of the activists who once organized squats in abandoned buildings, and shortly before the fall of the Wall declared the Free Republic of Kreuzberg, issuing “visas” and building “customs posts” of papier-mâché. And it validates what the exiled journalist Sebastian Haffner wrote from the safety of England on the eve of World War II: “Berlin was, let us say it with Prussian precision, the very essence of an international metropolis. It had, so to speak, roots in the air. It extracted its life force not from the native soil of the surrounding country . . . but from all the great cities of the world.”
The six-hour time difference between Washington, DC, and Berlin ensures that a sleep-cycle’s worth of backed-up US news alerts greets us each morning. Three days after our arrival comes news that ethnonationalists have engineered a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump fails to condemn the neo-Nazis who assembled, one of whom struck and killed a protestor, Heather Heyer, with his car. The president goes on to describe the day’s actors as including “very fine people, on both sides.”
These events have a pointed local parallel. Germans will soon go to the polls, to weigh in on Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome refugees in defiance of the AfD, which has been dog-whistling the doctrine of “blood and soil” at the heart of National Socialism. For most of my life I’ve been aware of the stakes of a choice like this for Germany. And here it lies before me, at the same time America seems to stand at a similar crossroads.
Done with the War
Kurt, 1913 to 1924
My grandfather had barely reached his midtwenties, but his adult life was off to the headiest kind of start. In 1913 Kurt brought out the work of his two in-house readers, Franz Werfel and the Expressionist poet and playwright Walter Hasenclever. He foreshadowed a long devotion to the visual arts by publishing the writings of the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. And he launched the Expressionist literary magazine Der jüngste Tag (The Judgment Day), with which he pledged to showcase writing that, “while drawing strength from roots in the present, shows promise of lasting life.” Several years later the edition seen here would feature the novella Kurt had asked after in that note to Kafka, which my grandfather referred to as “The Bug” and we know today as The Metamorphosis.
In 1913 the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Kurt Wolff Verlag eventually sold more than a million hardcover copies of a collection of his work, turning it into an under-the-Christmas-tree staple throughout Germany. In a January 1914 diary entry, Robert Musil, an Austrian writer in Kurt’s stable, described the man presiding over it all: “Tall. Slim. Clad in English gray. Elegant. Light-haired. Clean-shaven. Boyish face. Blue-gray eyes, which can grow hard.”
Kurt’s firm seemed to be making its way without having to compromise. “The house often functioned more as a patron of the arts than according to commercial calculations,” remembered Willy Haas, who joined Werfel and Hasenclever as a Kurt Wolff Verlag reader in 1914. Kurt had no interest in a kind of publishing where “you simply supply the products for which there is a demand,” he would write, the kind where you need only “know what activates the tear glands, the sex glands, or any other glands, what makes the sportsman’s heart beat faster, what makes the flesh crawl in horror, etc.” My grandfather held fast to another view, a luxury he could afford, but that would later make his row tougher to hoe: “I only want to publish books I won’t be ashamed of on my deathbed. Books by dead authors in whom we believe. Books by living authors we don’t need to lie to. All my life, two elements have seemed to me to be the worst and basically inevitable burden of being a publisher: lying to authors and feigning knowledge that one doesn’t have. . . . We might err, that is inevitable, but the premise for each and every book should always be unconditional conviction, the absolute belief in the authentic word and worth of what you champion.”
In 1914 Kurt finally landed Karl Kraus as an author. The Viennese Mencken was so prickly about whom he shared a publisher with that he and Kurt agreed on the only solution: to set up a subsidiary devoted solely to his work. Kurt also took over publication of the pacifist and anti-nationalist journal Die weissen Blätter (The White Pages), which would have to be printed in Switzerland after war broke out to dodge the censors. Even from his provincial haunts in Prague, Kafka noticed that Kurt was riding high, and said as much in a letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer: “He is a very beautiful man, about twenty-five, whom God has given a beautiful wife, several million marks, a pleasure in publishing, and little aptitude for the publishing business.”
Even after allowing that no publisher is commercially minded enough to satisfy the typical author, Kafka was on to something. “In the beginning was the word, not the number,” Kurt would say, many years later, in a riff on the Gospel of John. Der jüngste Tag nonetheless helped the Kurt Wolff Verlag carve out a niche as purveyor of cutting-edge writing, and that was worth something. Though my grandfather had been raised to revere the classics, he knew enough to step back and let that rule of twentieth-century marketing—if it’s new, it’s better—carry the day. For a while this worked. And it was an exhilarating time to be in the book business: during Kurt’s first year out on his own, no country produced more books than Germany, some thirty-one thousand new titles in 1913 alone.
With the outbreak of war in August 1914, both the Kurt Wolff Verlag and German publishing at large were changed forever. Eleven of the thirteen members of the firm’s staff were called up, including Leutnant Wolff, who was sent with an artillery regiment to the Western Front. “I flatter myself in thinking that I have some understanding of artillery service,” he wrote in an early entry in the diary he kept throughout his tour of duty, “and above all I love my weapon very much.”
Within a few weeks Kurt felt the full force of the carnage delivered by this “war that will end war.” His unit was dispatched to a forest south of the Belgian village of Neufchâteau to assess casualties after the 1914 Battle of the Ardennes. “The dead lie in monstrous numbers within a very small space,” he wrote. “One notices that every inch of earth was bitterly fought over and gets a sense of how dreadful a fight for a forest can be.”
Scattered among hundreds of corpses, Kurt’s unit discovered eighteen survivors, fifteen Frenchmen and three Germans,
who had passed days and nights since the battle without dressing or water or food amidst the horrific stench of decaying bodies, through the heat of the days and the damp cold of the nights. . . . It goes without saying that only in very rare, exceptional cases could some living thing, weakened by the heavy exertions and deprivations of the past days and weeks, without any food and especially with fevers from their untreated wounds, cling to life as long as these eighteen did. Most of these wounded, to the extent that they were able to utter a few words or communicate
