LITMIR.BIZ

      The following year Kurt auctioned off another tranche of his first editions and incunabula. The sale grossed more than 375,000 Reichsmarks, roughly $1.26 million today, a nut he would rely on for nearly twenty years, until he finally earned a steady income again. For all of Kurt’s delight in life’s pleasures, the hyperinflation­—­“to see wealth just melt away before your eyes,” as my uncle Christian puts it—had taught him caution with money. Yet the worldwide economic collapse of 1929 would soon leave his firm financially spent. And sandwiched around the crash came two unravelings of the most intimate kind.

      “I want to share something wonderful with you,” Elisabeth wrote her widowed mother, Clara Merck, just after Christmas 1928. “This summer we’ll be welcoming a long-anticipated visitor, a sibling for Maria and Niko. I look unspeakably forward to this child, whom we’ve wanted for years, even if we have some serious concerns, about which we’ll want to speak to you face-to-face.”

      Those concerns might have been business ones, given that Kurt had by now largely halted his publishing activities. They might have been anxieties over Elisabeth’s ability to bring another child to term, for she had just turned thirty-eight and, after giving birth to my father seven years earlier, been hospitalized with a renal pelvis inflammation. What she’s probably not alluding to, but was real nonetheless, is the wobbly state of their union.

      Soon after his wedding, Kurt had begun a faithful correspondence with his mother-in-law. The two exchanged scores of letters over the next two decades, and Kurt came to rely on Clara’s advice. At the end of February 1929, Kurt wrote her about her daughter’s pregnancy. “Elisabeth hasn’t felt herself over the past weeks,” he reported. “Since Monday she’s been flat on her back with a fever and frightful case of the flu.” A week later: “Things aren’t developing according to our hopes, and Elisabeth’s illness is proceeding downright unfavorably.” And two weeks after that: “She’s had a case of bleeding, which given her condition is of particular concern. As a precaution the obstetrician sent her to the hospital.”

      The ordeal ended two days later, on March 21. “Today I must share my latest letter, full of horrible news,” Kurt wrote Clara. “Early today, more than forty hours of labor resulted in a stillbirth. (It would have been a baby boy, Dr. Albrecht told me.)”

      I never knew I’d lost an uncle. But then my father never told me, and I’d never asked.

      My grandmother wound up spending two more months in the hospital recovering from sepsis.

      Years later Kurt would describe a feeling of imprisonment early in his marriage, crystallized one evening when he came home from the office to find Elisabeth waiting at the door. For her part, my grandmother told Maria much later, “I was too young. I didn’t understand him.”

      It’s unclear exactly when Kurt began to conduct affairs with other women, and there seems to be a question about what kind of philanderer he was—one who liked to maintain a brace of girlfriends, or one in it for the thrill of the hunt and then ready to move on. Support for the first theory comes from a cousin who tells of how Kurt would regularly assemble mistresses for coffee in the lobby of a Munich hotel and lead the conversation, inquiring after each in a roundelay of solicitude. (These Kaffeeklatsch signaled that, lest there be any misunderstanding, each woman was on an equal footing, and it was not a full-time domestic one.) Support for the second theory comes from another cousin, who says Kurt’s nocturnal activities on lengthy railroad journeys earned him the nickname Night Train.

      He may have embodied both types. And in his own mind Kurt seems to have been less a predator than an ingratiator. “If another person’s good qualities far outshine one’s own, there is no recourse but love,” goes one of his favorite quotes from Goethe. It’s the creed of the impresario, of someone who wants to lift others up. Yet those words might also be read as lending polyamory a sheen of inevitability. Maria once told me that Kurt, late in his life, confessed to her that he would have been a better publisher if not for all the women, for they took up so much time. “It was never the making love,” she said. “It was the seduction. And he hated to be alone.”