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Endpapers. Alexander Wolff
Читать онлайн.Название Endpapers
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780802158277
Автор произведения Alexander Wolff
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
When Günter Demnig fields a request for a Stolperstein, it’s more likely to come from the descendants of perpetrators than the families of victims. This seems to me to be a just and salutary thing. Whether a memorial takes the form of a lone stumbling stone in the sidewalk or a more expansive Gedenkstätte, a place of reflection, these impositions of the past unsettle the contemporary conscience. We are raised to regard shame as something to avoid or bury—to not speak about. But shame can be a great animating, activating force if we let it. “Detached from the question of guilt, [shame] seizes anyone who lets themselves be seized,” the German scholar, activist, and philanthropist Jan Philipp Reemtsma has written. “To waken and practice consciousness and shame—that is the reason for these monuments.”
As I try to construct a frame in which to fit discoveries that lie in wait for me, it’s worth considering a few guidelines for what looking back at a Nazi past isn’t and is about—or at least ought to be about. For those of us in successor generations, it isn’t a matter of collective guilt so much as collective responsibility. And the point of Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung isn’t just to remember but also to confront and engage and respond. As the political philosopher Susan Neiman puts it in her book Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, “You cannot choose your inheritance any more than you can choose your parents. You can only choose your relationship to them.”
If only Americans were as scrupulous and imaginative in the excavation of our past. To take up our most shameful historical chapters wouldn’t be to perform penance, exactly, for penance, voluntary and self-imposed, usually follows from some sort of personal implication. Germans who today underwrite Stolpersteine that memorialize people they never knew are engaging in atonement, an act of repair—but that doesn’t fully capture what I have in mind either. To alight on what feels right, it’s worth turning over the topsoil around the German word Erbsünde, which means both original sin and inherited sin, double duty that highlights the binding of one generation to another. Perhaps there we could find the basis for an American Erinnerungskultur (remembrance culture) that puts a current-day frame around a Confederate monument and regards the Stars and Bars as a homegrown swastika.
Since 1993 a museum of and memorial to the Holocaust has stood steps from the Mall in Washington, DC. It’s telling that, until the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in 2011, the US capital had nothing resembling a prominent and standalone Gedenkstätte related to slavery and racial violence.
Mediterranean Refuge
Kurt and Niko, 1931 to 1938
Beginning in 1931, Niko and Maria spent four summers in the south of France, where their father lined up a succession of rentals. It would be their only extended time with Kurt during this span. As the train carrying the Wolff children clattered its way from Munich, cold and order gave way to the sunshine and languor that has long fueled the German yearning for the south. They would use their small fingers to manipulate the signage on the toilet doors, switching VACANT TO ENGAGED and delighting in the lines that formed at the ends of the cars. During station stops Niko might get off to run the platform, boarding again only after the train began to move, mortifying their chaperone, their mother’s Jewish friend Elisabeth Krämer.
At first their destination wasn’t the grandest part of the French Riviera but the more modest Petit Littoral, that coastal stretch anchored by the still-undiscovered fishing port of Saint-Tropez, where Frau Krämer, at right in the photograph, has joined Niko, Helen, and Maria for a swim. The uprooted German Jewish litterateur Sybille Bedford captured the cultural landscape of this patch of meridional France at that time: “The conjunction of the perennial austere beauty of climate and nature—scouring mistral, the unfudging sun—with the sweetness and sharpness and quickness, the rippling intelligence, the accommodating tolerance of the French manière de vivre gave one a large sense of living rationally, sensually, well. As no other place in Europe, no other place in the world, France between the wars made one this present of the illusion of freedom.”
After their mother’s fussy domestic standards, Niko and Maria found relief in homes with no running water or electricity, like Le Cabanon, a bungalow set in a vineyard, and the seaside Villa Schlumberger, to which Kurt and Helen brought oil lamps, a hand-cranked gramophone, and a tube radio with a rechargeable lead acid battery. Of the two siblings, one could pull rank as Kurt’s favorite. “My father thought Niko illiterate,” Maria once told me. “With me he could talk about books and art.” And he would take Maria, nearly five foot ten by age twelve, to the Saint-Tropez Fisherman’s Ball, where he ran interference for her with the men who asked, Permettez, monsieur?
My father and his sister, shown here with Kurt in Saint-Tropez in 1931, spent days free of care, picking figs and pawing through the bonbon bins at the Patisserie Senequier. Outside the nearby villa La Treille Muscate, they checked the lantern that glowed green if its occupant, the writer Colette, was receiving visitors and red if she wasn’t. Mail would mistakenly arrive for a German aristocrat named Baron von Wolff, who lived in a nearby nudist colony, and my grandfather could be counted on to announce, in a put-upon tone, Ich muss die Post wieder den Nudisten zustellen (I’ve got to deliver the mail to the nudists again). For siblings from the steadily Nazifying north, to shuttle across the cleft of a broken home had its compensations.
During their last summer in Saint-Tropez, Niko announced to his astonished father that he had figured out how to drive. Every bit the man of letters, Kurt asked his son to prove it in writing. So Niko, only just twelve, put together an illustrated Gebrauchsanweisung (instruction booklet) so thorough that his impressed father might have been tempted to publish it. Behind the wheel of a 1929 Buick four-door convertible, with a spare tire surmounting each running board, Kurt gave his son a place on his lap, and the two set out on the back roads of Provence—until a gendarme waved them over.
Niko slid sheepishly on to the shotgun seat.
“He has a hard time seeing over the windshield,” Kurt told the policeman preemptively.
“I hope he’s not driving.”
“Oh, no.”
“May I see your driver’s license?”
Kurt produced his license. But he also flashed his Friends of the Saint-Tropez Police membership card, and the gendarme let them go.
Idyllic though it was, their sojourn in Saint-Tropez did nothing to alter Kurt and Helen’s status as Gesinnungsemigranten, emigrants of conviction. By the fall of 1933 they had moved east along the coast to La Chiquita, a house in the hills above Nice. There they took in boarders to help cover the rent. My father’s half brother Christian was born the following March.
During these years on the lam Kurt auctioned off more books and sold paintings. He stashed liquid assets in banks in Switzerland and England, a hedge that would pay off after the Nazis imposed restrictions on foreign exchange. Whether buying gold or joining organizations like the Friends of the Saint-Tropez Police, Kurt stayed tuned to a kind of defensive wavelength while keeping an anxious eye on the news.
By the end of 1934, with Italy’s fascist government still reasonably independent of Hitler, Kurt and Helen were plotting one more move, to the village of Lastra a Signa outside Florence. In December Kurt wrote Hesse from Nice:
We cannot remain here, much as we love the house and the countryside. Living here required the presence of paying guests, and although we had a steady stream of them, in the form of German friends, until the fall, the new German currency regulations have prevented them from coming [and spending Reichsmarks] since October. And so we decided to mobilize all our reserves and take advantage of