LITMIR.BIZ

      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 plane touched down at Tegel Airport on an August afternoon in 2017, I knew only the vague contours of the European lives of the two men to precede me. Kurt Wolff left Germany for good on the night of February 28, 1933, fleeing Berlin as the ashes of the Reichstag fire still smoldered. Over the next six and a half years, before war broke out, he shuttled between Switzerland, France, and Italy with a soon-to-expire German passport he was struggling to renew. My grandparents’ divorce, finalized in 1931, had left my father and his older sister, Maria, then eleven and fourteen, in Munich with their mother, whose family owned the Merck pharmaceutical empire, and her second husband, Gentiles both.

      The Nazis likely objected less to Kurt’s mother’s Jewish ancestry than to his authors, many of them Jewish, like Franz Kafka, or Expressionist, pacifist, or “degenerate” besides. Works by Karl Kraus, Walter Mehring, Heinrich Mann, Joseph Roth, Carl Sternheim, Georg Trakl, and Franz Werfel all became fuel for book burnings. After the Germans invaded and occupied France, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, with support from the American journalist Varian Fry and his Emergency Rescue Committee, fled Nice with their son, my half uncle Christian, and in March 1941 sailed from Lisbon to New York. By early the following year Kurt and Helen were running Pantheon Books out of their Manhattan apartment.

      Kurt would go on to leave the larger public mark, and in some literary circles his name still sparks curiosity. But the great questions that fall to me now come refracted through my father, who did not live a public life. How could Niko Wolff have served in the Wehrmacht despite his Jewish heritage? When his father fled Germany, why didn’t my father join him, rather than be left to live through the Nazis’ rise and rule? What burdens of guilt or shame did Niko carry into the New World

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