LITMIR.BIZ

      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 Bonn found his voice in music and poetry, and Kurt inherited his love of the first from his father. Love of literature—the passion with which he would make his way and name and eventually reinvent himself in exile—came from his mother, pictured above.

      But the story only begins here. The world into which this fully formed young man was launched would not be kind to Bildungsbürger who shunned the grubbiness of politics. For Germans content to lose themselves in books and art and music, history held out consequences—and left clues to what might be in store.

      It’s impossible to fully understand my family without excavating a strange and historically significant series of events that took place in Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden in Germany’s southwest, during the first half of the nineteenth century.

      Kurt Wolff’s great-great-grandfather Salomon von Haber, pictured overleaf, served three grand dukes of Baden, first as an independent financier and, beginning in 1811, as banker for the grand duchy. By the early nineteenth century, Baden had developed extensive material needs, and Salomon knew the levers to pull to pay for them. If the state needed tack for cavalry horses or satin for ladies’ dresses, “court Jews” called on trusted co-religionists around Europe to move gold or float loans. At the same time, Salomon was active in Karlsruhe’s Jewish community, advocating for such reforms as a modernized liturgy and worship in German rather than Hebrew. With Grand Duke Louis I taking his cues from the Habsburgs’ Edict of Toleration, my ancestor the Hofbankier seemed safe and content in his identity as both a member of the elite and a practicing German Jew.

      But in 1819 antisemitic riots broke out among university students in the Bavarian city of Würzburg and soon spread across Germany. Mobs of citizens, many of them members of the educated middle class, chanted Hep, hep, Jude verreck! (Death to the Jews!) as they trashed shops and homes and chased Jewish citizens into the countryside. In Baden, even the grand duke’s court banker wasn’t safe. On the night of August 27, a mob gathered outside the Haber palace, Salomon’s home across Markt­platz from Karlsruhe’s main synagogue, pelting it with rocks and chanting anti-Jewish slogans. Escorted by a detachment of bodyguards supplied by the grand duke, Salomon fled to safety in the town of Steinach, sixty miles south.

      A Jewish-born Berliner named Ludwig Robert, a playwright and recent convert to Christianity who happened to be in Karlsruhe visiting his fiancée, witnessed the riot and its aftermath: troops on horseback patrolling rubble-strewn streets; placards that read DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO THE JEWS; townspeople

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