Alexander Wolff (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021)
Alexander Wolff sharpened his journalistic skills at Sports Illustrated for the better part of four decades. In 2017, when SI melted down its writing staff for scrap, Wolff took the buyout and moved to Berlin with his family for a year. The book that resulted is the biography of his family, embedded in the history of a chaotic and dramatic time. He goes back into the 19th century to find his Jewish ancestors, some of whom were baptized under the pressures of the time, but most of the book concerns his grandfather, Kurt, and his father, Niko, whose fortunes diverged when Kurt left for America, fleeing the rising Nazi regime.
Kurt was a publisher, a womanizer, and a partisan of high culture. His first publishing house, the Kurt Wolff Verlag, lasted from before the first world war until 1930. "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." After he and his second wife got away to New York, in 1941, they founded Pantheon Books, another enterprise as poor in funds as it was rich in good taste. Fortunes would change when the house landed Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea, followed by Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. Both were somewhat less highbrow than Pantheon's usual fare, and vastly more profitable.
Kurt's first wife, Elisabeth Merck Wolff Albrecht, remained in Germany, as did their two children, Maria and Niko. Niko was, as the state measured these things, half as Jewish as his father, so he was eligible to join the Hitler Youth during his boarding school days. In 1940, he was drafted, and became a driver and mechanic in the Wehrmacht, supporting a Luftwaffe unit. For the next six years, his letters to his mother depict his transformation from an earnest teenager to an exhausted and hungry soldier, the embodiment of war-weariness.
Wolff makes a productive digression when he supplements his father's personal history with research by the historian Timothy Snyder. In Bloodlands, Snyder describes the scorched earth that both the Soviet Union and Germany made of Poland, the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine between 1933 and 1945. Something like fourteen million people died of starvation and associated causes, as both Stalin and Hitler deemed them unworthy of the means of life. But from Ukraine, Niko is writing cheerfully to his mother about the bread, soup, cheese, and sausage he and his comrades enjoy. "In wondering 'What did you do in the war, Daddy?' says Wolff, 'I hardly expected the answer to come back, 'I ate well.'"
Much later, when the allies won the day, Niko would be subject to a certain amount of payback, once riding in a cattle car for three days. The Allies had trouble keeping up with, let alone feeding, five million prisoners of war, amid the rubble of Europe. By the time he got back to his mother's house in Munich, he weighed a skeletal 133 pounds.
Niko's mother, Elisabeth was a daughter of the Merck family, which made a multi-generational fortune in opiates and other drugs, including one called Eukodol to which Adolf Hitler is plausibly rumored to have been addicted before U.S. planes bombed the factory in late 1944. She was stably housed enough to receive and preserve her son's letters partly because Dr. Albrecht, her second husband, was a 'supporting member' of the SS, who contributed money rather than actually joining up. It's complicated.
All credit to Wolff for pursuing the family history, interviewing cousins and probing into archives. He writes with due humility; how can we really know what we would have done? He's not seeking to take on the guilt of the past; each generation deserves a morally clean slate at birth. But responsibility? Yes, to "confront and engage and respond." From Berlin, he can see that the United States has a lot of work to do on this front. Are we treating refugees and migrants as generously as New York treated Karl and Niko (though obviously not all of the Europeans who needed help)?
Wolff's own mother came from a family that had kept people in bondage in Mississippi. Our work of remembrance and reconciliation with that history is woefully lagging; imagine if all of the antebellum mansions that dot the South were considered as so many Treblinkas, and "the Stars and Bars as a homegrown Swastika."
Each child is born with a historical clean slate, too. Niko made a break with his past when he emigrated, and his son was raised as an American baby boom child. "Why did he never go into such things? He wanted to spare us, of course. But the question, tacked on to an ever-lengthening list, suggests an answer in the form of another question: How could he have spoken of them? Although that hardly keeps the back half of the refrain from coming round, the companion to He never told me: I never asked."
Published by email, June 1, 2021
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