Endpapers, p.23
Endpapers, page 23
Margot would die at 106, the year after our Danube cruise. “Some people live forever,” my father said. “And the husband of the poor Krämer woman”—the spouse of the Wolff children’s chaperone during those train trips between Munich and Saint-Tropez—“jumped out a window.”
In his musings, Niko didn’t have to mention the dispositive modifier. Margot Hausenstein and Emil Krämer were both Jewish. We both knew what had imperiled her and doomed him.
One day late in the cruise, Niko explained why he had left Munich and his mother after the war. “You spend winter in a foxhole at the Battle of the Bulge and come home to silver to be polished,” he said, the strain of justification still hanging from his words. “I didn’t want to live an anachronistic lifestyle, rattling around in this beautiful house with Canalettos on the wall, where you couldn’t eat with paper napkins and you spent so much time on trivial details for the sake of tradition. My mother came from a generation where those things not only mattered but held first importance.
“I could have kept studying in Munich and worked for Merck in a research lab and had a happy, easy life. But I wanted to get out from my past. It wasn’t so much a matter of wanting to emigrate or become a US citizen. It was more that the country was damaged goods. At no time had I felt I was defending my fatherland. For five years of my life I’d been duped and forced to do the Nazis’ bidding. At the first opportunity I was going to open the cage door and fly out.”
Germany, he said, using a phrase I would hear from him again, had “too much baggage.”
I’d always thought of my grandfather as the exile and my father as the emigrant. But here I realized that Niko laid claim to being a kind of exile too.
Niko spoke often of the good fortune of his “nine lives”—the birthright, he came to believe, of someone born on July 7, 1921: seven/seven/three times seven. One afternoon in our cabin he ticked off several lives expended during the war.
There was that time in Dnipropetrovsk when members of his unit sat around a table cleaning their sidearms. A good-natured Bavarian failed to check the chamber, sending a bullet into the wall directly over my father’s head. (Since hearing that story I’ve never been able to look at the photograph here, in which Niko works on his pistol, the same way.) And there was “that time” during my father’s foxhole days in the Eifel, when a whistle and boom might have been the last two sounds he heard. One day there was a whistle but no boom—only a ping, right overhead, and later he and several fellow soldiers worked it out: an Allied shell had struck the flat surface where their gun barrel attached to its turret, but at such an angle that the shell caromed away without exploding, a stone skipping off the surface of a pond.
We were well past Bratislava before I finally asked about the camps. He was aware of them at the time, he said. His parents knew people who had been sent to Dachau. “They were places for forced labor and police detention,” he told me. But about the worst—about the death camps—he knew nothing, he said, even though he had overnighted at Auschwitz that time on his way to another posting. “I had no idea what was going on there,” he said. “I saw trucks with prisoners in striped suits being transported back and forth, all men. We were told they were working in the factories.”
In the quarter century after the war, millions of young Germans might have posed questions like mine to members of their own families. But a deep and broad reckoning quickly became attenuated. The extent of people’s collaboration with the regime, the double standards of the de-Nazification process, the urgency of turning West Germany into a counterweight to the Soviet Bloc, the desire of a defeated people to declare Stunde Null—all of this contributed to the country’s losing itself in the Wirtschaftswunder, which wound up “inducing a vanquished nation to feel itself a victor.” Yet for all that postwar ducking, questions insisted on answers, and young Germans paid a price for the delay in getting them. In 1967, a twenty-three-year-old student described for journalist Gitta Sereny the fraught way a generation was left to regard its elders: “We must either brand them as liars, or construct our lives upon a void.”
I believed I had something more solid than a void. I had the America of my American father. He anointed our lawn with Scotts Turf Builder. He bought us frozen Cokes on the boardwalk at Rehoboth Beach. He brought home a late-model Ford Mustang, a stablemate for our Ford Fairlane wagon, and lavished care on both. He flew the flag each Memorial Day and Fourth of July, flaunting his citizenship so enthusiastically that I never believed he spoke with an accent, even as friends insisted he did. The fifties gave Niko the perfect background in which to recede, to take on the protective coloring of red, white, and blue, to get on with the anaesthetizing business of dissolving into the Lonely Crowd. By the mid-sixties he was raising three kids in a world where the Russian front had become a laugh line on Hogan’s Heroes. I watched my father grow his shell hard and tuck his head in. I’m not sure it’s a word, but he turtled.
A few ports of call upriver, Niko had explicitly said that to stay, to take a chemist’s job with Merck in Darmstadt, would have made for “a happy, easy life.” But my father had also conceded that, by remaining, his path would have been psychologically and emotionally strenuous. Standing in the way, Grass wrote, was “the massive weight of the German past. . . . There was no getting around it. As if prescribed for me, it remained impenetrable: Here was a lava flow that had barely cooled down, there a stretch of solid basalt, itself sitting on even older deposits. And layer upon layer had to be carried away, sorted, named.”
German history makes elephants of everyone it touches. Even to be born clear of the Nazizeit only wins you a kind of half exoneration, for which there’s a phrase, my cousin Charlie would explain to me: die Gnade der späten Geburt, “the grace of a late birth.” It’s cheap bravado to insist you would have acted more nobly if faced with the same moral challenges as generations before you. At the same time, to ask deep into the twenty-first century for forgiveness from European neighbors, as some Germans still do, feels like fishing for compliments. As a result, Charlie says, “It’s like being trapped in a circle.” No wonder Grass got geological when taking up the subject. He was desperately seeking some terra firma from which to engage it.
It became a running joke that our cruise director, a Dutchwoman named Marlies, would appear smartly before us each morning at breakfast to say, “The weather today is changing.” Day after unremittingly wet and cold day the weather never did. And so things continued until we disembarked in Budapest—trapped in a circle, turtling in our cabin, all the while being borne in that single direction historical events are condemned to flow.
From the riverside quay we took a cab to the airport. There, before boarding our flight back to Munich, we heard a familiar name summoned over the terminal’s PA system. This couldn’t be the same one, for ours—Kurt’s army buddy, Tante Annemarie’s widower, the love of my Oma Albrecht’s life—had died a quarter century ago. But history has a long memory. Cue the elephant’s trumpet: the man being paged was a certain Jesko von Puttkamer.
Twenty-two years later, another trip, alone this time. Only this journey feels like something sprung from a Richard Scarry book.
Two U-Bahns and an S-Bahn from Kreuzberg to Berlin Hauptbahnhof. An InterCity Express to Hamburg. A change there to a Danish State Railways train headed north over the Schleswig-Holstein plain, where grazing horses regard us with nonchalance. In Puttgarden we roll on to a ferry; after docking at the Danish port of Rødby, we continue on. An hour later I alight in Roskilde, just southwest of Copenhagen. It’s a ten-minute cab ride from there to a small airfield, where I fold myself into a prop-engine air taxi for the flight to Laesø, a flat patch of land off Denmark’s northeast coast.
I’m met planeside by my cousin Annemarie, whom I lay eyes on for the first time. Enoch Crome’s daughter, now sixty-three, has lived here since the pace and cost of Copenhagen ground her down. I’d cold-called her a few weeks ago after discovering her mobile number online. On the phone she had taken several beats to process the shock of a call from a stranger eager to speak of personal things, but soon said she was grateful to be reached. And she suggested that kismet might be at play: since the death of her father four months earlier, at ninety-one, while she awaited permission from a probate court to clear out Enoch’s apartment in a Copenhagen suburb, she happened to have been reading about the grandfather we share and she never met.
We sit down to dinner at a pub overlooking Vesterø Harbor, where Norwegian yachts bought with oil dividends bob at anchor. There she describes for me the course of that life Kurt Wolff launched long ago.
Upon learning she was carrying Kurt’s child, Annemarie von Puttkamer panicked. “She was from a very conservative and religious Pomeranian family,” her granddaughter tells me. “They weren’t going to accept that she had an illegitimate child with a Jew.” Through her brother, Jesko, Enoch’s mother-to-be knew a Danish musician and composer named Fritz Crome, pictured above as a young man, who had studied and taught in Berlin. Annemarie von Puttkamer knew too that Fritz Crome’s career was suffering from whispers about his homosexuality. Sometime in 1925 she wrote to him. I have a problem, her letter essentially said. You have a problem. Let’s solve both our problems. They married that November, and her son Enoch Karl Gerd Crome was born the following July.
Kurt’s diaries make clear that from time to time he did see his son, who went by the nickname Pflaume (Plum). But after my grandfather fled Germany in 1933, Annemarie von Puttkamer Crome raised Enoch more or less alone while scratching out a living in Munich as a novelist, biographer, and translator. For a stretch she packed him off to Pomerania, to live on the estate of her landed parents. Children at the local school ostracized Enoch for being of the Junker elite. Meanwhile his grandfather Bernhard, and grandmother Margarethe, shown here with Enoch and his mother, had him take his meals in the kitchen—in part, Enoch couldn’t help but later conclude, because of his status as a Kuckucksei, a “cuckoo’s egg” or illegitimate child.
Sometime in the late thirties, alarmed as the Nazis made participation in the Hitler Youth compulsory, Enoch’s mother hurried to the Danish consulate in Munich. Although she was now divorced, the ruse that Fritz Crome was her son’s father held up. She secured a Danish passport for Enoch and put him on a train for Copenhagen. Barely a teenager, he appeared at Fritz’s door and introduced himself as “your son, Enoch Crome.”
“I’m not your father,” Fritz replied. “Kurt Wolff is your father.”
That was how and when Enoch learned the truth.
Fritz Crome nonetheless found Enoch a place to stay. He had him over for a meal every week or so, gave him regular spending money, and took him to the opera from time to time. “It was unpopular to be German,” Annemarie tells me. “My father had to learn Danish in a hurry.” Enoch rode out the war as a Dane and after enrolling in the university met Karen Arentzen, a woman from a local dairying family—a family, their daughter says, “all about food and warmth and holiday celebrations, all the things my father never had.” Enoch studied English and German, and after Karen became pregnant with their first child, she abandoned her legal studies and the two married. They named their son Hans. Annemarie came along a year and a half later.
It was a tempestuous marriage. Karen came to regard family obligations as burdens and staged several suicide attempts. One of Annemarie’s earliest memories is of her six-year-old brother running to fetch a neighbor after Karen swallowed a fistful of pills. Eventually, when their mother made a threat, Hans would tauntingly hand her the phone and urge her to call the paramedics in advance.
Enoch finished his studies but never sat for final exams. Years later Annemarie asked him why. “Because then I would have had to teach,” he replied, “and I didn’t want to teach.” Instead he went into the import trade, often handling millwork, like doors and windows, tied to housing starts and the business cycle. His daughter remembers the stress of boom and bust and the recurring fear that their home would be repossessed. The counterfactual curse hanging over the family was that Karen would have been a reliable breadwinner if only she had gone on to become a lawyer. Enoch began to find comfort with other women, affairs Karen apparently never learned of before her death in the early 2000s.
As a young adult Hans broke off contact with his parents and changed his name. For three months after his death in 2013, his body lay undiscovered in his apartment. Annemarie also wound up estranged from her parents, although she did see her father in the final year of his life.
Several years after Karen died, Enoch met a widowed American woman online. Joan Shepherd Meske had worked long ago as a railroad keypunch operator before getting married and raising a family. She and Enoch spent almost a decade together, alternating summers in Denmark with winters at her home in Lakeland, Florida, until her death from cancer in 2015.
I let Annemarie know how much I regret having just missed the chance to meet my uncle Enoch. But traces online offer a glimpse of him late in life. On Facebook, Enoch described bountiful orange trees and activity at the bird feeder in Joan’s backyard. On Amazon he contributed a five-star review of a reprint of a Kurt Wolff Verlag volume of Tagore—“a very personal and biased evaluation,” he confessed, for his mother had done the translation. And in July 2013 he wished Joan a happy birthday and that “many more happy years together” might be theirs. “Being part of a family the way I am here is really a new experience for me,” he told Joan’s daughter and son-in-law in one Facebook exchange. “Neither my German nor my Danish family life has been anything like it.”
Annemarie Crome never met Joan Meske. “But,” my cousin tells me, “I have no doubt that he found happiness with her.”
Annemarie has no car, only a scooter to get around the island. So after breakfast the next day I walk the forty minutes from my inn by the harbor to her simple cottage on the edge of town.
Glass doors invite the outdoors in, and interior walls burst with the colors of her own paintings. She exhumes old photographs: of Enoch; of the von Puttkamer estate near Karzin; of her namesake, her father’s mother, whom she calls Amo, a truncation of Annemarie and anagram of Oma, German for “grandmother.” She pulls out pictures of Jesko and tells me that, his two marriages and many female admirers notwithstanding, it’s her understanding that our childless great-uncle was bisexual. And she shows me evidence that Kurt himself must have known the man to whom the raising of the adolescent Enoch would be outsourced: a copy of the Kurt Wolff Verlag’s 1925 Almanac of Art and Poetry has been dedicated, dated, and signed, “For Fritz Crome, with heartfelt greetings, 1925, Kurt Wolff.”
In return I swipe through photographs loaded on my phone, most of them images from family albums, including the one shown here of Kurt—forehead broad, head canted, eyes alluringly preoccupied, cigarette wedged between the fingers of a spread hand.
“Jeremy Irons,” Annemarie says, not quite suppressing a gasp.
Growing up, Annemarie had heard her father refer to Kurt as “my uncle in America.” But it wasn’t until she was eighteen and visiting Amo in Munich that she heard the full story. Upon her return to Denmark, she confronted her father. Enoch simply said, “Fritz Crome was my father.”
She now has a sense of what he meant. “My father and Kurt Wolff wrote but had little face-to-face contact,” she tells me. “So my father probably felt a little overlooked. It’s just a feeling I had—he never actually told me that, as he wasn’t one to open up. Maybe he didn’t want to accept that Kurt Wolff was his father. Fritz Crome wasn’t his real father, but he somehow filled that role.”
Over the years Annemarie would better understand Enoch’s conflicted emotions and their ramifications. In 1980 she became pregnant at the end of a boozy evening out and wrestled with whether or not to keep the baby. Only after the father promised to be involved in raising their child—not simply pass along birthday wishes once a year but be an active parent—did she decide to do so. But he has been all but absent from the life of their son, and she has had to watch Mikkel, now thirty-eight, confront some of the same questions that haunted Enoch. “It can lead to identity problems,” she says. “Why is my father not in my life? Was it something I did? It strikes you deep.”
I share with Annemarie a handful of letters that Kurt and Enoch exchanged. Their correspondence ramps up during the fifties, after Fritz Crome has died and Enoch begins to face more adult responsibilities. Enoch reports on the novels he’s reading and offers to sit for a professional portrait and send the photo to New York. For his part, Kurt pays out a regular stipend as Enoch finishes up his schooling. He counsels him on his troubles with Karen, which have already surfaced, and urges him to find a circle of trusted male friends. He sends along books from Pantheon’s list and at one point wonders whether Enoch might be interested in translating Gift from the Sea into Danish. With a reference to Germany’s robust economy, he offers to connect him with Helen’s brother-in-law, whose family runs that paper mill in Bavaria, to see whether there might be a future for him there. It seems impossible that Kurt wouldn’t know Enoch’s birth date, for it’s the same as Niko’s. But there it is: “Please let me know your birthday in your next letter.”
