Endpapers, p.33
Endpapers, page 33
Under the influence Ibid., 167–72.
By October Ibid., 334.
Merck drugs figured Ibid., 195–202.
By the time The author of Blitzed only deduces that the raid on the Merck factory cut off Hitler’s opioid supply. But an assessment by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey confirms it: “The most serious loss was in the alkaloid department, which was very seriously damaged. It was here that Eukodal, a morphine substitute used by the Wehrmacht, was produced. Production ceased after the raid.” U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Morale Division, The Effects of Bombing on Health and Medical Care in Germany, Washington, DC, 1945, 332, in Merck-Archiv, F15-7.
In fact, Hitler’s bunker Ohler, Blitzed, 230.
By January, Morell Ibid., 267.
Two months later Ibid., 275.
To hear Ohler tell it While such historians as Anthony Beevor and Ian Kershaw endorse Ohler’s work, Richard J. Evans faults him for implying that “Hitler was a drug addict who was in the end not responsible for his actions.” And Evans cites several historians who, having also seen Dr. Morell’s notebooks, do not conclude that they prove opioid abuse. Earlier historical readings had attributed Hitler’s deterioration to Parkinson’s disease. Richard J. Evans, “Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, a Crass and Dangerously Inaccurate Account,” Guardian (UK), November 16, 2016.
Chapter Nine: Blood and Shame
Half of the country’s Kershaw, The End, 379.
But that didn’t diminish Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (London: Pocket Books, 2010), 6.
a “scandalous deficiency” W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 70.
During the war Victor Gollancz, cited in Stig Dagerman, German Autumn, trans. Robin Fulton Macpherson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 11.
“Deserved suffering is” Dagerman, German Autumn, 17.
“It is impossible” Cited by Mark Kurlansky in foreword to Dagerman, German Autumn, xii.
Oh, Maria, you should Kurt wrote this sentence in English.
“All I hope for” Helen would share this comment in a letter she sent years later to Christian’s draft board in support of his application for conscientious objector status. Helen Wolff letter to Selective Service Local Board No. 4, November 23, 1958. H&KW Papers, 2019 genm 0032 box 1B.
“some cold and hunger” Taylor, Exorcising Hitler, 172.
In Munich in early 1946 Ibid., 194. The level V ration card for “nonproductive adults” came to be known as “the death card.”
To supplement these rations CARE is an acronym for Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe. The food in CARE packages was originally to have served as rations for American troops during the invasion of Japan planned for late 1945. The provisions were freed up for humanitarian use in postwar Europe after the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki hastened the end of the war in the Pacific.
A training film “Don’t clasp that hand!” Geisel’s script warned. “It’s not the kind of hand you can clasp in friendship” until the German people are “cured of their disease. The super-race disease. The world-conquest disease.” See Your Job in Germany posted by US National Archives, February 1, 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1v5QCGqDYGo?
We’re currently living My father’s irritation was so widely shared that Ernst von Salomon’s The Questionnaire, a novel that sends up the impositions of the Allied occupation from a right-wing perspective, became a best seller in West Germany during the fifties. Neiman, Learning from the Germans, 33.
Unless he had been Niko’s own de-Nazification questionnaire consists almost entirely of neins and keins—nos and nones. He was a member of three compulsory Nazi organizations: at boarding school, the Hitler Youth; after graduation, the Labor Service; and while at the Institute of Technology in Munich, on study leave during late 1943 and early 1944, the German Student Organization.
Until her suicide The doctor’s report attributes Ernesta’s suicide to “a sudden strong mental depression or an extreme emotional compulsion.” A cousin supplies a story passed down among members of the family: One day, after persuading her chauffeur to let her take his place at the wheel, Ernesta struck and killed a pedestrian. When the police showed up the chauffeur took responsibility, but he soon began extorting payments from her. Unable to bear the guilt and the blackmail, Ernesta eventually shot herself. Another cousin tells a different story—that she took her life in despondency after heavy losses at the gaming tables in San Remo.
And it turned out If Kurt hadn’t become an American citizen, Niko would likely never have made it to the United States to study. The Federal Republic of Germany wasn’t founded until May 1949, and passports weren’t routinely available to German citizens until two years after that.
And she deployed Nora Krug, Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home (New York: Scribner, 2018), 28. In July 1953, while attending a reunion of his boarding school class, my father wrote back to Manhattan to my mother, whom he had begun dating: “I learned a lot about present-day Germany, and I can only say that I’m happy, very happy, that I have torn down my tent and settled in the United States forever. Only on occasion do I want to come back and say hello to my friends, my trees and woods, and my mountains; because those latter things are very dear to me and free from political and human fault.”
You want to swap In German, Du willst die Heimat mit der Fremde tauschen, / Dich lockt die Neue Welt, / Der roten Ahornwälder krafterfülltes Rauschen . . . . / Europa stirbt, die müden Menschen sehnen sich nach dem Todesschlaf, / Nur Ruhe suchen sie und Kühlung für die Wunden, / Da Sie der Kriegsgott traf.
Maria worked through Maria’s account appeared in the January 1948 edition of the German literary magazine Die Gegenwart.
He spent four weeks Molli E. Kuenstner and Thomas A. O’Callaghan, “The Führerprojekt Goes to Washington,” Burlington Magazine 159, May 2017, 375–85. Kurt learned of the existence of the Nazis’ survey from an old friend, Walter Severin, a Berlin book dealer whose son was one of the three hundred photographers commissioned by the propaganda ministry for the project. Impressing on Washington the cultural value of the images, as well as his own credentials as a German-American with a network of contacts in occupied Germany, Kurt secured an oral agreement that the Library of Congress would reimburse him for his time and expenses. Using CARE packages, food, clothing, and sometimes film and other materials that German photographers urgently needed, he was able to barter for most of the 3,572 images he ultimately secured. The in-kind payments Kurt made were particularly prized in Berlin after June 1948, when the Soviets imposed their blockade. Yet in the end, back stateside, it took two years for Kurt to collect from the US government, and then just $5,000, only slightly more than half of what he had spent. “When Kurt Wolff began making inquiries about the Führerprojekt, he realized what the photographers had known, that the images were of exceptionally high quality and captured works of art that in many cases were no longer extant,” write Kuenstner and O’Callaghan. “Wolff’s endeavor was not only of cultural significance, but he carried out a diplomatic and humanitarian operation that bridged the divide between the United States and Germany. . . . This prominent publisher willingly risked his reputation and solvency to recover the collection and bring it to North America.”
“the focal point” Bessel, Germany 1945, 249.
“Get us out” Kurt and Helen were actually in the midst of trying to arrange for Maria to move to New York to help out at Pantheon. She never did emigrate; in 1955 she remarried, making a life in Munich and Hamburg with her second husband, Peter Stadelmayer, until her death at a clinic in Bavaria in 1996. For more than seven years, beginning in late 1964, Maria and Peter did live in Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue in the Goethe House, where Peter served as its director.
The German doctor Martha Hall Kelly, Lilac Girls (New York: Ballantine Books, 2016), 477.
Though barely twelve Jesse Leavenworth, “Caroline and the Lapins,” Northeast: Sunday Magazine of the Hartford Courant, October 20, 2002; and Kristin Peterson Havill, “Caroline Ferriday: A Godmother to Ravensbrück Survivors,” Connecticut History, Winter 2011–12.
Just off the Appellplatz Sarah Helm, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women (New York: Anchor Books, 2016), 221–35. The physician who led the Ravensbrück medical team, Dr. Karl Gebhardt, had treated Reinhard Heydrich after Czech partisans blew up Heydrich’s car in Prague in May 1942. Heydrich—the Nazi who chaired the Wannsee Conference and spoke that morning of “our new prospects in the east”—survived the blast, only to die eight days later of a gas gangrene infection caused by shrapnel lodged in his spleen. After Nazi higher-ups faulted Gebhardt for neglecting to treat Heydrich with sulfa drugs, the doctor ordered up the Ravensbrück experiments—presumably to save his own skin by proving that sulfonamides would have made no difference.
With a urine-based Ibid., 247–52.
Not until April 1945 Ibid., 593–610.
And a camp Leavenworth, “Caroline and the Lapins”; Havill, “Caroline Ferriday.”
Upon learning that Kelly, Lilac Girls, 482.
One of their sons Elaine Dundy, Ferriday, Louisiana (New York: Donald I. Fine, 1991), 51–56.
According to a census “Ferriday Started as 3,600-Acre Wedding Present,” Natchez Democrat, November 22, 2006. As historian Timothy Snyder has pointed out, the more precise the figure—not “some 150 slaves” but precisely 149—the more meaning it carries.
In taking inventory Caroline Ferriday Papers.
“the Louisiana town” Ferriday is the seat of Concordia Parish, which during the civil rights movement was home to the secretive Silver Dollar Group, the most violent cell ever to splinter off from the Ku Klux Klan. See Stanley Nelson, Devils Walking: Klan Murders along the Mississippi in the 1960s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016). The black priest at Ferriday’s Saint Charles Catholic Church, Father August Thompson, spoke at Caroline’s funeral in rural Connecticut in 1990. So did an emissary of the Free French in the United States, who conveyed the condolences of Resistance figure and former Ravensbrück inmate Geneviève de Gaulle, niece of Charles de Gaulle, the French president who had bestowed on Caroline the Légion d’Honneur in 1961 for her work on behalf of families of the Resistance.
We could start Stanisława Śledziejowska-Osiczko, quoted in the trailer for the forthcoming documentary film Saving the Rabbits of Ravensbrück, dir. Stacey Fitzgerald, From the Heart Productions, RememberRavensbruck.com. One of the longest surviving Rabbits, Śledziejowska-Osiczko died in 2017.
As Susan Neiman Neiman, Learning from the Germans, 39.
To spend time Ibid., 9. Neiman, a Jew born in the segregated American South, goes on to point out that “we are historical beings, unable to describe ourselves without describing ourselves in space and time. And unlike other animals, we cannot grow up without considerable input from our parents, with whom we need to come to terms if we are ever to truly separate from them.”
Chapter Ten: Chain Migration
Because of armed Bessel, Germany 1945, 8.
“There is still something” Epigraph to Kurt Wolff zum Hundertsten.
Gaining altitude After turns in Hollywood and at New York City’s New School, the émigré playwright Carl Zuckmayer settled in Vermont, where he spent the war years farming. He captured the state’s appeal to the exile, a quality Kurt and Niko both came to know: “The pathless woods lured me; their solitude promised me protection, asylum, consolation.” Carl Zuckmayer, A Part of Myself, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 356.
Its previous occupant Broch’s fate was bound up in the upper floors of buildings: he died of a heart attack in a boardinghouse in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1951, after lugging a foot locker up three flights of stairs. Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, 282. Pantheon sold barely a thousand copies of The Death of Virgil, in part because a rave scheduled for the New York Times Book Review never appeared, as a result of a newspaper strike. Thomas Weyr, “PW Interviews: Helen Wolff,” Publishers Weekly, February 3, 1973.
Chapter Eleven: Late Evening
An encouraging early sign Schuyler, “Kurt Wolff and Hermann Broch.”
“He never would” Harcourt, Brace & World published volume one of The Great Philosophers by Karl Jaspers as a Helen and Kurt Wolff Book in 1962. Helen finished editing the fourth and final volume shortly before her death in 1994.
He eventually liquidated Schuyler, “Kurt Wolff and Hermann Broch.”
Kurt judged the fortunes Ibid.
“I remember Kurt’s” Mitgang, “Imprint.”
The other was the agreement Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship. The first volumes in the Bollingen Series were English translations of the works of C. G. Jung, with whom Mary Mellon had undergone analysis.
The agreement called Schuyler, “Kurt Wolff and Hermann Broch.”
Forty years later Helen Wolff letter to Steven Schuyler, April 21, 1984. H&KW Papers, box 39, folder 1219.
“The accountant representing” Helen Wolff, “Elective Affinities.”
I am thinking of you Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship.
Before the hammer Pasternak was almost unfathomably optimistic. In May 1958, after learning that the Soviet government would forbid him to accept the Nobel Prize, he wrote Kurt, “It is precisely these insurmountable barriers imposed by fate that give our life impetus and depth and gravity and make it quite extraordinary—joyful, magical, and real.” Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 179.
“How quickly do we give in” Kurt Wolff: A Portrait, 181–82.
“Both are great writers” Ibid., 180.
Several years earlier Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship.
“This is the first” Helen Wolff letter to Herbert Mitgang, April 3, 1970. H&KW Papers, 2019 genm 0032, box 2.
Some misunderstanding may Kurt Wolff letter to John Lewis, November 29, 1958. H&KW Papers, 2019 genm 0032, box 4.
“You are not a publisher” Kurt Wolff letter to Kyrill Schabert, November 27, 1958. H&KW Papers, box 39, folder 1186.
And Schabert himself Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship.
But the triumph Even after the success of Gift from the Sea, Pantheon remained a modest business. An August 1958 memo from Kyrill Schabert to Kurt on the eve of the publication of Doctor Zhivago reports that the firm’s cash on hand has “bounced back” to $75,300. Pantheon Papers, II/25.
But Schabert and Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship.
“They exerted great” Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, xi.
“I’m in the late evening” The green spiral-bound notebook can be found in the H&KW Papers, box 53, folder 1624a.
The enthusiast-on-the-page Pushkin Press has collected Hesse’s writing on the subject in Hymn to Old Age, trans. David Henry Wilson and published in 2011.
Kurt left America Helen Wolff letter to Herbert Mitgang, April 3, 1970. H&KW Papers, 2019 genm 0032, box 2. Helen goes on: “The bitter memories, of silence and of outright betrayal, make me feel that Kurt really wouldn’t care to have anything about himself appear in a place that repudiated him.” Helen would nonetheless collaborate on, and be pleased with, Kurt Wolff: A Portrait in Essays and Letters, which the University of Chicago Press published in 1991. And the world of American letters has hardly repudiated his American-born grandchildren, who include four published or forthcoming authors.
Yet, as Marion Detjen Detjen, “Kurt and Helen Wolff,” in Immigrant Entrepreneurship.
The East German daily “Kurt Wolff,” Neues Deutschland, October 25, 1963. Soon after Kurt and Helen’s departure, Random House acquired Pantheon and installed as its president André Schiffrin, Jacques’s son. The house remained a distinguished one under his stewardship but put more emphasis on political and social topics than the Wolffs’ favored themes of art, literature, and philosophy.
Kurt saw no choice During a three-week trip Kurt took through the United States in 1924, the New York Tribune interviewed him about his firm’s imminent publication of a translation of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. “I have seen no Babbitts in New York,” Kurt told the reporter. “Columbus was a great man to have discovered this country of Walt Whitmans.” The story ran under the headline AMERICANS NOT BABBITTS, SAYS GERMAN EDITOR/KURT WOOLF [sic], MUNICH PUBLISHER, REGARDS NOVEL AS MOST SIGNIFICANT OF BOOKS, BUT CALLS IMPRESSION FALSE. Alas, the New York Babbitts would get him in the end. New York Tribune, March 13, 1924. H&KW Papers, box 79, folder 2361.
On April 15, 1945 Taylor, Exorcising Hitler, 249–50. The National Socialist German Workers Party files, known as the NSDAP-Kartei, were finally handed over to the German government in 1994. The Americans hadn’t done so earlier in light of how many ex-Nazis held positions in the government of a critical Cold War ally.
Or perhaps because The lyrics to the “Horst Wessel Song” were written by Berlin SA member Horst Wessel, who was shot and seriously wounded by two Communists in 1930. Upon Wessel’s death a month later from blood poisoning, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels moved quickly to make the song the Nazi Party anthem.
“You will understand” Bundesarchiv-Lichterfelde, NS/12, 11377.
And in 1933 To curry favor without fully implicating themselves, businessmen or professionals might make a contribution to become an FMSS. This led to the joke that FMSS stood for Feiner Mann Sichert Sich—more or less, Upstanding Man Hedges His Bets. John M. Steiner, “The SS Yesterday and Today: A Sociopsychological View,” in Survivors, Victims, and Perpetrators: Essays on the Nazi Holocaust, ed. Joel E. Dimsdale (Abingdon, Oxon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 1980), 420.
“His political attitude” Bundesarchiv-Lichterfelde, R/9361/II, 5058.
