Endpapers, p.4
Endpapers, page 4
These events have a pointed local parallel. Germans will soon go to the polls, to weigh in on Merkel’s 2015 decision to welcome refugees in defiance of the AfD, which has been dog-whistling the doctrine of “blood and soil” at the heart of National Socialism. For most of my life I’ve been aware of the stakes of a choice like this for Germany. And here it lies before me, at the same time America seems to stand at a similar crossroads.
Two
Done with the War
Kurt, 1913 to 1924
My grandfather had barely reached his midtwenties, but his adult life was off to the headiest kind of start. In 1913 Kurt brought out the work of his two in-house readers, Franz Werfel and the Expressionist poet and playwright Walter Hasenclever. He foreshadowed a long devotion to the visual arts by publishing the writings of the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka. And he launched the Expressionist literary magazine Der jüngste Tag (The Judgment Day), with which he pledged to showcase writing that, “while drawing strength from roots in the present, shows promise of lasting life.” Several years later the edition seen here would feature the novella Kurt had asked after in that note to Kafka, which my grandfather referred to as “The Bug” and we know today as The Metamorphosis.
In 1913 the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Kurt Wolff Verlag eventually sold more than a million hardcover copies of a collection of his work, turning it into an under-the-Christmas-tree staple throughout Germany. In a January 1914 diary entry, Robert Musil, an Austrian writer in Kurt’s stable, described the man presiding over it all: “Tall. Slim. Clad in English gray. Elegant. Light-haired. Clean-shaven. Boyish face. Blue-gray eyes, which can grow hard.”
Kurt’s firm seemed to be making its way without having to compromise. “The house often functioned more as a patron of the arts than according to commercial calculations,” remembered Willy Haas, who joined Werfel and Hasenclever as a Kurt Wolff Verlag reader in 1914. Kurt had no interest in a kind of publishing where “you simply supply the products for which there is a demand,” he would write, the kind where you need only “know what activates the tear glands, the sex glands, or any other glands, what makes the sportsman’s heart beat faster, what makes the flesh crawl in horror, etc.” My grandfather held fast to another view, a luxury he could afford, but that would later make his row tougher to hoe: “I only want to publish books I won’t be ashamed of on my deathbed. Books by dead authors in whom we believe. Books by living authors we don’t need to lie to. All my life, two elements have seemed to me to be the worst and basically inevitable burden of being a publisher: lying to authors and feigning knowledge that one doesn’t have. . . . We might err, that is inevitable, but the premise for each and every book should always be unconditional conviction, the absolute belief in the authentic word and worth of what you champion.”
In 1914 Kurt finally landed Karl Kraus as an author. The Viennese Mencken was so prickly about whom he shared a publisher with that he and Kurt agreed on the only solution: to set up a subsidiary devoted solely to his work. Kurt also took over publication of the pacifist and anti-nationalist journal Die weissen Blätter (The White Pages), which would have to be printed in Switzerland after war broke out to dodge the censors. Even from his provincial haunts in Prague, Kafka noticed that Kurt was riding high, and said as much in a letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer: “He is a very beautiful man, about twenty-five, whom God has given a beautiful wife, several million marks, a pleasure in publishing, and little aptitude for the publishing business.”
Even after allowing that no publisher is commercially minded enough to satisfy the typical author, Kafka was on to something. “In the beginning was the word, not the number,” Kurt would say, many years later, in a riff on the Gospel of John. Der jüngste Tag nonetheless helped the Kurt Wolff Verlag carve out a niche as purveyor of cutting-edge writing, and that was worth something. Though my grandfather had been raised to revere the classics, he knew enough to step back and let that rule of twentieth-century marketing—if it’s new, it’s better—carry the day. For a while this worked. And it was an exhilarating time to be in the book business: during Kurt’s first year out on his own, no country produced more books than Germany, some thirty-one thousand new titles in 1913 alone.
With the outbreak of war in August 1914, both the Kurt Wolff Verlag and German publishing at large were changed forever. Eleven of the thirteen members of the firm’s staff were called up, including Leutnant Wolff, who was sent with an artillery regiment to the Western Front. “I flatter myself in thinking that I have some understanding of artillery service,” he wrote in an early entry in the diary he kept throughout his tour of duty, “and above all I love my weapon very much.”
Within a few weeks Kurt felt the full force of the carnage delivered by this “war that will end war.” His unit was dispatched to a forest south of the Belgian village of Neufchâteau to assess casualties after the 1914 Battle of the Ardennes. “The dead lie in monstrous numbers within a very small space,” he wrote. “One notices that every inch of earth was bitterly fought over and gets a sense of how dreadful a fight for a forest can be.”
Scattered among hundreds of corpses, Kurt’s unit discovered eighteen survivors, fifteen Frenchmen and three Germans,
who had passed days and nights since the battle without dressing or water or food amidst the horrific stench of decaying bodies, through the heat of the days and the damp cold of the nights. . . . It goes without saying that only in very rare, exceptional cases could some living thing, weakened by the heavy exertions and deprivations of the past days and weeks, without any food and especially with fevers from their untreated wounds, cling to life as long as these eighteen did. Most of these wounded, to the extent that they were able to utter a few words or communicate in any way, explained that they had had no sustenance. In every case their wounds were so severe that they had been unable to move at all. Only one, a German, in despair at slowly dying of starvation yet nursing hopes of being found if he could only hang on a little longer, had resorted to a desperate measure: he took the only thing left of his meager rations, a cube of condensed pea soup, dissolved it in his own urine, and drank it.
Kurt had arranged to have Hasenclever assigned to his unit, so in the midst of the war, even as they were deployed in France, eastern European Galicia, and the Balkans, the two imagined the directions German literature might take after hostilities ended. Riding the Orient Express back from Macedonia on leave, Kurt would stop off in Vienna to visit Kraus, a loud and consistent critic of the conflict—one of the few among German-language intellectuals of the time.
It’s hard to fathom the enthusiasm with which Germany greeted the outbreak of war. In an act of mass self-delusion, Germans across the political spectrum believed this common call to sacrifice would help Wilhelmine society bridge its many differences. Almost no one foresaw the duration of the stalemate or the scale of the slaughter. Shortly after its end, one of Kurt’s authors, Joseph Roth, declared the war a “great annihilative nothingness.”
The Kurt Wolff Verlag would be the only major house in Germany to refuse to publish pro-war literature. But like most of his countrymen, Kurt at the outset seemed open to victory by arms and tried to suppress his doubts. In December 1914 he wrote from Ghent:
I drive into the darkness and light my pipe. I think about my conversations with the military authorities, of the report of my female spy this morning, of the war and how we will win a victory over France. And suddenly all those with whom I so often, so bitterly, argued over these past months seem to be right: We must continue on over the rubble of these countries, and there must be misery and distress among our enemies and in enemy territory, and they must feel this bitter, unrelenting war, feel it until the hunger for peace is so great that the cry for the war’s end becomes so loud and penetrating, and so unanimously does the wailing rise, from Liège to Reims, from Namur to Lille, from Brussels to Calais, and also in the east, that it mingles with the groans of the exhausted in the trenches at the front, all of it swelling into a hurricane, into a raging, incessant sound that will ring in their ears in Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Petersburg, until they give up.
The young officer, pictured here, seemed to be writing for an audience beyond my grandmother, who had moved in with her mother in Darmstadt and to whom he sent his dispatches. In November 1914 he noted that a British torpedo had roared up the beach at Ostend, Flanders, ripping a hole in the dining room of the Majestic Palace, a hotel then billeting German officers, killing two as they ate their breakfast. The attack held two lessons, concluded Kurt, who noted that the Majestic Palace was built by British investors: “The British simply assume that German officers take their breakfast at only the finest hotels; and the blood of German officers seems to be of more value to them than British capital.”
But as the war progressed, his diary began to betray disillusionment. The first hint came that same month while he was still in Belgium. “I do not know if the weather has made me melancholy,” he wrote. “But all at once I found myself in the bleakest, darkest mood as I reflected on this country and its history. What great potential lies in the fertile soil here, what riches were accumulated from trade by sea and over land, from fishing, from the breeding of horses, cattle, flowers, lacemaking, and much else—and over and over again, this land and its people have suffered from war. And now this war has impoverished everything once more, a war that the Germans have delivered to their country.”
In December he wrote that he had been reading War and Peace:
I don’t want to go off on a literary digression here, but only quote a passage I’ve read many times, and which, it seems to me, should serve as an epigraph for the hundreds of books that now appear, or will appear, touching off millions of reviews. . . . : “Rostov knew from experience, from Austerlitz and the campaign of 1807, that men always lie when describing military exploits, as he himself had done in recounting them; furthermore, he had experience enough to know that what happens in war is entirely different from how we imagine it or relate it to others. . . . But he didn’t express his thoughts, for in such matters he had also gained experience. He knew that this tale redounded to the glory of our arms, and so one had to pretend not to doubt it.”
And then: “I must relate a story here, to free myself of it, of what unfolded on January 17, 1915. It is one story of many. Such things and occurrences are slowly but surely destroying my nerves. They (taken together) seem almost to have a more lasting effect on me than thoughts of many of the other horrors that war brings.”
The incident he recounted took place in a military courtroom presided over by a German judge. A Belgian district administrator reported that a stable boy had witnessed a soldier in a feldgrau (field-gray) uniform, with regimental number 207 stitched on his epaulettes, steal a farmer’s horse.
“Sir, I must warn you against using the word ‘steal’ when referring to a member of the German army,” the military judge said.
“In Germany this may be called something else,” the Belgian bureaucrat replied evenly. “Here in Belgium we call it ‘stealing.’”
At that, the judge ordered the district administrator jailed, and Kurt privately renders his judgment:
When I think of isolated incidents like these, and what thousands of decent Belgians living among such barbarians will think and say, and swallow and swallow, and hold on to, hold on to . . . I find it hard to take. . . . I nurse feelings of shame while walking down the street the next day . . . [at] all those who accept these things as standard operating procedure, who cheerfully, blithely, confidently, with a sense of relativism and the heady feelings of the conqueror, stride steadily and proudly along, thinking that everything is just as it is, as it can be, as it must be, as it should be.
Out on the town seven weeks later to celebrate his twenty-eighth birthday, Kurt and three comrades capered about the alleys and squares of Ghent. Eventually they came upon the Gravensteen, the castle of the counts of Flanders, where they woke the guards to be let in.
We climbed up on the ramparts and looked down on the beautiful, sleeping city, whose sons are yonder on the Yser, with no connection to, no news of, their fathers, who have been left behind, bitter and full of grief. . . . But at least this beautiful, imposing city with its proud cathedrals still stands. . . . Here it smells not of war, fire, destruction, and putrefaction but of home and stone, water and fish, healthy, alive, with the promise of spring.
What will spring bring—? The end of the Battle of the Nations, the great Peace of the Nations? It’s strange that this age of great deeds has also become a time of eternal question marks. . . . Why, when, how much longer, for what?
World War I has been called a conflict “that sloshed back and forth like waves in a basin: the trigger lay in the East, the escalation in the West, but the greatest destruction ultimately occurred, again, in the East.” In April 1915, Kurt found his unit redeployed to Galicia, where this picture was taken, for a spring offensive against Russian forces.
From Gorlice, southeast of Krakow, he devoted a telegraphic entry to what he called “a day in the war”:
Dust, columns of troops, supply trains, Russian prisoners, dust, shouting: Polish, Russian, Austrian, German, Hungarian, Czech, dust, columns marching, columns at rest, mobile messes, dust, vehicles in motion, wheelbarrows, artillery columns, broken-down vehicles, abandoned bivouac sites, fresh graves with and without crosses, the entrails of slaughtered cattle. . . .
Overturned wagons, dead horses, dust, the smells of August, supply columns, road work, dead Russians, the casings of two mortar shells, a live white cat on the windowsill of a shot-up house. Galicians burying dead Austrians, Germans, and Russians, a mountain of empty tin cans flashing in the sun. . . .
Dust, fatigue, evening, prisoners, many thousands of them in a long procession, stench, cars, infantry columns, dust, prisoners, infantry columns, dust, prisoners, infantry columns, dust—dusk, fatigue, darkness. Shots in the distance. A few lights. The soft sounds of German, Russian, Polish. . . . Dust, stench, prisoners, infantry columns, cooler, darker, campfires.
Nightfall. And through the dust and haze, the stars . . .
He asked forgiveness for his fragmentary reportage. “But what should I do?” he wrote. “It is too much. One cannot form out of chaos sentences with a subject and a predicate, cannot (should not) transform the madness into meaning.”
By summer, almost two years in, ennui had enveloped him. In June he wrote from Galicia.
How long the war has gone on. You have no idea how long. For a couple of hours you sleep in a car; the next night, you sleep in the villa of some Galician con man who has fled, with the newspaper on the nightstand left by the Russian officer who was here a week ago, and with dead bedbugs plastered to the wall. In the morning, at sunrise, still half-asleep, you mount your trusty horse, always there for you despite shrapnel wounds in its haunches and the scant oats to be had. You ride into the world with unbrushed teeth—you’re out of drinking water and don’t want to put cholera-swill in your mouth—off to nowhere in particular, gazing sleepily more within yourself than at the world around you; and when, stirred by the dazzling sun or a sudden jolt of your horse, you do look around, aware, you’re in a completely alien world, which might be strangely beautiful but through which you never intended to travel or ride. . . . For ten months now you’ve been looking into a kaleidoscope, and the very real and brutal facts it reveals seem more and more unreal, more vivid, and more improbable than the reality of what was once your everyday, civilian existence. And yet everyday life back home has also slipped away, like some feast day long since gone. What is, you want no part of; what was, no longer exists. . . . Who can blame me for being done with the war, even if the war isn’t done with me?
In September 1916, Ernst Ludwig, the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, declared the war indeed done with Kurt, intervening to spring him from military service. A man of literary interests and a poet and playwright himself, the grand duke wanted his own work published, and Kurt was happy to oblige if that were the price to return him to Leipzig. Marketing director Georg Heinrich Meyer had run the firm in Kurt’s absence and regularly traveled to the Western Front to go over business while Kurt served in Belgium. My grandfather’s redeployment east had left Meyer on his own. But Meyer’s knack for selling books held up even in wartime; upon Kurt’s return, the firm’s backlist featured more than four hundred titles, among them Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem, a notable best seller. “I extend my warmest greetings now that you are near us once again,” Kafka wrote Kurt in October 1916. “Though these days there is little difference between being near and being far.”
After the peace of 1918, Kurt brought out several books from an inventory that war fever had precluded from publication. Foremost was Heinrich Mann’s novel Der Untertan (literally, “The Underling”), held back for its anti-war and anti-monarchy themes. Kurt read the manuscript while serving on the Western Front and wrote Meyer right away: “I am entranced. After the war it is to appear immediately, marketed courageously, with timpani and trumpets. . . . Especially at a time the field-gray publicists will be swamping us with their deluge, Der Untertan should and must be published.” Although the kaiser, Wilhelm II, had abdicated and fled, the book appeared in a Germany riven by political intrigue and factional violence. The publication of Der Untertan earned Mann death threats—and the Kurt Wolff Verlag sales of one hundred thousand copies in six weeks.
A year later Kurt published Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” He had balked at doing so during the war, writing the author that he feared its gruesome subject would be too “painful” for readers. In fact, Kurt knew that this book too would have run afoul of the censors. “Your criticism of the painful element accords completely with my opinion, but then I feel the same way about almost everything I have written so far,” Kafka had replied. “Have you noticed how few things are free of this painful element in one form or another?”
