over those scars, to measure the length of each cut and feel the thickness of the tissue.
Bildung and Books
Kurt, 1887 to 1913
As Kurt Wolff’s grandson, I came swaddled in the certainty that I would play the cello. It was explained at an early age: with a pianist mother and violinist father, little Alex on the cello would make a trio. I broke in on a half-size instrument and graduated in middle school to a three-quarter size, with the expectation that I’d soon be fitted with Kurt’s well-varnished heirloom, crafted in the Tyrol in 1779 from maple and a majestic wide-grain spruce.
You don’t have to look too far back into the Wolff male lineage to see that this is how things were done. My grandfather grew up in Bonn, where his father taught music at the university and kept up an exhausting schedule as a conductor, string player, and organist as well as a choirmaster. On Sundays, at the Lutheran church on Kaiserplatz, Leonhard Wolff sandwiched organ and choral pieces around the sermons of Pfarrer Bleibtreu—literally, Pastor Stay Faithful. A scholar of Bach and friend of Brahms’s, Leonhard was a composer himself, part of his inheritance as the third Wolff in a line of professional musicians from the Rhineland town of Krefeld. When the pianist Clara Schumann passed through to perform in winter concerts staged by his father during the 1850s, young Leonhard had been dispatched to deliver flowers or fruit to her hotel room.
In 1886, twenty months after his first wife, Anna, took her life by throwing herself into the Rhine, Leonhard remarried. His new bride, Maria Marx, was the daughter of two Rhinelanders who could trace their Jewish roots as far back as records were kept. She gave up her job as a teacher at a secondary school for girls to assume stepmother duties to Leonhard and Anna’s two children. On a March evening in 1887, Maria gave birth to Kurt while Leonhard conducted Handel’s Messiah in the old Beethoven Hall. Unto us a son is given, the family joke would go.
Christian by baptism, as her own parents were, Maria ran a culturally German if mostly secular home. Her training as a teacher showed up in her parenting, as she shared a love of poetry with her stepchildren and Kurt, as well as with his sister Else, who was born three years later. Kurt began those requisite cello lessons and set out on a path toward a Gymnasium education. By the time of her death in 1904, at forty-six, Maria had made a decisive mark on the formation of her now seventeen-year-old son.
Preoccupied and more introverted than his wife, Leonhard liked to go for long walks, and as an adolescent my grandfather often joined him. Kurt would draw his father out about composers, performers, and two paternal forebears. Leonhard’s grandfather Johann Nikolaus, a Franconian miller’s son born in 1770, the same year as Beethoven, had served as music director in Krefeld. Leonhard’s father, Hermann, who succeeded Johann Nikolaus in that post, befriended Clara Schumann as well as her composer husband, Robert. Hermann was such an early champion of Brahms’s that in 1870 he left Krefeld in defeat after hostile reaction to a performance of A German Requiem, a piece apparently too radical for the town at that time. Leonhard would honor his father’s forerunning taste by embracing Brahms with gusto. Before arriving in Bonn he had played chamber music with the master, and successfully foisted A German Requiem on the city soon after taking up his post there in 1884.
In the predawn of a spring day in 1896, a few hours before Leonhard was to lead the chorus at Clara Schumann’s funeral, Brahms himself showed up at the Wolffs’ home on the Bonnerthalweg. “I remember the consternation, excitement, and grief at that unexpected appearance of Brahms at five in the morning at my parents’ door,” my grandfather, then nine, would recall more than a half century later. “Breakfast was like a Last Supper. My father would not see Brahms again after that funeral.” This photograph survives from a gathering the next day. Brahms is the bereft, white-bearded figure in the middle. Thanks to the Human Flowchart’s annotations on a tracing-paper overlay, I know my great-grandparents stand on either side of the man with the hat and dark beard just behind the composer.
The Wolffs fixed themselves among that class of Germans known as the Bildungsbürgertum, the haute bourgeoisie who devoted themselves to Bildung, lifelong learning and a cultural patrimony of art, music, and books. By age ten, Kurt had come under the spell of the stories of Theodor Fontane, and a love of literature propelled him further toward the Abitur, the capstone of a secondary education in the liberal arts. This kind of humanistic self-cultivation was taken for granted in a university town like Bonn. “Should, on occasion, the embarrassing event occur that a son of a faculty member elected not to study but rather pursue a career in business or trade, he’d be lost and abandoned,” my grandfather noted. “It was a disgrace to the family, which profoundly regretted it, and the unhappy episode was tactfully never mentioned.”
Besieged by “snobs and burghers,” as Kurt later put it, young Bonners eager to express themselves turned to music and poetry. Leonhard championed the piano prodigy Elly Ney, daughter of a Bonn city councilman, who lived across the street from the sports hall at Kurt’s school. After World War II the city would ban Ney from its stages for her Nazism. But here Kurt, not yet a teenager, skipped phys ed to slip into her salon and ask the sixteen-year-old Elly to play for him. And play she did, as if he were punching up tunes on a jukebox—“whatever I wished, for hours without tiring: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin . . . Brahms’s sonatas in C and F. I owe my knowledge of the major piano works to those hours with Elly. . . . [I] was totally smitten by the highly spirited young lioness.”
Kurt turned similarly to literature. As a nineteen-year-old he met Friedrich Gundolf, the literary titan who would go on to teach at the University of Heidelberg. Gundolf was close to the poet Stefan George, who had attracted a circle of acolytes that eventually included the von Stauffenberg brothers, the aristocratic German officers who would lead the unsuccessful Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler. “Refined, handsome, studious, modest, well-bred, possessed of a touching, inquiring, and searching spirit and freshness,” Gundolf wrote to George, describing Kurt in advance of bringing him by for an introduction. “[He is] one of those young men so essential to creating an atmosphere and elevating standards.”
Soon after that meeting, at the risk of mortifying academic Bonn, Kurt sailed to São Paulo, Brazil, for a six-month training program sponsored by the German banking industry. But he threw himself back into books as soon as he returned. With the 100,000 gold marks he inherited upon his mother’s death, a sum that would be worth more than $1 million today, he had begun to buy up first editions and incunabula, books produced during the fifteenth century shortly after the invention of the printing press. He would eventually count some twelve thousand volumes in his collection. But much like his father, a champion of music both old and new, Kurt let his eye wander from literature gathering dust to what was then being written—to those writers challenging the staid assumptions of the Wilhelmine era. Migrating from campus to campus in a fashion common at the time, he studied German literature at universities in Marburg, Munich, Bonn, and, most fatefully, Leipzig, then the seat of the country’s book publishing industry. In 1908, at twenty-one, he set aside work on a PhD in literature to take an editorial position there with Insel Verlag. “I loved books, especially beautiful books, and as an adolescent and student collected them even as I knew it to be an unproductive pursuit,” he would recall. “But I knew I had to find a profession in books. What was left? You become a publisher.”
One of his first projects came out of the family archives. As a teenager, while helping his maternal grandmother, Bertha, clear out a bookshelf in her home one day, he had discovered notes and visiting cards from Adele Schopenhauer, sister of the philosopher, and Ottilie von Goethe, the writer’s daughter-in-law. Kurt pressed his grandmother for details. It turned out that Bertha’s mother, Jeanetta, had been friendly with both women. Bertha unearthed further correspondence, and in 1909, supplementing those letters with a diary of Adele’s he’d found in private hands, Kurt assembled it all into two volumes to be published by Insel.
He turned next to the work of an associate of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s, the writer Johann Heinrich Merck, an ancestor of the seventeen-year-old woman