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