Stalking Wolfskehl

This is a story that features three Germans who came to New Zealand at different times.

Karl Wolfskehl left Europe for Auckland in 1938 to put as much distance as possible between himself and Nazi Germany. A wellknown Jewish writer, he was erudite and immensely sociable, friendly with other writers such as Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke.

Friedrich Voit was a young research assistant at Siegen University in the 1970s when he saw an ad for a job at the University of Auckland’s German department. He applied and got it. Voit wasn’t a fan of Wolfskehl. But some of his new colleagues had met Wolfskehl in person and told him about it. And what is a German-literature expert supposed to do in Auckland if not study the one famous German poet who ever lived there?

I arrived in New Zealand in early 2020. My grandfather, a book publisher, admired the writer Stefan George, a close friend of Wolfskehl. He chided me once because, in a letter, I’d spelled