Speak, Memory

Antoinette’s mother, Elisabeth née Fischer (born 1760), was the daughter of Regina born Hartung (1732–1805), daughter of Johann Heinrich Hartung (1699–1765), head of a well-known publishing house in Königsberg. Elisabeth was a celebrated beauty. After divorcing her first husband, Justizrat Graun, the composer’s son, in 1795, she married the minor poet Christian August von Stägemann, and was the “motherly friend,” as my German source puts it, of a much better-known writer, Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), who, at thirty-three, had fallen passionately in love with her twelve-year-old daughter Hedwig Marie (later von Olfers). He is said to have called on the family, to say adieu before traveling to Wannsee—for the carrying out of an enthusiastic suicide pact with a sick lady—but was not admitted, it being laundry day in the Stägemann household. The number and diversity of contacts that my ancestors had with the world of letters are truly remarkable.

Carl Heinrich Graun, the great-grandfather of Ferdinand von Korff, my great-grandfather, was born in 1701, at Wahrenbrück, Saxony. His father, August Graun (born 1670), an exciseman (“Königlicher Polnischer und Kurfürstlicher Sächsischer Akziseneinnehmer”—the elector in question being his namesake, August II, King of Poland) came from a long line of parsons. His great-great-grandfather, Wolfgang Graun, was, in 1575, organist at Plauen (near Wahrenbrück), where a statue of his descendant, the composer, graces a public garden. Carl Heinrich Graun died at the age of fifty-eight, in 1759, in Berlin, where seventeen years earlier, the new opera house had opened with his Caesar and Cleopatra. He was one of the most eminent composers of his time, and even the greatest, according to local necrologists touched by his royal patron’s grief. Graun is shown (posthumously) standing somewhat aloof, with folded arms, in Menzel’s picture of Frederick the Great playing Graun’s composition on the flute; reproductions of this kept following me through all the German lodgings I stayed in during my years of exile. I am told there is at the Sans-Souci Palace in Potsdam a contemporary painting representing Graun and his wife, Dorothea Rehkopp, sitting at the same clavecin. Musical encyclopedias often reproduce the portrait in the Berlin opera house where he looks very much like the composer Nikolay Dmitrievich Nabokov, my first cousin. An amusing little echo, to the tune of 250 dollars, from all those concerts under the painted ceilings of a guilded past, blandly reached me in heil-hitlering Berlin, in 1936, when the Graun family entail, basically a collection of pretty snuffboxes and other precious knick-knacks, whose value after passing through many avatars in the Prussian state bank had dwindled to 43,000 reichsmarks (about 10,000 dollars), was distributed among the provident composer’s descendants, the von Korff, von Wissmann and Nabokov clans (a fourth line, the Counts Asinari di San Marzano, had died out).

Two Baronesses von Korff have left their trace in the police records of Paris. One, born Anna-Christina Stegelman, daughter of a Swedish banker, was the widow of Baron Fromhold Christian von Korff, colonel in the Russian army, a great-granduncle of my grandmother. Anna-Christina was also the cousin or the sweetheart, or both, of another soldier, the famous Count Axel von Fersen; and it was she who, in Paris, in 1791, lent her passport and her brand-new custom-made traveling coach (a sumptuous affair on high red wheels, upholstered in white Utrecht velvet, with dark green curtains and all kinds of gadgets, then modern, such as a vase de voyage) to the royal family for their escape to Varennes, the Queen impersonating her, and the King, the tutor of the two children. The other police story involves a less dramatic masquerade.