After Dorothea von Moltke, co-founder of Labyrinth Books, died on March 23, a number of the members of the Princeton Merchants Association gathered in her memory in the basement of the Nassau Inn. Co-owner of Jazam’s toy store Dean Smith told The Daily Princetonian that they discussed the huge loss of her impact on local business owners.
During difficult conversations in town council meetings, “Dorothea would always come through in those moments and just be able to put on the table all the words that everybody else was searching for. She would find them and arrange them and then just put them out there in the most beautiful, beautiful way. And you know, it changed minds, and it changed hearts, and it changed the game for a lot of people that benefited from those thoughtful words,” Smith said.
Von Moltke’s engagement with the town of Princeton was centered around Labyrinth, where she regularly organized dozens of events a year in collaboration with numerous partners — often the Princeton Public Library and the Lewis Center for the Arts, but also the Humanities Council and many Princeton academic departments — and offered a space for community members, Princeton University faculty, students, and staff, and local political organizations to gather.
Following the closing of Micawber Books in March 2007, Labyrinth Books in Princeton was co-founded in Princeton in 2007 by von Moltke, her husband Cliff Simms, and his brother Peter Simms, at the University’s request. Previously located in Morningside Heights and New Haven, Labyrinth was known for its second-hand inventory and curated selections of academic books. When founded, Labyrinth served as both the local independent bookstore and the University’s official bookstore. In the past three years, Labyrinth has notably transitioned away from providing University coursebooks and been the site of conflict over worker unionization.
Often considered the face of Labyrinth, von Moltke was particularly known for her curation and introductions of book talks in the bookstore’s cozy basement. Professor of English Jeff Dolven called her introductions to these talks “little literary masterpieces.”
“She really made a space for many of us to launch our own books into the world,” Dolven told the ‘Prince.’ “It was always a space, almost a sort of threshold space, between the world of the department and the larger world of readers. You’re crossing out into the reading public by passing through Labyrinth and talking with Dorothea.”
In a memorial to von Moltke published by the Princeton Department of English, faculty members emphasized the impact of her eloquence on the launch of their books during these introductions. The Department of Anthropology similarly remembered her “love of books, big ideas, and unwavering commitment to social justice.”
Associate Dean in the Office of Religious Life Matt Weiner foregrounded her commitment to justice and civic engagement: “What does it mean to run a bookstore? To create a bookstore that is an intellectual public space that allows for civic engagement, justice work, so on and so forth, as an open question in terms of what it means to do good citizenry and good public work? What’s more important than that?”
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Von Moltke was born in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1968, before her family moved back to Germany. Her grandfather, Helmuth James von Moltke, was a leader of the Kreisau Circle, an anti-Nazi opposition group in the 1940s. In 2019, Von Moltke and her two brothers, Helmuth Caspar and Johannes von Moltke, co-edited the volume “Last Letters: The Prison Correspondence between Helmuth and Freya von Moltke, 1944-45,” which comprised the letters exchanged between her grandparents before her grandfather’s execution by the Nazis in 1945.
“Her grandmother Freya was her guiding star, morally and intellectually. She spent a lot of her formative years in conversation with Freya, who had such an intense experience of the war and being righteous on a political level, but really having to live the consequences of that righteousness,” said Stacy Mann, founding director of SPIA in New Jersey and a close friend of von Moltke.
Von Moltke moved to France at 16 and then Maine for her final year of high school. She earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from Yale University in 1990. “She was just someone who took her study at Yale so seriously and seemed to have a sense of its larger purposes and fit, in the world and history… that few of us at that age had,” remembered Dolven, who graduated the same year as her.
During her time as a doctoral student in comparative literature at Columbia University, von Moltke met Cliff Simms, who at the time was working at a bookstore in Morningside Heights in New York. They disagreed over whether the second volume of a book of German criticism could stand on its own, and von Moltke asked Simms on a walk. A few years later, in 1997, Simms established Labyrinth in Morningside Heights with another business partner. The couple then opened a location in New Haven in 2005 before coming to Princeton, with Simms’ brother, in 2007.
Von Moltke — who Mann emphasized was striking and “extraordinarily tall,” often adding multiple inches to her six-foot height by wearing Dansko clogs and wrapping her hair up in a scarf — soon joined a reading group in town, where the two first met.
“Dorothea showing up in book group was like Kareem Abdul Jabbar just walking onto a neighborhood pickup game,” Mann described, laughing. “She just had a capacity and insight and was articulate and made amazing connections and was so brilliant and fun to listen to.”
To those who knew von Moltke, it made sense that she ran a bookstore. Dolven explained that von Moltke “delighted in language and idiom” across her mother tongue of German and her fluencies in English, Italian, and French. Through the bookstore, von Moltke cultivated a love of literature among the public and prioritized, in Weiner’s words, creating “intellectually horizontal conversations” within the Princeton community.
“I think it’s possible within the University to think of school as the only safe place for an intellectual, and that mustn’t be true — and I think Dorothea was out to show that that needn’t be true,” Dolven added.
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Marna Seltzer, director of Princeton University Concerts (PUC), explained that when she was attempting to find moderators for their Healing with Music series — innovative concert-conversations with musicians and artists about how art and the healing process interact — she called von Moltke.
“The question wasn’t just, ‘Who’s the subject expert?’ It was, ‘Who’s the subject expert, who’s also an excellent interviewer, who’s also going to keep everybody on track time-wise, who is also going to manage audience questions really well?’ It’s a complicated role, right? And she knew that because she knew people, deeply. She cared about people, and she knew them,” she said.
As well as community building through the bookstore, von Moltke served on a number of town boards and councils, including an unprecedented term of eight years on the PUC Committee. Von Moltke spearheaded PUC’s Creative Reactions Contest, reading and responding to hundreds of submissions each year. She also became a key collaborator and co-editor for the volume of essays PUC published to celebrate its 125th anniversary, “Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces” (2023). Seltzer underscored that von Moltke knew not only whom to ask to contribute to the book, but also precisely what piece of music to ask them to reflect on.
“She was the kind of person who could step back from whatever she was doing and have a vision about the way it should be, and then, quietly and gently — but at the same time forcefully — push forward. There are lots of moments where I think about Dorothea making what seems like a very informal, off-the-cuff suggestion that turns into the real vision for the project,” Seltzer said.
Indeed, they had originally envisioned “Ways of Hearing” as a coffee table book, until von Moltke asked them if they knew how many coffee table books in the basement of Labyrinth would just be “going in the garbage” and pointed them in the “more impactful” direction of a paperback.
Von Moltke was also dedicated to activism. Her activism with Smith and other small business owners in the New Jersey Main Street Alliance led to the state’s Earned Sick Leave Law, which passed in 2018 and allows all temporary, part-time, and full-time employees to accrue up to 40 hours of paid time off. She also led the charge, Smith explained, on creating a Princeton Children’s Book Coalition in response to the encroachment of Scholastic onto book events that Jazam’s had previously run in schools and in town.
“When we worked together on projects, she would bring out the best in me, and she would make me feel that my contribution was equally if not more important than her contribution,” Smith said. “She would do that again and again and again with person after person after person: see what they were saying, see what they were trying to articulate, see where they were coming from, and try to draw out of that the best of what that person was putting forward. That was just remarkable — utterly remarkable.”
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In Stacy Mann’s kitchen, Mann pointed to a picture on the wall of herself, von Moltke, a family friend, and their daughters, all sporting big grins, hats, and brightly colored dresses. They had taken the train down to Trenton for a protest against then-Governor Chris Christie, who was “planning to balance the budget on the backs of school children and old people, with dramatic cuts,” dressed as “Billionaires for Christie.”
“She was so thoughtful and always processing and calibrating how to show up in the world in a way that was consistent with the convictions she had. And that held true for her parenting and her being a businesswoman, a neighbor, a spouse, and a sister and daughter,” said Mann.
Von Moltke was deeply invested in Mann’s own intellectual and civically-engaged academic work, as well as in their shared experiences of motherhood and life in central New Jersey. Most of the pair’s adventures were within a two-hour radius of Princeton, hiking in the Institute Woods, Mountain Lakes Park, and Harrington Woods and exploring the culinary richness of central New Jersey, with favorites being dosas in East Windsor and tomato pies (with, of course, Jersey tomatoes) in Trenton.
“She was just curious and available to be thrilled by whatever the world had to offer her,” Mann said.
Friends and family crowded into Labyrinth on the afternoon of Saturday, May 10 to celebrate von Moltke’s life. A bookshelf in her honor is still available to be browsed next to Labyrinth’s poetry section, featuring some of von Moltke’s favorite titles, including (but not limited to) “Autobiography of Red” by Anne Carson, “Liberation Day” by George Saunders, “The Penderwicks” by Jeanne Birdsall, poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Paul Celan, and René Char, and “anything by Beckett.”
Smith remembered a night soon after von Moltke and Simms moved to Princeton, when Jazam’s was co-hosting a Harry Potter-themed event with the Princeton Public Library. A huge storm flooded the bottom floor of the library, and von Moltke insisted everyone come to Labyrinth. In the midst of the catastrophe, von Moltke turned the bookstore’s basement into a magical Harry Potter scene.
“She was always right there,” Smith added, smiling. “Like, ‘What can we do? How do we do it? Let’s figure it out together.’”
Lucia Brown is a member of the Class of 2025. She studied comparative literature and covers arts and culture for Princeton-based publications.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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