Background for Love (eBook)

Helen Wolff’s personal estate is contained in boxes and envelopes in the attic of a small stone house in the mountains of Vermont, close to the sky and in a lovely, self-sufficient solitude that suits her, even if she rarely got to enjoy anything like it in her lifetime. Whenever I come, her son Christian carries the boxes down to the living room and leaves me alone with them for several hours until it is time to eat. In the afternoon, I pull weeds in the garden. Our meals mostly come from there. I can’t separate this quiet little house from the material in the boxes, which encompasses an entire century and a vast transatlantic network of connections, yet which is only bound by a single human life, Helen Wolff’s life. Nor can I separate my research on Helen’s papers from my feelings of gratitude, mixed with a sense of duty, even guilt, for Christian allowing me to invade her private sphere. I am desperately seeking something in this sphere: the truth, the historical truth about our place in the transatlantic twentieth century.

In the summer of 2007, when I was first left alone with Helen’s papers, I noticed a thick, rust-brown envelope, torn at the sides, stuffed with manuscripts. On one side, shortly before her death, it would seem, she had written the instruction: ‘At my death, burn or throw away unread!’ The contents of the envelope were the remains of a literary career Helene* had tried to establish in German, English and—for a time before 1941—French, only to be forced by the circumstances of the time to break off those endeavors. She left behind two finished plays, the novella Background for Love, handwritten notes for a longer novel project and at least a dozen essayistic meditations and pieces of documentary non-fiction.

Since founding Pantheon Books in late 1941/early 1942, nine months after fleeing occupied France and arriving in New York, neither Helen Wolff nor her husband Kurt, nor any of the people close to them who knew that she had once wanted to become an author, said a word about these writings. Christian had only stumbled across them in their ominous-looking envelope by accident. My grandmother Liesel, the youngest sister of Aunt Helle, as both her German and her Chilean nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews called Helen, had given me a shoebox full of letters after Helen’s death in 1994 and, with it, the idea of writing a biography. Liesel outlived her older sibling by a decade, but never mentioned Helen’s literary efforts. Neither did Kurt Wolff’s children from his first marriage—my Uncle Nico and Aunt Maria—nor her younger brother in Chile, Georg, my Uncle Schorsch. The same was obviously true for Helen herself, with whom I had stayed for several weeks as a young person in 1987–88. At the time I was already trying to discover that thing, that historical truth, which she, as an émigré, a ‘witness to the past’, a refugee of the lies and schemes of National Socialism, seemed to stand for. How greatly must she and others who experienced the 1930s on the European continent have mistrusted our ability to understand those times? Or did she perhaps just want to spare us? In any case, the knowledge that Helene wanted to become an author and may well have, had the Nazis not come to power, was obviously part of a past that was to be excluded from our memory and had been submerged, along with the rest of ravaged old Europe.

Why didn’t she burn or throw away the rust-brown envelope herself? Helen died well prepared and in full possession of her mental powers. As her sole heir, Christian was left to decide whether and how to follow her instruction. Back in 2007, we both felt uncomfortable discussing this issue. At the time, I communicated mainly with his wife Holly, also a passionate historian, about the vagaries of literary judgement that might have led Helen to make this unusual request. Were the texts not good enough to be put in front of readers? Did they not measure up to the exacting standards which Helen maintained as a publisher? The double bind reminded us of Kafka. But was comparing Helen to Kafka itself not a ridiculous sacrilege? Holly and I talked a lot about Uwe Johnson and his obsession with detailed precision. Perhaps that was the real message behind her paradoxical instruction: don’t do anything rash with these manuscripts. Be careful, be accurate. Better not to write or publish anything at all than something ill-considered.

There are obvious, if hardly all-encompassing, reasons why she kept the fruits of her literary labors secret as long as she was a publisher—something she remained for a lucky group of authors until her death. Part of Helen and Kurt Wolff’s ‘credo’ was that the devotion to the books of others demanded by the job of publisher precluded literary activity of one’s own. In 1982, when asked why she didn’t write any memoirs, she told the New Yorker: ‘If one writes oneself, one closes out the writing of others. I have never been able to understand editors who could also write. You have to keep yourself open for the creative efforts of authors; you must be totally receptive. It’s like being a priest, and I don’t think priests should be married.’1 But even if she was serious about this dubious comparison (her son’s best friend was a married minister in New York whom she greatly respected), it didn’t explain the secrecy she maintained about her writings at an earlier stage of her life before her career as a publisher.

Perhaps she was afraid of the jealousy and narcissism of the authors with whom she enjoyed such close, almost maternal relationships. Some—Max Frisch, Italo Calvino, Georges Simenon and Uwe Johnson, who dedicated his Anniversaries to her—were already dead by the early 1990s. But others—for instance, Günter Grass, Amos Oz, György Konrád and Umberto Eco—outlived her and might have felt overwhelmed by the fact that their ever-attendant publisher and maternal mentor had possessed literary talent of her own. One key element to her success was her ability to take a back seat. She actively silenced attempts to highlight her part in the professional comeback of Kurt, twenty years her senior, who had made a name for himself as the publisher of the Expressionist movement and of Kafka in the 1910s and 1920s.2 On the other hand, the imprint with which they both continued their work for Harcourt, Brace & World after leaving Pantheon in 1961 named her before her husband. A ‘Helen and Kurt Wolff book’ was, as Grass noted in his 1994 eulogy for her, like a seal of quality for European literature in the US.3 And it would retain that status after Kurt Wolff’s death in 1963 for the almost three decades during which she ran the imprint as a widow. It was she who tied many of those famous authors to the publishing house, giving them access to the American book market. She acted as their older, maternal friend and advisor, often also on private matters. In her later years she increasingly represented a moral and intellectual authority, as an emigrant of conscience and conviction, and as someone who embodied the best tradition of European literature and European values. At the same time, she possessed the authority of a practical woman, not afraid of hard work, who offered motherly support to authors who had lost their way. She always legitimized her actions by linking them back to Kurt Wolff’s legacy. ‘I never saw myself in his shadow, I always saw myself in his light,’ she invariably answered when asked whether it had been difficult to step out of his shadow after his death.4 She was highly skeptical of the achievements of the women’s liberation movement and often sided with her male authors against feminist attacks by their wives, particularly when the latter claimed to be creative themselves. If her own literary past, with all it entailed, had become known, it would have put her in need of explanation. Perhaps she wanted to spare her prodigy to be in need of explanations in her stead.

When I first read the manuscripts, I would have had a feeling of transgression even without Helen Wolff’s paradoxical prohibition—the unsettling sense of viewing something that wasn’t meant for my eyes. All of the texts have an autobiographical touch, dealing with private, even intimate subject matter. They work through experiences Helen Wolff obviously had lived through herself, and it’s all too easy to decipher which figures correspond to which real-life individuals. The texts remain fictionalized versions of reality and don’t allow readers to reconstruct dates, facts and events. But they contain a roman-à-clef level of connection with reality in their depictions of private relationships, their casts and constellations of characters and their settings. Several longer fragments describe Helene’s early childhood in the Balkans, first in Serbia, then in Üsküb, which today is Skopje in North Macedonia but which was a provincial capital in the Ottoman Empire until 1912–13. They feature a violent father who’s a German businessman and a weak Austrian mother who has almost godlike authority over her children.5 Both Helene’s two plays and her novella Background for Love are set in the years before and after the...