Kurt Wolff (publisher)

For the World War I flying ace, see Kurt Wolff (aviator).
Some books published by Kurt Wolff

Kurt Wolff (3 March 1887 – 21 October 1963) was a German publisher, editor, writer, and journalist.

Wolff was born in Bonn, Rhenish Prussia; his mother came from a Jewish-German family.[1] He married Elisabeth Karoline Clara Merck (1890–1970), of the Darmstadt pharmaceuticals firm, in 1909. Together with Ernst Rowohlt, Wolff began to work in publishing in Leipzig in 1908. He was the first to promote and publish Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel but declined to publish the works of Axel Munthe. Wolff's close contact to other writers in Prague and the support for unknown, but talented writers, helped him develop Kafka's friends, Max Brod and Felix Weltsch, who were more well known in Berlin and Germany.

In 1929, Wolff published the photography book Face of Our Time by August Sander.

In 1941 Wolff and his second wife, Helen Mosel, left Germany and emigrated to Paris, London, Montagnola, St. Tropez, Nice, and finally with the assistance of Varian Fry, to New York City.[2] Later in Munich, Florence, and the United States, Wolff developed several publishing houses. In the U.S., he and Helen founded Pantheon Books in 1942, which became well known.[3][4] They later ran the Helen and Kurt Wolff Books imprint at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.[5] Wolff settled in Switzerland in the 1950s.[6] He died after a driving accident and is buried with Helen in Marbach, Germany.

The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize is named in honor of him and his wife. His son, Christian Wolff, is a renowned avant-garde musician. His grandson Alexander (son of Nicholas) wrote a family history, published in 2021 as Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home.

  1. ^ "Rolle der Juden in Wirtschaft und Kultur Sachsens". Archived from the original on 2013-10-21. Retrieved 2012-10-03.
  2. ^ Detjen, Marion. "Kurt and Helen Wolff." In Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 5, edited by R. Daniel Wadhwani. German Historical Institute. Last modified June 19, 2012.
  3. ^ McGuire, William. Bollingen: An Adventure in Collecting the Past, Princeton University Press (1989), p 273.
  4. ^ [1] Goethe-Institut USA, about Helen and Kurt Wolff, retrieved July 31, 2009
  5. ^ Mitgang, Herbert (1994-03-30). "Helen Wolff, a Publisher, Is Dead at 88". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2017-12-18.
  6. ^ Hammer, Joshua (April 8, 2021). "A Ghost in the War Machine". New York Review of Books. Vol. 63, no. 6. pp. 28–31. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved March 28, 2021.