Background for Love

A lush autobiographical story of young love, 1930s Côte d’Azur, and rising fascism in Nazi Germany -- by the famed publisher of Calvino, Pasternak, and Gunter Grass

In a giddy rush, a young woman and her older lover leave 1930s Berlin for a summer vacation on the Côte d’Azur. As they drive along stunning bays, linger over sumptuous meals and steal kisses on the street, they seem marvelously in sync, each enchanted by the other. But as she observes her lover’s wandering eye and rigid world-view, the woman decides to leave in search of a cottage of her own near Saint-Tropez. There, amid the vineyards and lemon trees, she will forge startling new connections and pass an unforgettable summer of independence and freedom.

Background for Love is an irresistible autobiographical novel by the great publisher Helen Wolff, who together with her husband, Kurt Wolff, Kafka’s first publisher, set up Pantheon Books in America after fleeing Nazi Germany. In the fascinating companion essay, historian Marion Detjen, the author’s great-niece, delves into Helen’s path to writing and the autobiographical context of the novel in her early life with Kurt. Helen is remembered as a great publisher, a multilingual reader who brought authors such as Italo Calvino and Georges Simenon to English-speaking readers - only now is her own reputation as a writer coming to the fore.

Recently recovered from the archive and translated for the 1st time by Tristram Wolff, the author’s grandson, this is a a fast-paced, highly intense, and emotionally gripping novel of passion and self-discovery.

Helen Wolff (1906-1994) was born in Macedonia to a German father and Austro-Hungarian mother. At twenty-one, she went to Munich to apprentice at Kurt Wolff Verlag, Kafka’s original publisher. She began an affair with Kurt, whom she went on to marry. The couple fled Nazi Germany, first for France and eventually for the United States, arriving almost penniless in 1941.
The Wolffs founded a new imprint of Pantheon Books in 1942. Helen, a gifted linguist who could read four languages, published significant works by writers including Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Georges Simenon and Boris Pasternak. She wrote fiction and plays but always kept her own writing private. Background for Love was first published in Germany in 2020 to wide acclaim.

Marion Detjen is a historian at Bard College Berlin. She teaches migration history and is Program Director for International Education and Social Change, a scholarship program for displaced students.