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All publishing can be seen as a kind of translation. Sometimes from one language to another but also from one place to another, one time to another, one reader to another.
The writer and publisher Helen Wolff knew this. It shaped her life as one of the 20th century’s most important publishers, and it has shaped too the life of her novella, Background For Love, which has just been translated into English from German for the first time by her grandson, Tristram Wolff.
It is a startling work following a young woman as she escapes the rising fascism of 1930s Berlin with her older lover for the south of France. It shimmers with summer sun, with a young woman’s desire for her lover but also with her stronger desire to create her life as her own. And among the shimmering, the novella asserts too those human values, evident in the best kinds of translation, which are our defence against the narrow and the limited.
Wolff was born Helen Mosel in 1906 to a German father and an Austro-Hungarian mother and spent her early childhood in the Balkans. She had a gift for languages and used this in the late 1920s when she started to work as an editor and translator for the eminent Munich publisher Kurt Wolff, who had published Franz Kafka and other important German-language writers in the 1910s and 1920s.
She wrote Background For Love in 1932, its story a condensation and rewriting of the periods between 1929 and 1932 when she lived in the south of France with Kurt, who was by then her (much older, and married) lover.
The novella is unique for the period, written in the first person and in the present tense, which was unusual for novels before the second world war. Also unusually, the young woman narrator addresses her older lover throughout as “you”. All these techniques make it feel contemporary and they give it a powerful immediacy at one with the landscape which surrounds them – the light, the colours, the textures and smells of the Mediterranean.
It is in and through the landscape of the south of France that the narrator finds freedom and a new knowledge, but not in the way she first expected. She is young, inexperienced, without money. What she finds is the chance to create herself as herself, to create a world for herself that fits her.
While seemingly apolitical, Background For Love is a hymn to values inimical to the forces that were growing in Germany in the early 1930s. As she and her lover arrive in Provence, the narrator thinks:
Maybe there is no such thing as a fatherland, as they call it back home; and borders are arbitrary and that’s why they’re so often moved around, here as there; what there are instead are climates, milder and harsher, rougher and gentler, and climates kind to us humans.
When Wolff wrote the novella, it was already clear that the Nazis were on the rise. Background For Love was due to be published in 1933 in Germany, but the contract was rescinded after the Nazis gained power. The novella remained unpublished till 2020 and has just been translated from German to English this year.
As recounted in the essay by her great-niece, Marion Detjen, that accompanies the story in this new edition, Helen and Kurt left Germany for good just after Hitler became chancellor. They settled first in Paris, then London, where they married, then Switzerland and back to southern France, where their son was born in 1934.
They were living in Paris when the war started and both worked for the French Ministry of Information, writing anti-Nazi propaganda. They fled occupied France in 1940, returned to Nice with their son and eventually were able to leave Europe in March 1941, via Spain and Portugal, on a ship to New York.
The following year the Wolffs founded the publisher Pantheon and it grew to be one of the most respected literary publishers in the US. It was responsible for introducing through translation a slew of the most important European writers of the 20th century – Boris Pasternak, Guiseppe de Lampedusa, Günter Grass.
Panetheon was bought by Random House in 1961 and the Wolffs then set up Helen and Kurt Wolff Books as an imprint of Harcourt Brace, running it together until Kurt’s death in 1963. Helen then ran it alone till her retirement in 1986, continuing to bring translations of important European writers such as Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco to US audiences.
Helen Wolff’s work as a publisher, making European writing available in English in the US, contributed to the kinder climates imagined by the narrator of Background For Love – dissolving borders, increasing understanding, sharing new perspectives. Her work as a writer, in Background For Love, through the work of multiple kinds of translation, can now contribute to them too.
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Leigh WIlson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
