Endpapers Bonus Material

An Endpapers Gallery

Photography, Music, Genealogy & Art

Family Photographs

Hover for caption, click or tap to see full image

Leonhard Wolff circa 1890, conducting in Bonn’s old Beethovenhalle. Maria Marx Wolff gave birth to Kurt in 1887 while Leonhard led a performance there of Handel’s “Messiah.”
The four daughters of Carl Emanuel and Clara Merck vacationing on the Baltic, 1915. Clockwise from bottom: Adelheid (Heidi); Caroline; Niko’s mother Elisabeth; and star-crossed Annemarie.
In 1918, Kurt Wolff moved his publishing house to Munich, into this villa on the Luisenstraße. It housed his still-substantial book collection and soon became the site of exhibits, talks, and recitals.
Kurt in Bonn, 1920, visiting his father, Leonhard, then 72. The retired professor, municipal music director, string player, and composer would live another fourteen years.
Niko Wolff sometime in the mid-twenties, with his stuffed bear Zoschl, a gift from the Italian consul in Munich.
Mercedes-sponsored racer Wilhelm Merck, far right, toasting the results of a rally with friends, circa 1930.
Ten-year-old Niko in the Allgäu, 1931, with his new stepfather, the obstetrician, violinist, and magician Hans Albrecht.
The port of Saint-Tropez during the thirties, when it offered Kurt and Helen Wolff and other German intellectual and artistic refugees, in Sybille Bedford’s words, “this present of the illusion of freedom.”
By the mid-thirties, Niko and his sister, Maria, had become accustomed to spending summers visiting their father and stepmother in Saint-Tropez, giving in to the German “Drang nach Süden.”
Whatever Kurt did, he had a knack for doing to the max. In 1937 he landed in the most felicitous of exile destinations, Elba, where he and Helen rented this villa.
During the late thirties, as Germany hurtled toward full-on fascism, teenage Niko found temporary refuge at Landheim Schondorf, a boarding school on Bavaria’s Ammersee.
Niko drove this Luftwaffe support truck, with target maps and reconnaissance photos, during the invasion of the Soviet Union. Here his unit has encamped somewhere on the Ukrainian steppe.
Helen sent this postcard of a Velázquez crucifixion, from the Prado in Madrid, to Munich to let Maria know that she, Kurt, and Christian had escaped Vichy France en route to the U.S. The censor’s stamp on the body of Christ is from the Franco regime.
A photo Niko took during the winter of 1942, en route to Kharkov. The Wehrmacht has buried its dead.
“Hungry Summer, 1946.” Niko with his mother, Elisabeth, in the backyard garden of her home on Nymphenburg’s Südliche Schlossrondell.
Thanks to Kurt’s efforts, Niko landed a student visa and was able to enroll as a graduate student at Princeton in 1948. Here he is outside Frick Chemistry Lab.
Kurt and Helen’s son Christian, whom his friend and colleague Morton Feldman would call “Orpheus in tennis shoes,” was a teenage prodigy not on the piano, but as an avant-garde composer.
Niko met his wife-to-be, Mary Neave, a piano student at Mannes School of Music, at a party in Manhattan. He pursued her through his grad student days at Princeton.
Wilmington, Delaware, 1957. Alex’s first Christmas. One of the few Old World customs Niko clung to as he adapted to American ways was real candles clipped to the tree.
Alex in late 1959, not quite three, learning the story of Noah’s Ark from Niko.
In Frankfurt for the 1960 Book Fair, Kurt and Christian inspected a bookshop storefront devoted to the early works of the Kurt Wolff Verlag.
Niko with Ursula Merck, née Lange, in 1961. The wife of Niko’s first cousin Emanuel, Ursula was orphaned as a teen, losing her Jewish mother to suicide. She spent the Nazi era shuttling between Landheim Schondorf and the homes of family friends.
Kurt, as rendered in his early forties by the Italian painter Felice Casorati, foregrounded by Maria and Niko. The photo is from 1961, two years before Kurt’s death.
Kurt at a dinner he threw for Günter Grass during the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1963, days before he died.
Kurt’s funeral in Marbach am Neckar, near Stuttgart, October 1963. Grass paid his respects graveside.
June 1996. Niko and Alex on the Danube, the great transnational river, which flows from the Black Forest to the Black Sea.
During that same summer of 1996, after the Danube cruise wound up in Budapest, Niko returned to Munich to revisit his childhood home on the Königinstraße.

An Endpapers Playlist

For all his devotion to the literary life, Kurt Wolff lived a parallel one rich with music. You can listen to a soundtrack to the book, in more or less chronological order, by going to Spotify, where I’ve chosen the most appropriate recordings the platform will allow. Learn more about how each selection ties into the story.

An Endpapers Family Tree

Click or tap to zoom

Illustration by Donovan Andrews

Woodcuts from the Kurt Wolff Verlag

Woodcut by Frans Masereel from the graphic novel Le Soleil.
Published in Munich by Kurt Wolff Verlag as Die Sonne, 1920.

Woodcut by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner on front endpapers of Georg Heym’s Umbra Vitae (Shadow of Life).
Published in Munich by Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1924.