two mortar shells, a live white cat on the windowsill of a shot-up house. Galicians burying dead Austrians, Germans, and Russians, a mountain of empty tin cans flashing in the sun. . . .
Dust, fatigue, evening, prisoners, many thousands of them in a long procession, stench, cars, infantry columns, dust, prisoners, infantry columns, dust, prisoners, infantry columns, dust—dusk, fatigue, darkness. Shots in the distance. A few lights. The soft sounds of German, Russian, Polish. . . . Dust, stench, prisoners, infantry columns, cooler, darker, campfires.
Nightfall. And through the dust and haze, the stars . . .
He asked forgiveness for his fragmentary reportage. “But what should I do?” he wrote. “It is too much. One cannot form out of chaos sentences with a subject and a predicate, cannot (should not) transform the madness into meaning.”
By summer, almost two years in, ennui had enveloped him. In June he wrote from Galicia.
How long the war has gone on. You have no idea how long. For a couple of hours you sleep in a car; the next night, you sleep in the villa of some Galician con man who has fled, with the newspaper on the nightstand left by the Russian officer who was here a week ago, and with dead bedbugs plastered to the wall. In the morning, at sunrise, still half-asleep, you mount your trusty horse, always there for you despite shrapnel wounds in its haunches and the scant oats to be had. You ride into the world with unbrushed teeth—you’re out of drinking water and don’t want to put cholera-swill in your mouth—off to nowhere in particular, gazing sleepily more within yourself than at the world around you; and when, stirred by the dazzling sun or a sudden jolt of your horse, you do look around, aware, you’re in a completely alien world, which might be strangely beautiful but through which you never intended to travel or ride. . . . For ten months now you’ve been looking into a kaleidoscope, and the very real and brutal facts it reveals seem more and more unreal, more vivid, and more improbable than the reality of what was once your everyday, civilian existence. And yet everyday life back home has also slipped away, like some feast day long since gone. What is, you want no part of; what was, no longer exists. . . . Who can blame me for being done with the war, even if the war isn’t done with me?
In September 1916, Ernst Ludwig, the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, declared the war indeed done with Kurt, intervening to spring him from military service. A man of literary interests and a poet and playwright himself, the grand duke wanted his own work published, and Kurt was happy to oblige if that were the price to return him to Leipzig. Marketing director Georg Heinrich Meyer had run the firm in Kurt’s absence and regularly traveled to the Western Front to go over business while Kurt served in Belgium. My grandfather’s redeployment east had left Meyer on his own. But Meyer’s knack for selling books held up even in wartime; upon Kurt’s return, the firm’s backlist featured more than four hundred titles, among them Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem, a notable best seller. “I extend my warmest greetings now that you are near us once again,” Kafka wrote Kurt in October 1916. “Though these days there is little difference between being near and being far.”
After the peace of 1918, Kurt brought out several books from an inventory that war fever had precluded from publication. Foremost was Heinrich Mann’s novel Der Untertan (literally, “The Underling”), held back for its anti-war and anti-monarchy themes. Kurt read the manuscript while serving on the Western Front and wrote Meyer right away: “I am entranced. After the war it is to appear immediately, marketed courageously, with timpani and trumpets. . . . Especially at a time the field-gray publicists will be swamping us with their deluge, Der Untertan should and must be published.” Although the kaiser, Wilhelm II, had abdicated and fled, the book appeared in a Germany riven by political intrigue and factional violence. The publication of Der Untertan earned Mann death threats—and the Kurt Wolff Verlag sales of one hundred thousand copies in six weeks.
A year later Kurt published Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” He had balked at doing so during the war, writing the author that he feared its gruesome subject would be too “painful” for readers. In fact, Kurt knew that this book too would have run afoul of the censors. “Your criticism of the painful element accords completely with my opinion, but then I feel the same way about almost everything I have written so far,” Kafka had replied. “Have you noticed how few things are free of this painful element in one form or another?”
Kurt had surely noticed. At the same time, the flight of the kaiser and the promise of democracy seemed to foretell the kind of Germany in which the Kurt Wolff Verlag would flourish. In its 1918 catalog the house foreswore “prejudices of a literary, political, national nature” and vowed instead simply to “consider the question of whether a book is good.” But post-traumatic social conditions and an economy shackled by reparations imperiled the book business. Bureaucrats with authoritarian sympathies remained in place. The first democracy in Germany’s history, established in the cultural capital of Weimar, lacked the hardheadedness to enforce the lofty values in its constitution. Communists and reactionaries clashed violently with one another from their respective camps, and the idealism and confidence that had marked German literary culture before 1914 became collateral damage. Karl Kraus put it succinctly: “[The Germans] will have forgotten that they lost the war, forgotten that they started it, forgotten that they waged it. For this reason, it will not end.”
The Wolffs now had an infant daughter, my aunt Maria, and in October 1919 Kurt moved the firm from Leipzig to Munich. With supply chains disrupted and habitable apartments for its employees scarce, he nonetheless set up shop in a neo-Baroque villa on Luisenstrasse. It quickly became a house of culture, accommodating Kurt’s still-substantial library and hosting regular readings, concerts, and exhibits. But my grandfather soon fell into a funk. “More than ever, Kurt Wolff is a slave to the Kurt Wolff Verlag,” he wrote Hasenclever in November 1920. Nine months later it was Werfel’s turn to hear out one of my grandfather’s lamentations—that their generation had groomed “no young creative successors.”
Kurt began to choose titles that were more bourgeois and less adventurous. He shut down Der jüngste Tag and threw his house open to European writers, not just German ones. All good as it went, but crotchets and peeves sometimes rushed in where sure-handed seismography once prevailed. In 1920, when a “Professor James Joyce” offered him the German rights to a novel that was probably A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Kurt wondered who “this idiotic ‘professor’ who has written me from Trieste in bad German” could be. Forty years later my grandfather confessed, “If the Kurt Wolff Verlag had published an early book by Joyce, it would certainly also have acquired Ulysses, the most important work to be written in English in our century.”
In Munich he turned more often to the arts, to painters of Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider), such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, whom he had begun to patronize before the war. During his exile to come, Kurt would pawn some of their works to support himself and his family.
Carrying a payroll of one hundred, the firm in 1923 began steadily shedding staff. “The times are bad,” Kurt wrote his mother-in-law, Clara Merck, that June, “and the publishing business accords with the times.” Kurt started to hedge his bets. Instead of the new, he published more of the tried-and-true, including authors from countries with which Germany had just been at war—Émile Zola and Guy de Maupassant, Maxim Gorky and Anton Chekhov, even Sinclair Lewis. Hoping to become less dependent on the fragile German economy, he founded a house in Florence, Pantheon Casa Editrice, the first pan-European firm to specialize in art books. He brought out volumes with text in five languages, cutting deals with foreign publishers to share costs. But the uncertainty of the times left even wealthy continental book buyers reluctant to spring for lavish editions, and rising nationalism began to subvert the cosmopolitan assumptions at the heart of these copublishing arrangements. The firm’s prewar reputation as safe harbor for avant-garde playwrights, poets, and authors of fiction vanished as these kinds of writers seemed to disappear too. As the worst of the hyperinflation set in, Kurt paid his staff daily, so that, he wrote, “they could spend it the same day for purchases that would be
