Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home
by Alexander Wolff 
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"A literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author's grandfather and father: the renowned publisher Kurt Wolff, dubbed "perhaps the twentieth century's most discriminating publisher" by the New York Times Book Review, and his son Niko, who fought in the Wehrmacht during World War II before coming to America. Kurt Wolff was born in Bonn into a highly cultured German-Jewish family, whose ancestors included show more converts to Christianity, among them Baron Moritz von Haber, who became famous for participating in a duel that led to bloody antisemitic riots. Always bookish, Kurt became a publisher at twenty-three, setting up his own firm and publishing Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and many other authors whose books would soon be burned by the Nazis. Fleeing Germany in 1933, a day after the Reichstag fire, Kurt and his second wife, Helen, sought refuge in France, Italy, and ultimately New York, where in a small Greenwich Village apartment they founded Pantheon Books. Pantheon would soon take its own place in literary history with the publication of Nobel laureate Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, and as the conduit that brought major European works to the States. But Kurt's taciturn son Niko, offspring of his first marriage to Elisabeth Merck, was left behind in Germany, where despite his Jewish heritage he served the Nazis on two fronts. As Alexander Wolff visits dusty archives and meets distant relatives, he discovers secrets that never made it to the land of fresh starts, including the connection between Hitler and the family pharmaceutical firm E. Merck, and the story of a half-brother Niko never knew. With surprising revelations from never-before-published family letters, diaries, and photographs, Endpapers is a moving and intimate family story, weaving a literary tapestry of the perils, triumphs, and secrets of history and exile"-- show lessTags
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Member Reviews
Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home by Alexander Wolff was part history, part memoir, part warning. Wolff's family history is a fascinating look at the early 20th century from his ties to famous publisher Kurt Wolff, responsible for publishing Kafka and starting Pantheon Books after emigrating to the United States, and the Merck pharmaceutical company that may have supplied drugs to Hitler and certainly used slave labor supplied by the Nazis. He father, Niko, did not leave Germany with his father and served in the Wehrmacht throughout the way despite having some Jewish blood.
Wolff, who spent his career writing for Sports Illustrated, takes a journalistic approach to his family history, using primary sources show more including family letters to create a detailed timeline. He uses that foundation to move between the lives of his grandfather and father, weaving in the stories of other family members, both legitimate and illegitimate, who experienced both sides of the war.
I enjoyed the book with its ties to publishing and history as well as its exploration of the complexity of our personal relationships to the past. show less
Wolff, who spent his career writing for Sports Illustrated, takes a journalistic approach to his family history, using primary sources show more including family letters to create a detailed timeline. He uses that foundation to move between the lives of his grandfather and father, weaving in the stories of other family members, both legitimate and illegitimate, who experienced both sides of the war.
I enjoyed the book with its ties to publishing and history as well as its exploration of the complexity of our personal relationships to the past. show less
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Longtime Sports Illustrated writer Wolff (The Audacity of Hoop) presents a dual biography of his grandfather Kurt Wolff (1887–1963) and his father Nikolaus ("Nico") Wolff (1921–2007), whose Jewish heritage uprooted their lives in Nazi Germany. Kurt was a successful publisher who fled Germany in 1933 with his second wife, Helen, and who together escaped to the United States in 1941. show more Although part Jewish, Nico remained in Germany with his mother and stepfather, becoming a mechanic in Hitler's Wehrmacht. Stories of Kurt fleeing from Nazi-controlled France and Nico's tour on the eastern front are engrossing. Once settled in the U.S., Kurt founded Pantheon Books, while Nico, who joined his father in 1948, earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton. Both men enjoyed good lives afforded them by U.S. citizenship. The author delves deeply into his ancestry to unravel the complex stories of his multigenerational family, and to show how his father's and grandfather's traumatic lives affected him. show less
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History: War & Terrorism
64 works; 1 member
Author Information
14+ Works 297 Members
He is an award-winning senior writer for Sports Illustrated and is considered the dean of basketball writers with the magazine industry. He lives in New York & Connecticut. (Bowker Author Biography)
Alexander Wolff is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing.
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- Genres
- Nonfiction, Biography & Memoir, History, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 943.004924 — History & geography History of Europe Central Europe: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech, Poland, Hungary Historical periods of Germany Standard subdivisions of Germany Ethnic And National Groups Jews
- LCC
- E184 .G3 .W65 — History of the United States United States Elements in the population Afro-Americans
- BISAC
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- 107
- Popularity
- 303,217
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.06)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 2
