Overview

In a giddy rush, a young woman and her older lover escape the rising fascism of 1930s Berlin for a summer vacation on the Cote d'Azur. As they drive along stunning bays and linger over sumptuous meals, they are enchanted by each other. But their harmony soon falters, and the woman decides she must 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 autobiographical novel by the great publisher Helen Wolff, who together with her husband, Kurt Wolff, 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 the basis of the novel in Helen's own life as well as the political and social forces that led her to abandon hope of publishing it.Recently published for the first time and translated by the author's grandson, Tristram Wolff, this is a lushly atmospheric, irresistible story of passion and self-discovery.

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9781805330721

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'A fresh, self-confident tone, a distinctive beauty that needn't fear comparison with books by Irmgard Keun or Erich Kastner' - Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung 'A fast-paced, highly intense, emotionally gripping, autobiographically grounded story' - Buchkultur

Author Information

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, now remembered as Kafka's original publisher. She began an affair with Kurt Wolff, whom she would go on to marry. The couple fled Nazi Germany first for France and eventually for the United States, where they arrived almost penniless in 1941. The Wolffs founded a new imprint of Pantheon Books there in 1942. Helen, a gifted linguist who could read in four European languages, published a wide range of 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, where she teaches migration history and is director of the Program for International Education and Social Change, a scholarship program for displaced students. She lives in Berlin.

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