Alexander Wolff's Blog: ENDPAPERS Shelfies

My cousin Caroline Ferriday, hero of the bestseller Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly, has a cameo in ENDPAPERS. So does the eponymous Louisiana town from which our slaveholder ancestors came. I extend thanks to the authors of each of these books, who helped me tell the Caroline part of the larger story.

The guts of ENDPAPERS is set in the aftermath of World War II, as Germans are literally picking up the pieces. From English-language histories by Ian Kershaw, Frederick Taylor, Konrad Jarausch, and Richard Bessel; to the newspaper dispatches of Swedish novelist Stig Dagerman; to the recent contributions of German scholars Andreas Kossert and Harald Jähner, I'm indebted to each for helping me understand that period. None of these books is exonerative of the German people or unreasonably sympathetic; each is, rather, simply trying to explain.

Thank you Günter Grass (d. 2015), Sebastian Haffner (d. 2019), Fritz Stern (d. 2016) and Nora Krug for these magnificent memoirs, written by a novelist, a journalist, an historian, and a graphic artist, respectively. Each supplied me with inspiration--ENDPAPERS is part memoir, after all--but also four distinct angles on what Stern called "the German catastrophe." Highest recommendation for each.

Some of my ancestors produced the Merck drugs that Hitler consumed over the final years of his life. Other forebears, born Jewish, were chased from the family home in Karlsruhe during the 19th century, in two rounds of antisemitic riots 24 years apart. My father, of Jewish descent but nonetheless drafted into the Wehrmacht, participated in the invasion of the Soviet Union--and, simply by eating lavish rations made available to him, helped implement the Nazis' genocidal "Hunger Plan" to depopulate Eastern Europe of Jews and Slavs. Implication came at me fast while I worked on ENDPAPERS, and when I placed family letters and diaries alongside these sweeping histories, by Norman Ohler, Timothy Snyder, Bryan Mark Rigg, and the late Amos Elon, the story emerged in all its unsettling but essential aspects. I thank each of these authors, and anyone dedicated to telling the stories that undergird our common humanity.

It's Publication Week for ENDPAPERS, and no more appropriate time to highlight four Pantheon titles published by Helen & Kurt Wolff and how they figure in the story.
In 1955 Anne Morrow Lindbergh's GIFT FROM THE SEA essentially saved the struggling firm, selling 600,000 in hardcover and another 2 million in paperback, "certifying Pantheon's naturalization in the world of American letters," as I write.
Three years later DOCTOR ZHIVAGO became a global publishing phenomenon--and brought to a head long-simmering tensions within Pantheon that led to Helen & Kurt's departure and ultimately finding a home with William Jovanovich at Harcourt Brace.
Both BASIC VERITIES, by the French poet and essayist Charles Péguy (which my grandfather vowed to never let go out of print), and LOST TREASURES OF EUROPE were originally published with real gold leaf on their spines. A Pantheon salesman once argued for fake, citing the savings on each copy. “Fake will fade,” Kurt countered. To which the salesman said, “But by then the customer will have bought the book.” Precisely, Kurt said—settling the issue. Only real gold would do.
Charles Péguy

Within hours after the Reichstag burned and the Nazis took over in 1933, my grandfather Kurt Wolff fled Germany. He spent most of the next eight years in France, a time and a place that each of these books--some fiction, some biography, some literary history--captures so well.
Without the help of Varian Fry, subject of these two biographies and the novel The Flight Portfolio, Kurt never makes it to the US, and isn't able to send for my father in 1948--and of course he would never have met my mother.
Meantime, I'm very hopeful that my step grandmother Helen Wolff's novella, Background for Love, will appear in English soon!

My shelves grown from the weight of books that helped me write ENDPAPERS, especially ones about Berlin, where I spent a year researching and writing. Highest recommendation for these essential reads on die Hauptstadt: