Background for Love

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A heady, rapturous novel of love and self-discovery in the south of France written by famed publisher Helen Wolff, based on her early life with Kurt Wolff

In a giddy rush, a young woman and her older lover escape the rising fascism of 1930s Berlin for a summer vacation on the Cte 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.

Written in 1932 and now translated into English for the first time by the author's grandson, Tristram Wolff, this is a lushly atmospheric, irresistible story of passion and self-discovery, told from the cusp of disaster.

Reviews

'Sweet, sunlit... A summery story of love, lust and loss in 1930s St Tropez' - The Times

'Wolff may not have wanted her book to be seen by outside eyes, but her summer of love is a tale so rich, evocative and forbidden, it is irresistible' - Vogue

'A fast-paced, highly intense, emotionally gripping, autobiographical novel' - Buchkultur

'A small masterpiece... a writer as subtle and charming as Colette' - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

'Some books you dont read, you experience. This story of a woman who discovers the full extent of her strength of will in a sparkling summer of love, is one of them' - Die Welt

Author Bio

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.