rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: Endpapers
    sub title: a family story of books, war, escape, and home
  name:
    name part: Wolff, Alexander
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  genre: biography
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nyu
    date issued: 2021
    copyright date: 2021
    edition: First edition.
    edition: First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition.
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: xiv, 376 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
  abstract: 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 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.
  table of contents: Bildung and books -- Done with the war -- Technical boy and the deposed -- Mediterranean refuge -- Surrender on demand -- Into a dark room -- a debt for rescue -- An end with horror -- Blood and shame -- Chain migration -- Late evening -- Second exile -- Schweinenest -- Turtle Bay -- Mr. Bitte Nicht Ansprechen -- Shallow draft -- Play on the Bones of the Dead -- The end, come by itself.
  note: Alexander Wolff.
  note: Includes bibliographical references and index.
  subject:
    geographic code: n-us---
    geographic code: e-gx---
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Wolfe family
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Wolff, Alexander
      name part: 1957-
    topic: Family
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Wolff, Nicholas
      name part: 1921-2007
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Wolff, Kurt
      name part: 1887-1963
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Merk family
  subject:
    topic: German Americans
    genre: Biography
  subject:
    topic: Political refugees
    geographic: United States
    genre: Biography
  subject:
    topic: Intellectuals
    geographic: United States
    genre: Biography
  subject:
    topic: Jews, German
    genre: Biography
  subject:
    geographic: Germany
    topic: History
    temporal: 20th century
    genre: Biography
  subject:
    geographic: Germany
    topic: Social conditions
    temporal: 20th century
  classification: E184.G3 W65 2021
  classification: 325/.210973
  identifier: 9780802158253
  identifier: 0802158250
  identifier: 9780802158277
  identifier: 2020057035
  record info:
    record content source: DLC
    record creation date: 210209
    record change date: 20210728154231.0
    record identifier: in00004443670