WOLFF, KURT

WOLFF, KURT (1887–1963), publisher; with Samuel Fischer* and Ernst Rowohlt,* helped set the contours of modern German literature and twentiethcentury publishing. Born in Bonn to a music* professor, he completed Gymnasium in 1906 and went to Brazil for a banking apprenticeship in Sa˜o Paulo. He soon sensed that the trip was a mistake and returned home to study German language and literature. In 1908, while studying at Leipzig, he founded the first Ernst Rowohlt Verlag with Rowohlt; in November 1912, after four successful years, the partnership was dissolved and the firm became the Kurt Wolff Verlag (KWV). What followed was a period of restless expansion and accomplishment. Erik-Ernst Schwabach's Verlag der Weissen Bu¨cher was acquired in 1914, and the Verlag der Schriften von Karl Kraus (Press for the Writings of Karl Kraus) was formed in 1916. In 1918, with Peter Reinhold and Curt Thesing, he created Der Neue Geist Verlag; in 1921 he purchased the Berlin-based Hyperion-Verlag from Rowohlt. Finally, owing to Germany's precarious economics, he created the Pantheon Casa Editrice in Florence in 1924. This empire allowed him to indulge diverse interests in art (Pantheon), sociology (Neue Geist), literary masterworks (Hyperion), and Expressionism* (KWV). By the mid-1920s his array of German-language authors (he also had a broad international clientele) included Lou Andreas-Salome´, Walter Hasenclever,* Kurt Hiller,* Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schu¨ler,* Heinrich Mann,* Joseph Roth,* Carl Sternheim,* Fritz von Unruh,* and Franz Werfel. Wolff held a reserve commission and was mobilized in August 1914; with Hasenclever, a friend since university, he spent two years in Belgium, Russia, and the Balkans. In September 1916, on instructions from the Grossherzog of Hesse, he was discharged to return to publishing. He moved KWV to Munich in October 1919 and, because of its size, incorporated it in February 1921. The inflation* crisis cost him many of his best authors. In 1930, exhausted by financial worry, he sold his holdings rather than face bankruptcy. After living abroad for two years, he settled in Berlin* late in 1932 in hopes of directing a radio station. Soon after the Reichstag fire, however, he left Germany. For eight years he lived with his family and Hasenclever in France and Italy. In March 1941, after more than a year in French internment camps, he fled to the United States. The next year he founded Pantheon Books; among its titles were English translations of Hermann Broch, Stefan George,* Robert Musil,* and Gu¨nter Grass. He resigned from Pantheon in 1960 and worked in his final years for Harcourt, Brace and World.