Endpapers. Alexander Wolff

      In 1913 the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Kurt Wolff Verlag eventually sold more than a million hardcover copies of a collection of his work, turning it into an under-the-Christmas-tree staple throughout Germany. In a January 1914 diary entry, Robert Musil, an Austrian writer in Kurt’s stable, described the man presiding over it all: “Tall. Slim. Clad in English gray. Elegant. Light-haired. Clean-shaven. Boyish face. Blue-gray eyes, which can grow hard.”

      Kurt’s firm seemed to be making its way without having to compromise. “The house often functioned more as a patron of the arts than according to commercial calculations,” remembered Willy Haas, who joined Werfel and Hasenclever as a Kurt Wolff Verlag reader in 1914. Kurt had no interest in a kind of publishing where “you simply supply the products for which there is a demand,” he would write, the kind where you need only “know what activates the tear glands, the sex glands, or any other glands, what makes the sportsman’s heart beat faster, what makes the flesh crawl in horror, etc.” My grandfather held fast to another view, a luxury he could afford, but that would later make his row tougher to hoe: “I only want to publish books I won’t be ashamed of on my deathbed. Books by dead authors in whom we believe. Books by living authors we don’t need to lie to. All my life, two elements have seemed to me to be the worst and basically inevitable burden of being a publisher: lying to authors and feigning knowledge that one doesn’t have. . . . We might err, that is inevitable, but the premise for each and every book should always be unconditional conviction, the absolute belief in the authentic word and worth of what you champion.”

      In 1914 Kurt finally landed Karl Kraus as an author. The Viennese Mencken was so prickly about whom he shared a publisher with that he and Kurt agreed on the only solution: to set up a subsidiary devoted solely to his work. Kurt also took over publication of the pacifist and anti-nationalist journal Die weissen Blätter (The White Pages), which would have to be printed in Switzerland after war broke out to dodge the censors. Even from his provincial haunts in Prague, Kafka noticed that Kurt was riding high, and said as much in a letter to his fiancée, Felice Bauer: “He is a very beautiful man, about twenty-five, whom God has given a beautiful wife, several million marks, a pleasure in publishing, and little aptitude for the publishing business.”

      Even after allowing that no publisher is commercially minded enough to satisfy the typical author, Kafka was on to something. “In the beginning was the word, not the number,” Kurt would say, many years later, in a riff on the Gospel of John. Der jüngste Tag nonetheless helped the Kurt Wolff Verlag carve out a niche as purveyor of cutting-edge writing, and that was worth something. Though my grandfather had been raised to revere the classics, he knew enough to step back and let that rule of twentieth-century marketing—if it’s new, it’s better—carry the day. For a while this worked. And it was an exhilarating time to be in the book business: during Kurt’s first year out on his own, no country produced more books than Germany, some thirty-one thousand new titles in 1913 alone.

      With the outbreak of war in August 1914, both the Kurt Wolff Verlag and German publishing at large were changed forever. Eleven of the thirteen members of the firm’s staff were called up, including Leutnant Wolff, who was sent with an artillery regiment to the Western Front. “I flatter myself in thinking that I have some understanding of artillery service,” he wrote in an early entry in the diary he kept throughout his tour of duty, “and above all I love my weapon very much.”

      Within a few weeks Kurt felt the full force of the carnage delivered by this “war that will end war.” His unit was dispatched to a forest south of the Belgian village of Neufchâteau to assess casualties after the 1914 Battle of the Ardennes. “The dead lie in monstrous numbers within a very small space,” he wrote. “One notices that every inch of earth was bitterly fought over and gets a sense of how dreadful a fight for a forest can be.”

      Scattered among hundreds of corpses, Kurt’s unit discovered eighteen survivors, fifteen Frenchmen and three Germans,

      who had passed days and nights since the battle without dressing or water or food amidst the horrific stench of decaying bodies, through the heat of the days and the damp cold of the nights. . . . It goes without saying that only in very rare, exceptional cases could some living thing, weakened by the heavy exertions and deprivations of the past days and weeks, without any food and especially with fevers from their untreated wounds, cling to life as long as these eighteen did. Most of these wounded, to the extent that they were able to utter a few words or communicate in any way, explained that they had had no sustenance. In every case their wounds were so severe that they had been unable to move at all. Only one, a German, in despair at slowly dying of starvation yet nursing hopes of being found if he could only hang on a little longer, had resorted to a desperate measure: he took the only thing left of his meager rations, a cube of condensed pea soup, dissolved it in his own urine, and drank it.

      Kurt had arranged to have Hasenclever assigned to his unit, so in the midst of the war, even as they were deployed in France, eastern European Galicia, and the Balkans, the two imagined the directions German literature might take after hostilities ended. Riding the Orient Express back from Macedonia on leave, Kurt would stop off in Vienna to visit Kraus, a loud and consistent critic of the conflict—one of the few among German-language intellectuals of the time.

      It’s hard to fathom the enthusiasm with which Germany greeted the outbreak of war. In an act of mass self-delusion, Germans across the political spectrum believed this common call to sacrifice would help Wilhelmine society bridge its many differences. Almost no one foresaw the duration of the stalemate or the scale of the slaughter. Shortly after its end, one of Kurt’s authors, Joseph Roth, declared the war a “great annihilative nothingness.”

      The Kurt Wolff Verlag would be the only major house in Germany to refuse to publish pro-war literature. But like most of his countrymen, Kurt at the outset seemed open to victory by arms and tried to suppress his doubts. In December 1914 he wrote from Ghent:

      I drive into the darkness and light my pipe. I think about my conversations with the military authorities, of the report of my female spy this morning, of the war and how we will win a victory over France. And suddenly all those with whom I so often, so bitterly, argued over these past months seem to be right: We must continue on over the rubble of these countries, and there must be misery and distress among our enemies and in enemy territory, and they must feel this bitter, unrelenting war, feel it until the hunger for peace is so great that the cry for the war’s end becomes so loud and penetrating, and so unanimously does the wailing rise, from Liège to Reims, from Namur to Lille, from Brussels to Calais, and also in the east, that it mingles with the groans of the exhausted in the trenches at the front, all of it swelling into a hurricane, into a raging, incessant sound that will ring in their ears in Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Petersburg, until they give up.