Helen Wolff

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Helen Wolff , b. Helene Mosel (born July 27, 1906 in Skopje , † March 28, 1994 in Hanover , New Hampshire ), was a German - American publisher and author .

Life

Helene Mosel was born in Skopje , Macedonia in 1906 . She was the daughter of an electrical engineer from Germany who worked for Siemens . Her mother was of Hungarian-Austrian origin. After the beginning of the Balkan Wars , her mother and four children first moved to Vienna in 1912 , to Berlin in 1916 and to Oberammergau in 1918 . Helene Mosel received private tuition and from 1920 attended the grammar school in Schondorf am Ammersee . In 1927 she completed a three-month internship at Kurt Wolff Verlag in Munich and translated for the art publisher Pantheon Casa Editrice, where she then took on a permanent position. In 1930 she first went to Paris with the publishing house that had changed hands, but shortly afterwards she worked for the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation instead . In 1933 she married the publisher Kurt Wolff in London, whose second wife she became. The following year their son, who later became composer Christian Wolff , was born. After staying near Nice and Tuscany , the family moved back to France in 1938. Kurt Wolff was interned there for some time.

Together with her husband Kurt Wolff, Helen Wolff emigrated to New York in 1941, almost penniless . There, with the help of three small investors, they founded the Pantheon Books publishing house in 1942 , where they were joined by the publisher Jacques Schiffrin the following year . The publisher had his breakthrough in 1944 with a new edition of Grimm's fairy tales ( Grimm's Fairy Tales ). Other bestsellers followed, such as Gift from the Sea (1955) by Anne Morrow Lindbergh and Doktor Schiwago (1958) by Boris Pasternak . In 1959 Helen and Kurt Wolff moved to Locarno and sold their shares in the publishing house, which became the property of Random House . In 1961 they initiated the imprint Helen and Kurt Wolff Books at Harcourt Brace Jovanovich . The Wolffs mainly devoted themselves to the translation and publication of contemporary European literature into American . With them appeared u. a. the American editions of the German-language works by Max Frisch , Günter Grass , Uwe Johnson and Jurek Becker . They also published Julien Green , Georges Simenon , Italo Calvino , Umberto Eco , György Konrád and Stanislaw Lem , among others . After the death of her husband in 1963, Helen Wolff returned to New York and continued to run the imprint on her own until she retired in 1986. She died in her apartment in Hanover in 1994 .

Helen Wolff wrote plays and novels herself, but did not publish them. In the 1930s, for example, she wrote Background for Love , a novel about the marriage of a young woman to an older, unfaithful husband. She ordered the manuscript to be burned, but it did not. In 2020 the work was published by Weidle Verlag with an afterword by her great-niece Marion Detjen . It came in 6th on the SWR best list in July / August 2020.

Fonts

  • Günter Grass - Helen Wolff. Letters 1959–1994. Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-88243-896-7 .
  • Helen Wolff, Max Frisch. Correspondence between 1984 and 1990 . In: Sinn und Form 1/2012, pp. 102–128 [introductory: Marion Detjen : Spiritual Companionship. Max Frisch and Helen Wolff . In: Sinn und Form 1/2012, pp. 91-101].
  • Background for love , novel from the estate of Helen Wolff with an afterword by Marion Detjen, Weidle Verlag , 2020, 216 pages

Honors

Helen Wolff was awarded the publisher's award by the US PEN in 1977 . In 1981 she received the Inter Nationes Award for Literature and the Arts and in 1985 the Goethe Medal from the Goethe Institute .

In 1994 Helen Wolff was posthumously awarded the Friedrich Gundolf Prize . The eulogy to this, which was also an obituary, wrote Gunter Grass. The Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator Award, which is intended to promote literary translations from German into English, was named after her and her husband .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Website Friedrich Gundolf Prize
  2. ↑ a b c Wolff, Helen. In: German Biographical Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  3. ↑ Herbert Mitgang: Helen Wolff, a publisher, Is Dead at 88. In: The New York Times . March 30, 1994. Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  4. ^ Annemarie Stoltenberg : Novel by the passionate publisher Helen Wolff. Background for Love by Helen Wolff. In: NDR culture . May 11, 2020. Accessed July 12, 2020.
  5. ↑ SWR best list July / August 2020 (PDF). Retrieved July 12, 2020.
  6. ↑ Review of the novel Background for Love , published in 2020 (accessed on July 8, 2020)
  7. ^ Laudation for the Friedrich Gundolf Prize by Günter Grass
personal data
SURNAME Wolff, Helen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mosel, Helene (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American publisher and author
DATE OF BIRTH July 27, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Skopje
DATE OF DEATH March 28, 1994
Place of death Hanover , New Hampshire