Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home

by Alexander Wolff

A sweeping portrait of the turmoil of the twentieth century and the legacy of immigration, as seen through the German-American family of the celebrated book publisher Kurt Wolff A literary gem researched over a year the author spent living in Berlin, Endpapers excavates the extraordinary histories of the author’s grandfather and 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, whose desire to demand satisfaction in a duel sparked off 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Memoir, Biography, Books About Books, World War II, Biography Memoir

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2021

About the author

Thanks for your interest in my books and me!
I spent 36 years at Sports Illustrated, leaving in 2016 as the longest-tenured writer on staff. Besides covering basketball at all levels, I filed from the Olympics, soccer’s World Cup, the World Series, every Grand Slam tennis event, and the Tour de France. SI story assignments took me to China, Cuba, and Iran, and dealt with such issues at the intersection of sport and society as race, ethnicity, gender, drugs, the environment, education, youth development, business, armed conflict, and ethics, as well as cultural themes like art, style, food, and the media.
I’m the author or co-author of seven books about basketball. They include Raw Recruits, a New York Times bestseller that examined college basketball recruiting; Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, an account of a year spent chasing the game around the globe to take the measure of its impact, which was named a 2002 New York Times Book Review Notable Book; and The Audacity of Hoop: Basketball and the Age of Obama. I also edited and introduced a collection of basketball writing for the Library of America, Basketball: Great Writing About America’s Game, published in 2018.
In March 2021 Atlantic Monthly Press and Grove UK will publish Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home, with DuMont Buchverlag of Cologne releasing a German edition in Fall 2021. The book explores the lives of my grandfather and father, both German-born men who became American citizens. Kurt Wolff, a book publisher of Jewish descent, went into exile to escape the Nazis and founded Pantheon Books in New York in 1941; his son, who because of a divorce remained behind in Germany, was left to fight in Hitler’s army before landing in the U.S. in 1948.
My writing for Sports Illustrated includes three pieces that appeared in The Best American Sports Writing. In 1996, with Hoop Dreams filmmakers Steve James and Peter Gilbert, I collaborated on Team of Broken Dreams, an Emmy-nominated documentary short that detailed the impact of the Yugoslav crisis on basketball players from the Balkans. Broadcast on NBC and based on one of my SI articles, the film won the International Olympic Committee’s Media Award.
As a Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton in 2002, I taught a seminar called Writing About Sports and the Wider World. In 2010 I served as commencement speaker at Springfield College, and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame honored me in 2011 with its Curt Gowdy Media Award for contributions to the game as a print journalist.
At Brighton High School in Rochester, N.Y., I co-captained the varsity basketball team. In 1980 I earned a B.A. in History with honors from Princeton after having taken a leave to play basketball with a club team in Switzerland. In 2006 my wife Vanessa and I founded the Vermont Frost Heaves of the American Basketball Association, whose birth and life I chronicled in SI and on SI.com.
I love hearing from readers and am happy to speak with book clubs, collaborate with bookstores, libraries, and festivals on events, and otherwise affirm and spread literary culture. Books are in the family blood!

Reviews

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a wonderful read, totally compelling and captivating, an intimate family chronicle and a mixture of history, politics and literature, beautifully written, an astonishing story of a remarkable family. Alexander Wolff has thoroughly researched his family, in particular his renowned publisher grandfather Kurt Wolff and his father Niko who fought for Hitler before emigrating to the United States. And then there is Elisabeth Merck, Kurt’s first wife, whose family pharmaceutical firm became entwined with Hitler’s destiny. So many threads, so many fascinating characters, all expertly woven together making this one of the most absorbing family biographies I have ever read.

[Maine Colonial · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alexander Wolff, a longtime writer at Sports Illustrated, spent a year in Europe researching the history of his family, especially his father and grandfather. Grandfather Kurt Wolff was the famous publisher known for his work with such giants as Boris Pasternak and Franz Kafka. Kurt’s association with avant-garde writers and his partial Jewish ancestry led him to flee Nazi in 1933, leading a peripatetic exile life in Europe before finally moving to New York City with his second wife, Helen, and founding Pantheon Books.

Kurt left his teenage children by his first wife behind with her. Kurt was able to get his son Niko (Alexander’s father) papers that allowed him not only to avoid discrimination, but to serve in the Wehrmacht during World War II as a driver and mechanic. After the war, Niko was able to emigrate to the US.

Alexander’s exploration of his grandfather’s colorful life and his enigmatic father is sympathetic. But he goes further afield, into his connections to the Merck chemical company, for example. This is an impressive melding of literary history, political history, and an always interesting and often surprising family history.

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alexander Wolff, the author of this compelling book, traveled to Germany to research his family's fascinating history. After living more than a year in Berlin he pieced together a vast amount of information compiled from articles, books, diaries and other documents in his quest to learn about his grandfather and father. This book is the result.

Narrated chronologically in sections divided into years, we first learn background history then move onto specific family history. Punctuated with photographs (two of my favourites are those of Wolff's great grandparents with Brahms and the other the "daily harvest!) and excerpts from diaries and documents, the story really comes alive with energy, poignancy and many surprises. The family is intelligent, musical and literary.

Kurt Wolff, the author's grandfather, born in Germany and left in 1933. is the social and outgoing publisher of Kafka. He goes on to run Pantheon in New York. Niko, the author's father, was quieter and was left behind in Germany. During the war he served for the Nazis, though Jewish, by driving a delivery truck. Elisabeth Merck, the author's grandmother, was from pharmaceutical powerhouse Merck.

This book is chock full of interesting personal information. Many things stand out in my mind which include the questions Wolff asks himself such as, did his father carry guilt for working with the Nazis and of what should he himself be ashamed of?

Kurt's war descriptions are so powerful and gut wrenching yet beautiful. Niko writes of the fabulous food he ate in WWII while at work, a huge contrast to those impoverished. However, he doesn't write food details with arrogance but as a matter of fact. Both have very human sides. The family endured much sorrow and many hardships. The parting images in the last chapter were evocative.

Readers who enjoy learning more about personal experiences during war and about publishing should read this. It would appeal to History and Nonfiction readers in general.

My sincere thank you to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this intriguing book. Much appreciated.

[Joe Kraus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been a fan of Alex Wolff’s Sports Illustrated work for as long as I can remember, and I recently had the chance to meet him since he has become close to a lifelong friend of mine. He’s a great, thoughtful guy, so I couldn’t be neutral about this book if I wanted. Luckily, this is a powerful meditation on ancestry, guilt, and meta-history – a mix perfectly up my alley.

In a nutshell, Alex explores his family’s complicated history as Germans in a time when the German nation perpetrated unthinkable atrocities.

On the one hand, Alex’s grandfather, Luke Wolff, was one of the major publishers not just in Germany but in the world, having brought out Kafka, Musil, Hesse, Pasternak, Karl “Sadly, no relation” Kraus, Eco, and many others. As a publisher, he refused to acquiesce when the WWI government pushed him to include propagandistic work in his catalog, and, as someone with a Jewish parent, he fled early in the Nazi years. In his way, he was an early and significant resistor of the Nazis. I’d be proud of all he did, and I’m proud that I got to spend a morning talking with Alex even though I didn’t know to ask about him.

At the same time, Alex’s father, Nico, was left behind with his mother and – as it eventually turns out – his SS-supporting step-father. In that time, Nico joins the Wehrmacht and endures the horrors of the Russian front before returning home a bedraggled veteran.

Alex cannot find any direct crimes that his father was part of, but he doesn’t shy from the challenging fact that the German army on the Eastern front was a tool for perpetrating a famine that killed many Slavs and other middle Europeans. He ate well as others starved.

And then, in an even more complicated exploration, Alex explores the role of his great-grandmother’s family company – the pharmaceutical giant Merck – in the war. Merck survived the war in part by compromising with Nazi authorities, but it also produced the oxycontin-like drug to which Hitler became addicted. Did that enhance or diminish his dictatorial madness? It’s hard to know.

If that’s this broad and ambitious book in a nutshell, it’s important to point out that this book doesn’t happen in a nutshell. Alex has always been a writer who “colors outside the lines.” He’s one of our great sportswriters because, in writing about sports, he is always writing about something more, not just the people who make sport happen but what our games tell us about ourselves.

Here, there are no games, but the fundamental question is that same. Alex’s daughter at one time wants to think of Nico, her “Opa,” as a “good guy.” That’s a crucial jumping-off point, but it obscures the harder premise Alex works with. In a brutal century, few people could be entirely “good” or entirely “bad.” Each of his various ancestors and relatives had to make choices that determined whether they and their closest dependents would live or die.

To his credit, Alex refuses to play the role of judge. He doesn’t pretend he can assess whether someone acted ethically. All he can do is trace the story that begins in many places and ends, for the moment, in himself.

I’m drawn to that project not just because it takes in so many of the great names of literature of the last century but because I’ve been working to pursue a similar – though smaller – exploration of my own family. Alex is a first-class journalist, so he explores a staggering range of sources, finding remarkable testimony from dozens of family letters and in books that seem to have become entirely obscure in this new century and new country.

I know from my own tentative work on my family history that this work is challenging. Family trees look as if they give order to our history, but they branch in two dimensions. We have more relatives each generation we go back, but those ancestors have more descendants each generation we go forward. Branches tangle, and that means stories tangle.

There are moments when Alex’s story begins to feel tangled, and moments when one or another story looks as if it might be a digression.

Where that might feel like a criticism, I intend it as a compliment. Alex is burdened here by essentially too much information. He could have made a clearer account – one that would fit more readily in a nutshell – but clarity is a false virtue in a story like this.

It was a brutal German century, and all of us are left now to sort out what that means. For Alex, it’s personal on all sides, with some of his family taking brave stands, some risking deep victimhood, and others making compromises that seem troubling today.

Any single thread here would make for a clearer story, one we could more readily recognize from the back-cover copy. Endpapers – those pages that attach the cover to the pages inside – are subtler and more multi-dimensional than that. They hold the whole together, even as they are always pressured to tear apart. And this story is, as the title says, subtle like endpapers rather than clear like back-cover copy.

Alex, taking a gutsy look at all he has learned, shows the pressures that might tear apart his history, but – like strong endpaper – he holds it all together in a remarkable and fearless look at a complicated past.

[timv · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully written and thoroughly researched biography of the authors father’s Germanic family, mostly from WWI onwards and much of it previously unknown to the author. It includes the founders of the publisher, pantheon, and family members of the German Merk pharmaceutical empire. He follows these European elites (some are Jewish) in the world war eras as they go through uprooting and upheaval and gives us touchstones to the present day.

This family tree is well connected, cultured and wealthy as documented in the photos that are dispersed throughout the text.

This is a type of World War II history that I value reading. It took a while for my interest in the book to develop, as in the beginning it seem to just be the storyline of an aristocratic European family and it seemed to involve a lot of name dropping of famous literary figures. Then the Nazis took power.

The story benefits from the vast troves of documentation that still exist to tell the story. Everyone in this family tree saved their letters and and the German bureaucracy loves its documentation.

I do wish the author would’ve put in some diagrams of the family trees involved.

[Eden · Rating 4 out of 5]

2023 bk 132. Well written and well researched. In the end, I felt more than a little sorry for the author who in the course of his family history research uncovered the horrors members of his family participated in and had to reconcile personal memories with written documents. His grandfather fled Nazi Germany, leaving behind 2 teens with his first wife and one teenage son by a mistress. Wolff's tale of family members weaves in and out through the generations, the external and internal traumas always simmering just at the surface. This is also the story of a publishing house and its rise and fall and recreation and the authors and books brought to the notice of the world. Without this family we would not have had some of the most important books of the 20th century - and without his maternal family, the Mercks, we would not have had some of most used painkillers of the era. In the end there is no hard defined conclusion - just a sadness that some allowed themselves to be caught up in madness, some engineered parts of the madness, and some were able to escape and create good lives for themselves and their children. A well thought out look at Euro/American century.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author cites uwe Johnson book "anniversaries " as his inspiration. Good enough for me.
Interesting and detailed histories of Kurt Wolff, his son niko, and grandson Alexander (author) and their families and the many heart-rending actions from fascist germany.

[Vansa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This wonderfully written family history of survival and art is Alexander Wolff's attempt at reconciling the diametrically opposite experiences of his family in World War II and coming to terms with their complicity in the events. If that sounds like a complicated undertaking, the book weaves it in so beautifully, it's like an experience reading it. I started it, expecting it to be along the lines of The House of Wittgenstein, but it's very different, with very different aims. One would think World War II has been examined multiple times, but this book shows that it's when we stop examining evil, that we leave ourselves open to it.
Kurt Wolff, the legendary publisher of all the stars of early 20th Century literature, including Kafka and Franz Werfel-basically everyone the Nazis included in 'degenerate art', was Alexander Wolff's grandfather. He was forced to flee Nazi Germany with his wife Helen, and through a tortuous route including a stint at the infamous Vel d'Hiver, reached America. Alexander Wolff's father, on the other hand, Niko Wolff, was conscripted into the Nazi Army, made it out alive, and with Kurt Wolff's help, also migrated to America. Wolff moved to Berlin for an immersive research experience, so that through the experiences of his own family, he could explore Germany's attempts with coming to terms with the country's Nazi past, a sort of generational atonement and true remembrance of crimes past to learn from history and the necessity of that for America. While Wolff focuses on America, since he's from that, and he wrote this book against the backdrop of Trump's Presidency, the universality of the themes explored make it extremely relevant, and crucial, for countries across the world, since right wing populism is frighteningly on the rise everywhere.
The narrative has 3 distinctive strands-a potted history of the author's family, tracing back to the 19th Century, the growing roots of anti-Semitism with a more detailed account of Kurt Wolff's amazing life, told through his extremely evocative letters and diary entries, filled in the beginning with literary superstars whom he discovered, and who are now part of the canon, Niko WOlff's boyhood, conscription, experiences in World War 2.The third narrative strand is the beautifully nuanced of Wolff's life in Berlin, his efforts and interviews to unearth his family history while also tracing the efforts Germany has made as a country to come to a reckoning with a complicated recent history of violence, and the implementation of policies to shape national thought, as safeguards against a repeat of the past. The chapters on Kurt Wolff are wonderful, set against the flowering of art and culture in the Weimar Republic, the sparkling salons while the economy was tanking, hyperinflation was driving people to starvation ( a very telling anecdote being Kurt WOlff paying employees of his publishing house everyday, because by the next day their currency value would have substantially devalued). I wouldn't have minded a far longer book about Kurt and Helen WOlff, and their amazing knack at picking talent to publish. While those were my favourite parts of the book, each section is absolutely fascinating, and at no instance does Wolff try to play down the part of this family in World War II, even though he wasn't directly responsible for anything. What's emphasized constantly is how easy it is for the history book on the shelf to repeat itself ( in the wise immortal words of ABBA), when we don't confront unsavoury aspects of our culture head-on. WOlff draws parallels to America's unwillingness to reckon with slavery, and Confederate flags and iconography not being banned for being the symbols of an unbelievably repressive system but a far more harmless heritage, which leads to an increasing valorisation of a past that never was. This applies universally to all countries seeing rising fascism. It's very moving to read of Germany's attempts to remember how this happened, and the parts everyone played it. It makes the slogans of "Never Forget" more than mere hashtags-those are precepts to live by and make a conscious attempt at not forgetting, and not ignoring facts that don't fit into uncomplicated narratives.
THis was such a moving, thought-provoking insightful book that my only complaint is that it could have been twice as long and would still be as compelling. THanks for the ARC #GroveAtlantic #NetGalley

[Rosalind Reisner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent memoir/bio/social history about the complicated legacy left by World War II for the German Wolff/Merck family.

[Nancy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Another huge disappointment, poorly written with little focus. An ego trip for the author.

[David Jesse · Rating 3 out of 5]

Heard the author on a couple of podcasts before reading the book. Podcasts were more interesting

[Fran Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Author Alexander Wolff spent a year in Germany researching his interesting, talented, but still flawed family. His grandfather Kurt Wolff was born in Germany. His family was a highly cultured German/Jewish family. Kurt became a publisher at the age of 23. He fled Germany in 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, with his second wife Helen. After settling in the US he started Pantheon Books. He published books by Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, and others whose books were burned by the Nazis. It gained literary history by publishing "Doctor Zhivago", by Boris Pasternak.

His son, Niko and a daughter, by his first wife, Elizabeth Merck, niece of the founder of Merck Pharmaceuticals, are left in Germany with their mother. Despite his Jewish heritage, Niko joined the Nazi military and fought the Allies on two fronts.

In letters sent to relatives, journals, papers, and interviewing people, Alexander has written a complex and insightful book. The information he provides is far more in depth than just the interesting biographic details of these talented relatives. He quotes other authors when their information is useful and I liked the fact that he used the German word (and translation) in his writings. Example..."So Niko, only just twelve, put together an illustrated Gebrauchsanweisung (instruction booklet )..."

He discovers that in 1995, Germans were forced to confront a long-standing myth: that only units of the SS and the Order Police committed Nazi atrocities. The "Wehrmacht exhibition" featured photos and letters sent home from the front that implied that ordinary soldiers committed atrocities much more serious than popular believed. German soldiers were told if they wanted to eat they would have to starve the surrounding population. We had been conditioned to think that genocide mainly happened in the death camps. Nico's letters made clear that he was eating well and that the Ukrainian peasants and Soviet prisoners were not.

The indiscriminate bombing of German citizens (as was the bombing of London, England) only made them more traumatized and less able to raise up against their leaders. Allied bombing of German civilians ended up killing 600,000 people, more than twice the number suffered by US forces in Europe.

After the war was over, his father Niko, was not investigated for war crimes as, if the common soldier had not been implicated in serious crimes and if born after 1919, they were presumed not worthy of prosecution.

This is a complex book and well worth reading.

[Lee · Rating 2 out of 5]

A man who has ancestors who were both publishers and victims of the Holocaust and others who were also Nazis, along with a mother whose family comes from slaveholders, Wolff travels to Germany to seek out his roots and to guilt his way across the country. This memoir had potential, because he has an interesting family background. However, the book falls flat because it is larded with endless and inexplicable guilt.

Wolff frets over the money that he got from his father’s sale of Merck stock (he is descended from the Merck family) and the fact that Merck was involved in the Holocaust. “Here in Lichterfelde I realize that, like Caroline Ferriday, I too have a cross to bear in the form of a great-uncle. And I’m led back to the late seventies, when my father was stunned to learn that, as a family shareholder in Merck Darmstadt, he owed the US government tax on all paper gains of his stock, despite having never cashed in a pfennig. He hired a tax attorney, negotiated a settlement with the IRS, and—I remember his relief as if it were yesterday—found a family member in Germany to buy him out. He reinvested the proceeds, then rode the rising tide of the US stock market through decades of mostly steady growth.That initial sum, which grew to help send me to summer camp and college,owed itself to West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder. But while Merck has been a largely respectable corporate citizen since the war, much of the company’s intellectual capital and brand positioning can be traced to the nineteenth century and the decades before World War II. For that reason it’s impossible to simply overlook the interceding Nazi era. How did Merck survive the Third Reich? Beyond using forced laborers from the east, apart from supplying drugs to which Hitler apparently became addicted, what did the company—what did my family—do under or with or for the most shameful and warped regime in history?”

First, this statement is weird because he uses the term “cross to bear” to talk about his guilt. One would expect him to be attentive to language in a book focused on his expiation of guilt for the wrongs that goy ancestors did to Jew ancestors, but that is not a large problem.

The bigger problem is that strange need he has to find guilt in himself for these crimes. Merck did some horrible things in World War II. In the 1970’s, his father sold his stock in Merck. And Wolff, the son, went to summer camp with some of that money. And that makes him guilty? That is his cross he has to bear?

This book is crippled by a need to find guilt, or to manufacture it out of the thinnest of threads connecting him to these horrendous crimes.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I almost finished this by Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Wolff is trying to come to terms with his ancestry. Not only were there slave-owning Southerners on his mother's side, on his father's side there were all those Germans who somehow survived Nazism. His father's father, founder of Pantheon Books, knew everybody in the intellectual elite (apparently a fair number of them "in the Biblical sense") and was Jewish. His mother's father was a Merck, of the pharmaceutical company that kept Hitler in opioids. "What did you do in the war, Daddy?" is a question of real import for Germans. Ideally, your ancestor was brave and stood up against the atrocities; in actuality, if he did that, he didn't survive and neither did you.

Of course America is grappling with all these issues, too. Should we pay reparations? Should we send people with unacceptable opinions to reeducation camps? Should we treat people from different races differently? Should we rewrite history to better reflect current preoccupations? Should we make it impossible for those we deplore to keep their jobs? Should we require people to show identification to conduct business? Which people who wish to become citizens should we accept and why? How much power should the secret police possess? What yardstick should we use to measure right and wrong?

Wolff is an American liberal, so he has a tribal yardstick to deploy. I worry about any yardstick that divides people us into Us and Them. "They" surely have their faults; be more skeptical about "Us."

A note on the physical book: the publishers chose to include the many photos on the pages which refer to them, rather than together in a glossy insert. They are well-printed and I like having them there.

[Marc Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really interesting true story of the Wolff family of Germany. Kurt Wolff became a well-known publisher of modern writers from Germany and elsewhere, particularly between the world wars. He published the likes of Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and others of that ilk. The business prospered until the Nazis came to power. The Wolff family had Jewish ancestors along with many who had converted to Christianity. Because of the type of books Kurt Wulff published, they were deemed degenerate by the Nazis and were burned or otherwise destroyed. Thus, he was a target of the Nazi regime and was forced to flee with his second wife (Helen). His first wife (a member of the Merck family of Merck Chemical Company fame) and his son and daughter by her were left behind. They were somewhat protected by their close connection with Merck Chemical, which produced drugs for the Nazis. Ultimately, Kurt Wulff and Helen made their way to New York and safety. Kurt's son was drafted into the German army initially as a truck driver, then later as whatever the army needed him to do, as the Russian army and the Allied armies were overtaking Germany. He survived the war and eventually reunited with his father in America. His sister had married during the war and had a son, but her husband died during the conflict. She stayed with her mother in Germany, even after the war. Kurt Wulff and Helen founded Pantheon Books, which became rather successful in the States. These two tracks of the family's history are well written by Kurt Wullf's grandson. If you are interested in the publishing business, books in general, or stories about the time of the Nazis and their programs during World War II, then this book is for you. Well worth your time.

[Steve P · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third book I've read recently about family origin stories, and it's one of the best and most compelling. I've know Alexander Wolff's writing for years as a Sports Illustrated scribe, but he channels his words in an all-new direction in Endpapers.

In 2017, against the backdrop of the Charlottesville riot and Trump presidency, Wolff and his family depart for a year in Berlin to discover and share the story of his father (was employed by the Nazi regime before emigrating to the US after the war), his grandfather (founder of Pantheon Books who fled Nazi Germany) and multiple offshoots of the family tree. The Wolff family is connected to the Merck pharmaceutical family, and countless members of the 19th century intelligentsia in current-day Germany. This book has the best cameos from Brahms to Kafka to John Forbes Nash ("A Beautiful Mind") to Varian Fry (Emergency Rescue Committee). Wolff also touches on his wife's family's Southern U.S. roots, including slave-holding.

The entire book is a reflection on our forebearers, their choices, family secrets, our faith (most of the Wolff family is Jewish) and the meaning of individual and national identity and sense of place.

I heartily recommend it.

PS - Only discovered this book because Alexander Wolff commented on Twitter about the amazing new crest of Vermont Green FC soccer club, which led me to see what had happened to the writer. See, Twitter has purpose some times.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this beautiful and compelling family history by Alex Wolff. Wolff, who spent 36 years as a writer at Sports Illustrated, comes from an illustrious German family. His grandfather, Kurt Wolff, was a prominent Berlin publisher, who published authors such as Franz Kafka, Joseph Roth, and Karl Kraus (and later, in the U.S. Gunther Grass). His grandmother, Elizabeth Merck, was a member of the Merck family, as in Merck Pharmaceuticals. Alex follows them through the heady twenties and thirties in Berlin and through World War II, when his grandfather, who was half-Jewish, fled the country. His grandmother remarried, and Alex's father, who was a quarter Jewish, ended up serving in the Germany army under the Nazis. Alex grapples with the complexity of this and of his family's involvement with the Nazis, asking the questions: What kind of responsibility do German descendants (even those in America) bear? What does it mean to be of German descent? And how can we ensure that this descent into political madness never happens again, anywhere? It took me a while to get into this book, but by about page 30, I couldn't put it down. A truly compelling family history.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book on an impulse from my local indie (Shakespeare and Co. in NYC) and devoured it. It is the story of German Jewish intellectuals displaced and fleeing in the 30s from Germany to make a new life, and those who were left behind...not the Jewish half, for those who remained by choice or the inabilty to leave were mostly Aryan. The father was a great publisher of intellectual books in Germany (he published Franz Kafka among others) and out of his small New York City apartment, begun the famous Pantheon Books. His son and daughter from his first marriage were stuck in Germany during the war, and the son served in the army. This book meant a huge amount to me as my adopted stepparents were intellectual German Jews who fled, and left behind family, most of whom survived. Such a divided world by the madness of Hitler...just fascinating. I felt to close to the whole Wolff family!

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Untangling three generations of a complex family history: that’s the reason Alexander Wolff moved to Germany for a year in 2017. He wanted to understand the lives of two men: his grandfather Kurt Wolff and his father Niko Wolff. The German-Jewish Kurt, whose grandmother had converted to Christianity, published books (including those of Franz Kafka) that were burned by the Nazis. While Kurt managed to escape Germany before World War II, Niko remained behind and served in the Nazi army. Both men emigrated to the U.S. – Kurt in 1933 and Niko after the war in 1948 – although much about their European life remained a mystery to Alexander. Their stories form the core of the author’s memoir/history “Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home” (Atlantic Monthly Press).
See the rest of my review at https://www.thereportergroup.org/past...

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Meanders. Sometimes too granular; sometimes pulls the lens back too far. Philippe Sands did this better, imho, in "East West Street"--and by "this" I mean teaching about Europe's intellectual life before WWII and the moral questions the war brought to everyone who lived through it (complicity, resistance, atonement, etc.).

Is it a good sign that "Endpapers" makes me think mostly of other books? It quotes from "Learning from the Germans" a lot, and sits on that shelf, obviously. Also has a lot in common with "Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob." In both books, a seasoned journalist turns his professional tools onto his understanding of his grandfather and father. I'm not sure that works, for the same reason that physicians shouldn't treat their closest family members.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting book by the grandson of the publisher, Kurt Wolff - I now understand more about what makes an outstanding publisher, though his wife should get equal credit and usually doesn't. Alexander spent a year in Germany exploring his family (which includes the Merck Pharmaceutical Company) and their paths from WW I - WW II. Well-written, very interesting - clearly a lot of love and affection between the author and his father, Niko. But the author - I think - is much to quick to accept his father's assurance that, even though he was fighting in the War as a German soldier on the Eastern Front, he had no idea about concentration camps and the attempt to exterminate the Jewish community. Do we really believe this? So let's hear more from Wolff - maybe a follow-up book where he explores his father as fully as he explores his grandfather?

[Russell · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author traces his family history in Germany prior to World War I, through World War II and up to the present day, attempting to find out their responsibility for atrocities committed during World War II. Written mostly chronologically, in each chapter Wolff moved forward a decade or so in the family history, then jumped ahead to modern day reflections on what he had learned. Though it largely held my interest, I found that the modern passages slowed the narrative a little too much, and became repetitive. In the end Wolff convinces himself that all Germans knew about the death camps and assasination squads, but willingly looked the other way, as they saw no hope of resisting Hitler. He also does not shy away from parallelling Nazism with Trumpism, an apt comparison in my opinion.

[Aidan Carter · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great read - its focus is Germans coming to terms of the legacy of the nazis. The author references Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans, but this work is less ambitious, focusing on the author’s own unusual and privileged family, especially a grandfather who left Germany before the war and founded Pantheon books, and a father who stayed behind and fought in the German army before also coming to the US and becoming a successful upper middle class American. A fascinating account of divergent lives, and an earnest attempt to contribute to the literature of vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (“working off the past”)

[Emily Mayo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important book, and a good one. I always struggle with rating nonfiction and "memoir" type books because by nature of the genre I'm just going to find them a little less compelling than fiction, so I usually end up giving most of them four stars - this one isn't an exception. It's well-written, and the vastness of the research embarked upon and the multitudes of threads to tangle and untangle are both impressive and handled well, but I did find the book dragging at points - although again it's entirely possible this is simply a fact of the genre. Either way, a good, personal read for anyone interested in this period of history or in family history/family historical reckonings on the whole.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book to be a fascinating insight into the lives of those who lived through the time leading up to, and after the war. History tends to simplify the times into moments on a timeline, and this well constructed novel unpacks the time in-between those moments through a brilliant juxtaposition of someone who was part of the war and someone who escaped it. Their lives are interesting beyond the wartime, and the author lets you in to learn about the tragic moments and his touching insights as he researches the past from his memory, interviews and their correspondence.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent and very engaging examination of complicated lives, situations, and families in Nazi Germany, the reckoning that the country has been going through ever since, and the responsibility felt even by the author—an American-born descendant of a well-connected German family of publishers, pharmaceutical firm owners, Jews, and Nazis. Wolff also includes interesting and helpful endnotes and a bibliography, with many sources that I look forward to reading.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm glad I read this, but I am rather cooler in my appreciation than most other reviewers. The parade of family names and tangled inter-relationships takes some getting used to. There is also a feeling that some greater revelation is going to be revealed about his father's war record. So, the ending comes rather unexpectedly. It is very much a family memoire and may not find a wider audience.

[Nuria · Rating 3 out of 5]

La narración se hace un poco pesada y en ocasiones es difícil seguir las historias familiares pues están llenas de nombres y personajes. Pese a ello, el autor cuenta cosas interesantes, especialmente de la sociedad alemana de la época. Mucho más interesante la parte dedicada a la vida de Kurt Wolff que a la de su hijo Nicolás.

[Sarah Bodaly · Rating 2 out of 5]

In all honesty, this “sweeping portrait of the turmoil of the twentieth century and the legacy of immigration” was such a disappointing and confusing let-down that it took me entirely too long to get through the book.
I had a longer review in our book group, but I'll be nice here and just say that I am a well-read history enthusiast who was most definitely not a fan of this book.

[Kurtie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extensive background research. Interesting premise as a family history when the patriarch is quoted, ˋTo produce a memoir is a fool’s errand, he liked to say: “What one can write is not interesting, and what is interesting one cannot write.”´