Helen Wolff (1906-1994) was born in Macedonia to a German father and Austro-Hungarian mother. At twenty-one, she went to Munich to apprentice at Kurt Wolff Verlag, Kafka's original publisher. She began an affair with Kurt, whom she went on to marry. The couple fled Nazi Germany, first for France and eventually for the United States, arriving almost penniless in 1941.
The Wolffs founded a new imprint of Pantheon Books in 1942. Helen, a gifted linguist who could read four languages, published significant works by writers including Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Georges Simenon and Boris Pasternak. She wrote fiction and plays but always kept her own writing private. Background for Love was first published in Germany in 2020 to wide acclaim.

Marion Detjen is a historian at Bard College Berlin. She teaches migration history and is Program Director for International Education and Social Change, a scholarship program for displaced students.