MODERN GERMAN LITERATURE IN LETTERS TO KURT WOLFF
every literary generation enjoys the privilege and the benefits of being fostered by an ideal type of publisher, who in one person combines great business acumen with broad scholarship and the requisite love of the fine arts; who carries in his heart a great spiritual tradition which enhances his judgment and sharpens his skills to detect the true values in the present and preserve them for the future. In the Germany of recent years this ideal was personified in Kurt Wolff. During the second and third decades of the present century he gathered about himself virtually all the leading spirits of the younger generation of authors. Most of the outstanding names of this period passed through the portals of his publishing house to recognition and fame; or at least felt themselves honored to have gained the renown of his imprint for one or more of their works. There was scarcely an author who failed to correspond with this keen-visioned young publisher who so soon gained for himself the reputation of a tried and true sponsor to his literary friends. It is for this reason that the literary archives of the firm Kurt Wolff, recently acquired by the Library, contain in fact the epistolary heritage of the spiritual center of the Germany ofthat period. It is the correspondence of a period of great activity: die old power and freedom of the German spirit was as yet unbroken, the style is free, all sorts of views and opinions confront one another, wrestle with one another, and survive or fall in single combat. As the discussion grows heated, so does the tone of many a letter. Political fervor quite easily takes a turn toward personal clashes. The spirit of the time is often formless, willful, unrestrained, sometimes rude. Expressionists and Dadaists give loud voice to their pet views. And in sharp contrast with these are the polished letters of those who, about the middle of the 'twenties, move into the limelight: Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Kafka, Borchardt, Schroeder, and Thomas Mann. The free and catholic spirit of the publisher saw in these widely differing views only one important issue their contribution to the arts, to the great European cultural ideal, world-wide in its under-