Love as a battlefield – Liberation

The German Grete Weil (1906-1999) had never been translated into France until today, where we discover The border path. Better still: this major novel, the first she wrote, remained unpublished until 2022. Grete Weil tried to publish it after the war but no publisher wanted it. The academic Ingvild Richardsen found the tensioner at La Monacensia, which houses, at the Munich municipal library, important literary funds.

The border path was written in winter 1944-1945 in Amsterdam, on the icy staircase of an attic. Grete Weil then lived in a building where several emigrant Jews hid like her. She wrote on her lap, in notebooks, and typed the text later. He is dedicated « In memory of Edgar Weil, murdered on September 17, 1941 at the Mauthausen concentration camp ». Grete Weil was from a family of the Jewish big bourgeoisie assimilated from Munich, where her father was a lawyer. In 1932, she married her cousin Edgar Weil, and they had chosen to leave Germany in 1935. Edgar Weil left for the Netherlands, joined by his wife at the end of the year. Meanwhile she had learned photography. Edgar Weil, playwright attached to the Munich theater, had been arrested during a roundup – we suspected the theater of connections with Soviet Russia – and put in prison. Grete Weil and hers managed to release it.