On Friday 27 January, publisher Ingvild Richardsen, Arnon Grünberg and the German actress Annette Paulmann (Münchner Kammerspiele) will discuss Grete Weil and her book Der Weg zur Grenze. More information and tickets: Literaturhaus München.

Grete Weil fled the Nazis to the Netherlands in 1935, at the age of 29, with her husband Edgar. In Amsterdam, towards the end of the Second World War, constantly threatened by discovery by the German occupiers, she wrote the autobiographical novel Der Weg zur Grenze, which remained lost for almost 80 years and was published this year by C.H. Beck Verlag.

In Der Weg zur Grenze, Grete Weil describes her own story and that of her husband, who was murdered in Mauthausen concentration camp in 1941 – a novel of keys that remained undiscovered and unpublished for almost eighty years. Ingvild Richardsen discovered the novel in a literary archive in Munich. Essentially, the novel tells the love story of Grete Weil and her husband Edgar Weil, fictionalized and taken from the autobiographical to the exemplary. It is also the story of the politicization of an educated, cultured bourgeoisie and a unique description of the changes in everyday life, families and institutions since the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Der Weg zur Grenze will be published in the spring of 2023 in a Dutch translation by Uitgeverij Meulenhoff.

You can read and hear a report of this meeting over here.