Abstract
In her essay “Travel Writing and Gender,” the British scholar Susan Bassnett makes two points that are relevant in analyzing Grete Weil’s travel tales, Happy, sagte der Onkel (Happy, Said My Uncle). Bassnett remarks that “increasingly in the twentieth century, male and female travelers have written self-reflexive texts that defy easy categorization as autobiography, memoir, or travel account.” This observation certainly holds true for Grete Weil’s slim volume, and so does Bassnett’s gender-specific assertion that there is a “strand of women’s travel writing that has grown in importance in the twentieth century: the journey that leads to greater self-awareness and takes the reader simultaneously on that journey.”
Highlights
The twelve years in Dutch exile were most traumatic for Grete Weil, and they became thematic in her later books
After a hiatus of 10 years, she resumed writing. Her short story Ans Ende der Welt (To the End of the World) was completed in 1945, shortly after the end of the war. It is a differentiated fictional account of some of her harrowing observations and experiences as a clerk for the Jewish Council in Amsterdam's Joodsche Schouwburg, The Jewish Theatre, where apprehended Jews were processed before being deported to the death camps
Weil made it her task as a writer to witness against forgetting. Since she saw herself as a German writer and the German culture as her culture, she re-migrated to West Germany as early as 1947
Summary
The twelve years in Dutch exile were most traumatic for Grete Weil, and they became thematic in her later books. In 1962, this West German publishing house decided to bring out a new edition of Ans Ende der Welt, which greatly encouraged the author to continue working on her novel.
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