GRETE WEIL IS A PART OF THIS STUDY for three reasons. Similar to both Wolf and Drewitz, Weil came of age during the Nazi era (albeit earlier than the other two since she was born in 1906). Questions of history and collective and individual memory and identity mark her work. Additionally, her experience and articulation of these questions lead her to positions on morality that resonate clearly both with the other two writers examined here and with feminist ethics. Relationships with family and friends also form pivotal points from which the writer constructs key moral positions. On the other hand, her experiences as a German Jew during the Nazi era and afterward created an irreparable rupture in her sense of collective history. As readers, therefore, we must explore how she depicts this rupture and the consequences it had both for her understanding of German Jewish identity for people of her generation, as well as for her sense of individual and collective responsibility.

Grete Weil saw herself as German. Both in her own words and in those of her narrative stand-ins, she stresses her self-identification as German from childhood on and her affinity with what she saw as the centerpieces of German culture. She certainly shared many of the cultural traditions and collective memories that Drewitz and Wolf did. However, after the Nazis stripped her of her public identity as German and cast her out of the German collective, her relationship to those cultural traditions and collective memories was ruptured, a breach she attempts repeatedly to repair in her fiction.