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BERLIN — After Helga Weyhe locked up her bookstore within the city of Salzwedel, Germany, every night, she would make her common commute — a trudge to the house upstairs. She had been making the identical journey since World War II, simply as her father had earlier than then, and as her grandfather had earlier than him.
The H. Weyhe Bookstore is likely one of the oldest bookstores in Germany. It was based in 1840, earlier than Germany was a rustic. Ms. Weyhe’s grandfather Heinrich Weyhe purchased it 31 years later. It endured via World War I, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime. Ms. Weyhe took over the shop from her father in 1965, 4 years after East Germany constructed the Berlin Wall, and guided it via Communist rule and reunification with West Germany.
She locked up for the final time at some point in December. She died at 98 someday earlier than Jan. 4; her physique was present in her residence, mentioned Ute Lemm, a grandniece.
“With her life, she closed a circle,” Ms. Lemm mentioned. “She died where she was born.”
Helga Weyhe (pronounced VIE-eh) grew to become an anchor in Salzwedel, about 110 miles west of Berlin. The city was within the former East Germany, and through Communist rule she stocked spiritual books that had been unavailable in state-run bookstores, frowned on as they had been by the regime. It was a boon to the trustworthy, and for her a quiet act of defiance.
Ms. Weyhe was a lifeline of kinds to her prospects. She traveled far and extensive after East Germans had been typically allowed to depart for tourism, bringing again her infectious enthusiasm for the skin world. “She brought a little bit of the world to Salzwedel,” Ms. Lemm mentioned.
When the Iron Curtain was dissolved and people who had fled to the West returned to Salzwedel, they gathered at her retailer for readings she had organized.
“They had bought their school books at the Weyhes’ when they were kids, and now, when they came back to the city, they were senior citizens,” Steffen Langusch, the city archivist, mentioned. He held lengthy conversations with Ms. Weyhe about native historical past in her workplace in the back of the shop, amid piles of books and black and white images chronicling the shop’s previous.
Bookstores maintain a particular place for a lot of Germans. During the pandemic lockdown, some had been labeled as “essential” companies; the nation’s 3,500 small, unbiased booksellers (in contrast with 2,500 within the United States) have been buoyed by a legislation that fixes e book costs, stopping the small retailers from being undercut by giant chains and Amazon.
Ms. Weyhe in 2012 was the primary resident after reunification to be formally honored by the city, the equal of receiving a key to town, and in 2017 she acquired a special national prize for her bookstore.
“She wasn’t just an honorary citizen,” the city’s mayor, Sabine Blümel, mentioned. “She was an institution.”
The retailer’s inside, with its well-stocked picket cabinets and show tables, has not modified a lot since Ms. Weyhe’s grandfather renovated it round 1880. Ms. Weyhe printed out quotations and poems and caught them to the store home windows for the good thing about passers-by.
She took delight in stocking solely books that she knew and authorized of, though she would order prospects nearly something on-line from her suppliers.
As she advised interviewers through the years, one in every of her favorites was a 1932 youngsters’s e book by Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, known as “Stoffel Flies Over the Sea,” a couple of boy who tries to go to his uncle in America by hiding in a zeppelin.
“It was probably the last bookstore in Germany where you could always buy a copy of that book,” Mr. Langusch mentioned.
The e book’s plot appealed to her personally. Ms. Weyhe’s Uncle Erhard lived in Manhattan and ran his personal bookstore, at 794 Lexington Avenue, close to East 61st Street. His obituary in The New York Times in 1972 described him as “one of the last of the great art book dealers.” An outdated signal with the Lexington Avenue tackle held on one of many cabinets in Ms. Weyhe’s bookstore.
“Since she was a little girl, she dreamed of going to the States, but she had to wait her entire adult life until she was retirement age,” within the Eighties, mentioned her grandniece Ms. Lemm, the creative director of a theater.
Helga Weyhe was born on Dec. 11, 1922, to Walter and Elsa (Banse) Weyhe. Her mom additionally labored within the retailer. She graduated from highschool in 1941 and was the primary lady, and solely the second particular person, in her household to attend college, finding out German and historical past at establishments in Vienna and what was then Königsberg and Breslau.
With the conflict slicing quick her research, she went to work on the bookstore in 1944.
Ms. Weyhe by no means married and left no speedy survivors. Her prolonged household is hoping to discover a new supervisor for the bookstore.
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