Obituary Note: Helga Weyhe

Helga Weyhe

Helga Weyhe, Germany's oldest bookseller, died earlier this month "above the bookstore... where she had worked since the waning months of World War II," the New York Times reported. She was 98. The H. Weyhe Bookstore was founded in 1840, and her grandfather, Heinrich Weyhe, purchased it 31 years later. Helga Weyhe took over the store from her father in 1965, four years after East Germany built the Berlin Wall, and guided it through Communist rule and unification with West Germany.

Ute Lemm, a grandniece, said Weyhe locked up for the last time in December, and her body was found in her home. "With her life, she closed a circle. She died where she was born." 

Weyhe "became an anchor in Salzwedel, about 110 miles west of Berlin," the Times wrote. "The town was in the former East Germany, and during Communist rule she stocked religious books that were unavailable in state-run bookstores, frowned on as they were by the regime. It was a boon to the faithful, and for her a quiet act of defiance.... She traveled far and wide after East Germans were generally allowed to leave for tourism, bringing back her infectious enthusiasm for the outside world."

"She brought a little bit of the world to Salzwedel," Lemm observed.

When the Iron Curtain fell and those who had fled to the West returned to Salzwedel, they gathered at her store for readings. Town archivist Steffen Langusch said, "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."

In 2012, Weyhe was the first resident after reunification to be formally honored by the town, the equivalent of receiving a key to the city, and in 2017 she received a special national prize for her bookstore. She never married and has no immediate survivors. Her extended family is hoping to find a new manager for the bookstore.

"She wasn't just an honorary citizen," Mayor Sabine Blümel said. "She was an institution."

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