•
Feresia (
A day in the life of a child in Zimbabwe) was listed as one of the best 20 German children's books of 1988. •
Sascha und die neun alten Männer, a children's book, tells the adventure of a little Russian boy, who stumbles into a small house next to an old
synagogue. Here he meets nine old men who have moved together in the hope that one day a Jew will visit the deserted quarter, so that they are a "
minyan" – a congregation of ten Jews – to enable them to hold a synagogue service. Sascha finds the tenth man. The book was listed by the Catholic Best Children Books in 1997 in Germany. •
My Sister Sara tells of a four-year-old, blonde German
war orphan patriotically adopted in 1948 by an
Afrikaner parliamentarian who sympathises with the
Nazis. The family, a good family, falls in love with the child. When her papers arrive from the orphanage six months later, the family discovers that Sara's roots are tainted. Hate rips through the family. The rejected child only has two options:
depression or
rebellion. The story was selected as compulsory
matriculation reading in the German state of
Baden-Württemberg in 2007. • ''Mitzi's Wedding'' tells of a young German aristocrat who defies convention to become a musician in the heady days of
Berlin in the 1920s/1930s. Charming and exuberant, she braves the mesmerising ascent of
Nazi Germany to marry one of the three men who love her. She is betrayed by the second who cowers before the voice of popular racism and, finally, continents away, is revenged by the third. This novel considers how racism impacts the intertwined, families of victims and oppressors and the everyday voices of silence and
dissent. •
Judenweg is the fictional account of a young
Jew turned robber out of anger and defiance against 17th century
anti-Jewish laws which forced thousands into
homelessness, wandering along unmarked paths, unable to remain anywhere for longer than two days. The aimless walk from
Fürth to
Frankfurt took two weeks. •
Blutsteine (
Bloodstones) is a
thriller set in Africa in the 90s, when
diamonds were used in three-corner
barter deals for weapons and drugs. •
Zimbabwe and the New Elite examines the dashed hopes of
Robert Mugabe's
first independence decade where power was transferred from whites to a new
black elite who all too readily abandoned the foundations of their revolution. •
Sir Garfield Todd and the Making of Zimbabwe, one of her non-fiction works, is a biography of
Sir Garfield Todd, the unlikely New Zealand
missionary who became the Prime Minister of Rhodesia but was sidelined because of his
liberal policies of
racial equality. Another compares the
Irish and
African freedom movements. The role of women in revolution is reflected in
The Women of Zimbabwe, where Weiss often cites the women's narratives directly. One woman's description of avoiding a massacre by hiding in a
pit latrine for four days is particularly heart wrenching. •
Wege im harten Gras (
Paths Through Tough Grass), her autobiography, documents her life through the late 1980s and has an prologue written by her friend, Nobel Prize-winner and fellow South African writer,
Nadine Gordimer. ==Archive==