After the poor reception of her first publication, the story Ans Ende der Welt (To the End of the World) by the East Berlin publishing house Volk & Welt in 1949, Grete Weil worked as a playwright and wrote, among other things, the libretto for Hans Werner Henze's opera Boulevard Solitude. Her prose text Antigone, which she had written at the beginning of the 1950s, remained unpublished. She included some motives from Antigone in her later novel Meine Schwester Antigone (My Sister Antigone). In 1958 she made contact with the Wiesbaden publisher Limes Verlag, for which she translated books from English. Her first novel Tramhalte Beethovenstraat (published in English under the title Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat) was published there in 1963.

Grete Weil, whose photo studio had been in Beethovenstraat in Amsterdam, drew upon her own experiences while in exile in Holland during the war years to write a fictional story about a German editor and writer who witnessed the deportation of the Jewish population there in August 1942. In the main character’s failed attempt to find a language for his traumatic experiences, Weil addresses both the difficulties of survivors of the Shoah in putting the incomprehensible into words as well as the strategies of repression in West German post-war society. Tramhalte Beethovenstraat was for the most part neglected by critics and the public. Only with Weil’s broader reception in the 1980s and 1990s was the novel reissued in several new editions.