In early August 1941 the painter and writer Peter Weiss wrote from rural Alingås near to Gothenburg to the theatre director and actor Curt Trepte who had emigrated to Sweden in 1938 and who had declared himself willing to make a room of his apartment available to him from September 1. Trepte lived in the Stockholm suburb of Abrahamsberg. A friend of Peter Weiss', Henriette Itta Blumenthal, had forged the connection. Two months later she emigrated to the United States.

The announced arrival in Stockholm was Peter Weiss' second and more successful attempt to launch his life as an artist in the Swedish capital. His first stay, from November 1940 until May 1941, had failed, although he had succeeded in showing paintings and drawings in an exhibition in the "Mässhallen" in March 1941. He could now capitalise on the contacts he had forged with other emigrants in Stockholm: the sculptor Karl Helbig and Max Hodann, whom he paid homage to in his novels Abschied von den Eltern and Die Ästhetik des Widerstands.

Itta Blumenthal's birthday was on 29 August, Max Hodann's a day later. They celebrated together, giving Weiss cause to come earlier to Stockholm. Peter Weiss was introduced to the exile theatre group through his host Curt Trepte, who had fled in 1938 from the persecution he encountered in Soviet exile and who had worked in 1939 in Sweden with Bertolt Brecht. Years later, in 1972, he drove to Curt Trepte in Berlin, to discuss the research for his novel Die Ästhetik des Widerstands with him.