Margarete Steffin

The progressive proletarian writer, singer and actress Margarete Steffin was born into a working class family on March 21, 1908 in Rummelsburg, Pomerania in Imperial Germany. Rummelsburg, a part of the Berlin metropolitan area, was the home of the chemical and photographic film maker Agfa AG. (The Versailles Treaty ending World War I officially established the border of Germany with the recreated Poland 15 kilometers to the east of Rummelsbug.) Margarete Emilie Charlotte Steffin's father was a construction worker and her mother took in sewing to supplement the family's income. Her parents had two more children, her sister Herta Frieda, who was born in 1909, and a boy, Hermann Wilhelm Albert, who died shortly after birth in 1913. Her father was among the first round of draftees conscripted into the German Imperial Army in August 1914.

The young Grete was a gifted student. When she was 13, an hour-long play in verse she wrote for Christmas was produced by three schools. However, her father did not want her to go on to university, which was a common sentiment at the time: education should not be wasted on females. (He also may have been concerned that she would lose contact with her social class.) Instead of pursuing a higher education, she got a job with the telephone company Deutschen Telefonwerken after graduation.

Politically conscious since a young age, Grete as she was called, initially was attracted to the Social-Democratic faction on Germany's left, a humane socialism; later, she drifted further to the left and became a communist and supporter of Joseph Stalin, who had an iron grip on the German Communist Party from the 1930s onward. Stalin would not allow the German Communist Party to form a Popular Front with the more liberal Social-Democrats to resist Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party, as Stalin believed Hitler would bring on the conditions that would trigger a revolution that eventually would sweep the Communists to power. It was a fateful miscalculation for tens of millions of Germans, Russians, and countless others.