While the father wanted his daughters to aim for office jobs, the mother supported artistic aspirations, and the interest in foreign languages.

At age 17, she left school in Kiel to become a fashion designer and actor in Hamburg, studying at Margot-Höpfner-Schauspielschule, working in several jobs to earn the money.

At age 19, Doris Treitz took part in the Miss Germany pageant, enjoying being in the spotlight while still living with her mother in a small cheap apartment in Hamburg's Rothenburgsort.

Before a concert of singer Salvatore Adamo, the crowd booed other new female talents away, until Alexandra won them over with her rather melancholic style.

She wrote the half of the tracks released on her second album Alexandra, which had mixed receptions from music critics, according to producer Fred Weyrich because the songs "were ahead of their time".

The same day, on her way to a holiday on Sylt, Alexandra drove her recently acquired Mercedes-Benz 220 SE Coupé with her son, Alexander, and her mother.

Leaving the shop, the car failed to stop at an intersection, colliding with a truck near the town of Tellingstedt, Holstein, under unexplained circumstances.

A biography was published in 1999 by movie director Marc Boettcher; Boettcher received several anonymous threats while researching the circumstances of Alexandra's death, and announced that he would push for a new investigation of the circumstances of her death in 2004 after further research, citing former Stasi documents that revealed that her lover Pierre Lafaire had been an American secret agent in Denmark as well as testimonies contradicting the documented results of the original investigation.