Alice Gerstel attended a girls' boarding school in Dresden, then the lyceum and the German-language teacher-training college in Prague.

In the same year she married Otto Rühle, a Left-communist student of Alfred Adler, and together with Grete Fantl founded the Marxist Individual-psychological Study Association of Dresden.

In 1924, she co-founded the publisher "Am Ufer ändern - Dresden-Buchholz-Friedewald" and produced monthly articles defending socialist education.

As a socialist, she was no longer safe at the beginning of Nazi rule in Germany, so in 1932 she returned to her native city of Prague.

Despite friendships with Trotsky, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera in Mexico, she never felt comfortable there, and ended up committing suicide on the day of the death of her husband in June 1943.