[1] She passed her school final exams (Abitur) in 1933,[3] which at least for a man would have been expected to open the way to a university level education.
On the day the war broke out, by which time she was working in a Berlin bookshop, she met the Austrian author and translator Eduard Zak whom she subsequently married.
[7] In 1953 she embarked on a degree course in German studies at Berlin's Humboldt University, but she was obliged to break off for health reasons.
There were nevertheless some friends and admirers who remained loyal and devoted to the end, most notably the writer Elfriede Brüning and, while he still lived, the cartoonist-satirist Herbert Sandberg.
Most notably, Nomland was involved in a ground-breaking court case that enabled her to obtain her U.S. citizenship despite being both an atheist and pacifist.
The Wende Museum in Culver City, California has a small collection of Auer's literary criticism works.
She suffered a bad fall in the bathroom which resulted in a broken neck vertebra: she died from the complications that followed in Berlin on 7 February 2002.