Her father is described in sources as a German Trade representative based, at the time of her birth, in Moscow which is where she was born.

Meanwhile, in Germany, there had been a major regime change in January 1933 and the government had lost little time in moving towards one-party dictatorship.

A feature of Nazi philosophy and of the new chancellor's own rhetoric, was a peculiar capacity for hatred, with Jews and Communists high on the target list.

From 1936, Wielland was a participant in the Spanish Civil War, but the focus of her life remained in Paris, by now the de facto headquarters of the German Communist Party in exile.

Around this time, or possibly some years earlier, she married Heinz Wieland (1907-1980), a fellow communist who had spent much of 1933 held in "protective custody" in Nazi Germany, and who subsequently, like her, had taken part in the Spanish Civil War.

Later that month, relations between the two dictatorships abruptly broke down when Germany launched a vast military assault against the Soviet Union: towards the end of 1941, Wieland was evacuated with her invalid husband to Osh in what at that time was the Kirghiz Soviet Socialist Republic.

[1] In December 1949, she took a job with her young country's Information Office under the direction of Gerhart Eisler, himself newly returned from several eventful years in the United States.