Her father, Max Handelsman (1885–1964), was a teacher of Jewish provenance who was keen to integrate and troubled that the predominant language inside his own parents' house was Hungarian.
[3] In May 1937, increasingly preoccupied with the problem of poverty and involved in left-wing politics more generally, she quit New College without sitting her final exams.
[3] Her initial break into journalism, which lasted only for a few months, came unexpectedly in 1942 when her friend Milton Wolff joined the US army and recruited her to succeed him as culture editor with the New York-based "Daily Worker", a communist newspaper.
Her parents were against the idea and even left-wing friends were taken aback by her stated intention to move to Berlin help construct an anti-fascist Germany.
A New York senator arranged a personal interview for Anderson with the "head of the passport division of the State Department in Washington" in order that she might plead her case, but the official was unbending: "Certainly not .... [we would have to] chase the Russians out of Berlin" [first].
Even in Europe, organising a visa for Berlin proved far from simple, and her stay in Paris lasted several months: she had time to befriend several expatriate intellectuals including the Afro-American writer Richard Wright who was in the process of acquiring French citizenship for himself.
[3] Max Schröder was already a well-connected member of a Marxist intellectual elite, through the many contacts he had made as a Communist political journalist exiled in New York and, more recently, as a leading Berlin publisher.
I did not anticipate that it would be the political situation that would cut me off from America, that if I went home I would be unable to leave again, my passport would be confiscated and that for all I know I might go to jail or [face] some framed up charge.
[1] This brought her into contact with other English-speaking expatriates, and also opened the way for officially authorised foreign trips that included Denmark, China, Rumania and Hungary.
[3] While retaining her socialist idealism, Anderson had been appalled by the postwar destitution she found when she arrived in 1947, and which endured in East Germany long after the West German economy had begun to recover strongly.
In summer 1953, around the time of the brutally and efficiently suppressed East German uprising, Edith Anderson suffered her first nervous breakdown, which resulted in a six-week hospitalisation during July/August of that year.
[3] Despite the occasional brief affair, she saw no realistic alternative to sticking by her frequently absent husband during the 1950s, and towards the end of the decade an increased focus on her own writing offered an outlet for some of the stress inherent in the life choices she had made.
Her novel "Gelbes Licht" (later published in English as "A Man's Job") was released,[1] as a result of which she was accepted as a member of the East German Writers' Association.
Her father begged her to stay permanently but her daughter was homesick, and the extensive network of politically left-leaning New York friends of which she had been a part in the 1940s was no longer in place.
She produced a succession of children's books and contributed regularly, between 1960 and 1977, to the New York National Guardian, trying to provide western readers with a critical perspective on developments both in West Berlin and in the German Democratic Republic.
She became an informal spokesperson for US citizens with an interest in East Germany, helping the composer-singer Earl Robinson organise his Berlin tour, calling on her late husband's contacts in the world of music and on her own growing experience of dealing with the authorities.
[3] During the mid 1960s she made several lengthy visits to Hungary, the land of her ancestors, where she quickly built an additional network of friends and contacts.