[1][2] Hermine Auguste Brühning was born the illegitimate daughter of a serving-maid in Bremen-Hastedt, then a poor rural settlement just outside the city into which, for administrative purposes, it would be subsumed in 1902.
Her new stepfather was an activist member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), which ensured an early introduction to the rapidly changing world of socialist politics.
[1] Very soon after joining the workforce at the jute mill she became involved in the activities of the textile workers trades union ("Textilgewerkschaft") and of the Consumers' co-operative movement ("Konsumgenossenschaft").
The USPD had broken away from the SPD in 1917, principally because members rejected the mainstream party's parliamentary support for funding the First World War.
The war had finished and been followed by a year of revolutions in the cities, the toppling of the Kaiser and the launch of a republican governmental structure (which incorporated votes for women without much sign of the resistance that the notion encountered elsewhere in Europe).
[3] She remained a member until 15 March 1933 which was when the parliament, like other democratic institutions across Germany, dissolved itself in response to the enforced rapid transition towards one-party dictatorship which had been underway since the start of the year.
The charge was the usual one of "preparing to commit high treason" ("Vorbereitung zum Hochverrat"), and the sentence was a four year jail term.
After 1945, throughout West Germany, the relationship between the SPD and the Communist Party, became ever frostier, but in Bremen Hermine Berthold and Käthe Popall would remain the firmest of friends over the decades that followed.
A year later, on 1 September 1939, as German and Soviet troops invaded Poland from opposite sides, Berthold was re-arrested because she had failed to comply with conditions imposed by the authorities.
[2] Directly after the war, as she concentrated on making her half destroyed apartment habitable for herself and her surviving son, there was a determination to have nothing more to do with politics, but that quickly weakened and she became a member locally of an all-party ant-fascism association, which in the end was dissolved in December 1945.
Berthold was persuaded by comrades to rejoin the (no longer banned) Social Democratic Party, re-establishing the Bremen-Hastedt women's section of it.
[1] Berthold also resumed her involvement in the local Consumers' co-operative movement, now on the supervisory board, working closely with Käthe Popall, her Communist friend from their time in prison together.