[4] In 1929/30 she undertook a training in the book trade, after which, still aged only eighteen, she moved to Berlin where, between 1930 and 1934, she was employed by the Marx-Engels publishing house.
This activity ceased after the library director banned her because, as he put it, he did not want a nice German girl corrupted by Marxist literature.
[4] The party central committee then ordered her to Basel to work with an operation that involved producing "disguised anti-fascist literature".
[4] It would certainly have been quite usual, at this time, for someone caught smuggling communist literature into Germany to spend a year in pre-trial "investigative detention" before facing trial and sentencing.
In 1937 she started working for "Deutsche Freiheitssender 29.8", a radio operation which provided broadcasting facilities for and on behalf of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.
Gerhart Eisler was interned by the French in 1939, but in 1941 he became a beneficiary of an offer of political asylum for Spanish Civil War veterans by the Mexican government.
[4] Their destination changed when the ship on which they were travelling was torpedoed, with the result that they ended up not in Mexico but in Trinidad where the British promptly interned them.
Despite being in possession of a transit permit, they were then interned for three months on Ellis Island,[1] since 1892 New York's (and the United States') principal immigration station.
The country was still formally not participating in the war, but the government had nevertheless recently issued a blanket ban on German or Austrian nationals seeking to travel to Latin America via the USA.
[13] But if she had let her husband return home without her she would, as she later told an interviewer, have "found no sympathy with ... American friends" if she "would have, so to speak, deserted [their marriage]".
[4] However, in May 1949, temporarily at liberty pending his final appeal, Gerhart Eisler managed to escape by pretending to be blind and smuggling himself on board a Polish liner, which then dropped him off unceremoniously in London from where, after several further unpleasantnesses, he was freed[12] and permitted to move on to Germany.
Disclosing how he had escaped as a stowaway on a Polish ship (at a time before news of his discovery on board by the liner's crew had been received) would have amounted to a betrayal, however.
Having found no evidence-based reason to detain her further, after six weeks imprisonment the authorities released Hilde Eisler and she was expelled via Ellis Island at the end of June 1949.
[4] While Gerhart quickly resumed his contacts and embarked on a largely political career,[16] Hilde started to create a future for herself, while her husband took on the leadership of the Office for Information.
[4] On arriving in Berlin she and Gerhart had lost no time in joining the Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED).
[15] Regardless of any comparisons with The New Yorker, she demonstrated political and journalistic skill in steering the publication for two decades or more, providing what the magazine itself describes as "an unusual mixture of journalism and literature".
Eisler's time in New York and her talent for networking meant that she had contacts with foreign writers that other editors lacked, and Das Magazin published contributions on fashion from Vienna, London and Florence.
[4] Hilde Eisler retired in 1976[1] or 1979[18] (sources differ) but retained her links with Das Magazin till her death in 2000.