A progressive educator, he delivered a speech in 1933 to an assembly of Hamburg teachers, warning of the dangers of Nazi ideology.
[5] Her mother died in 1953,[5] and she then began to write poetry, publishing the first small collection, Dependencies, in 1965 after twelve years of self-studies.
[1] The couple built a home in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, Illinois, in the 1960s, and she wrote: "Though my family landed in the Midwest, we lived in urban or suburban environments."
[1][4] She made money by working as a receptionist in a doctor's office[1] and writing book reviews for the Chicago Daily News, which hired her in the 1970s.
She sometimes alludes to German fairy-tales by the Brothers Grimm, and quotes Bertold Brecht.
In her 1992 autobiographical poem "Curriculum Vitae", she writes: "My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes".