[1] After a one-year commercial school education in Bremen, Gansberg studied German, English and social sciences at the universities of Göttingen, Hamburg, Marburg and Heidelberg from the summer semester of 1954.

In Munich, she and her colleague friend, the Germanist medievalist and Marxist Paul Gerhard Völker (1939–2011)[4] were invited to take part in the "Sozialwissenschaftliche Reihe des SDS ★ WS 66/67": Gansberg spoke on "German Exile Literature - a Tabooed Fact", Völker on "How Reactionary is German Studies?".

Materialistische Literaturtheorie und bürgerliche Praxis,[5] published in the "Texte Metzler" series, suddenly made the rebellious duo known to the intellectual public of the old Federal Republic.

Gansberg was the only female professor to take part in the "3rd Siegen Colloquium on Homosexuality and Literature" (October 12–15, 1990) and gave a lecture in Zurich on April 3 of the same year on "Useless Women?

In the second half of the 1970s, along with Silvia Bovenschen and Renate Möhrmann, she was one of the founders of the Feminist Literary Studies research field in German-speaking countries.