[2] Paul Franken was born in Höhscheid (Solingen), some 40 km (25 miles) east of Düsseldorf in the heavily industrialised Ruhr region of Germany.
[2] In January 1921 he joined the Communist Work Community (party - KAG / Kommunistische Arbeitsgemeinschaft) but this movement proved short-lived, and by May 1922 he was back in the USPD.
[2] In 1924 the couple relocated to Zeitz, some 450 km (280 miles) to the east, where Flora Franken, who joined the SPD in 1925 sat on the district council till 1933.
[2] He was active in the cultural and educational fields,[1] working in the SPD's Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft der Kinderfreunde / RAG (loosely National Children's Friendly Society).
[3] Flora Franken, who was both Jewish and a Socialist, had even more reason to fear the Nazis than her husband, and emigrated to Riga, joining her mother in Latvia.
[4] Flora Franken, who had accompanied her husband to the Soviet Union in 1934, was permitted to return to the German Democratic Republic with her son, Peter, in May 1955.
She took a job with Dietz Verlag (the Berlin publishing house), later switching to the (closely associated) Marxism–Leninism Institute of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party (Central Committee).