Her father, originally from Germany's northwestern coastal flatlands, was head of a local senior school, a member of the centre-left Democratic Party and a passionate advocate of land reform.
Unlike most members of the intellectual liberal elite, Renate's father had read Mein Kampf, the chancellor's bizarre presentation of his political views, shortly after its publication back in 1925, and was evidently less surprised than many by what happened after 1933.
He was quickly transferred to a less important job, and in many respects the family spent the twelve Nazi years as "internal emigrants", separating themselves from the social and political mainstream while avoiding the more suicidal aspects of "active resistance".
Meyer was aware of one Jewish friend whom, with others in their circle, her parents were able to save from deportation to the death camps, rotating her secretly between a succession of hiding places.
In 1945 she nevertheless succeeded in passing her "Notabitur" - a version of the usual school leaving exam, truncated because of the impact of war[2] Under normal conditions that would have opened the way to university-level education, and in the winter term of 1947 she enrolled at Berlin's Humboldt University.
She had to struggle for a place not merely against her father's opposition but also on account of the need to compete with surviving (male) soldiers returning from the front and keen to catch up on their education.
After a year Renate Meyer switched to Freiburg University, about as far from Berlin as it was possible to relocate to without emigrating, "in order to free myself from the strong arm of my father".
[2] Later in 1948 she went to England at the invitation of the London-based German Educational Reconstruction Committee (GER), an organisation with close links to the ruling Labour Party.
There was also a more personal aspect to her stay in England which enabled her to make progress with the difficult task of escaping from her father's evidently formidable intellectual influence.
In the end Renate Meyer took a job as a typist in Bonn with the German Academic Exchange Service ("Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst" / DAAD).
It might not have been the path to a stellar career for which she had planned, but since Bonn had been selected, in 1949, as the "provisional capital" of West Germany, the work placed her close to the world of politics in which she aspired to participate.
[4] Following a couple of years as a secretary-typist she resigned in order to accept a very much better paid job with the press office of the Inter Nationes organisation, securing rapid promotion.
In 1955 she even joined a trades union, a source of continuing pride ("worauf ich doch recht stolz bin"), as she later told an interviewer.
However, the long-awaited birth of her child, and her decision to take personal charge of his education during his earlier years enforced a further postponement of her own political career.
[1] After the election was over, in 1969 she also joined the advisory council ("wissenschaftliche Beirat") of the Bonn-based National Agency for Political Education ("Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung" / bpb).
[1] In 1972 she seized the opportunity to compete for a seat in the German parliament ("Bundestag"), in the election that in retrospect came to be known among supporters as the "Willy-Wahl", because it was won by the SPD under the national leadership of Willy Brandt.
[4] She also spoke out strongly in favour of abortion law reform (§218), an issue that was rising rapidly up the political agenda across western Europe in the wider context of Second-wave feminism.