[1][2][3] Rita Tomaschek was born and grew up in Rumburg (as Rumburk was then known), a small manufacturing town near the northern tip of Bohemia, in what was at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

[3] During 1946 she had been one of tens of thousands of early joiners of the new Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED), created under contentious circumstances during April of that year.

[2] Under Klemperer's leadership she also became a dean of studies in 1949[1] and began work on her Habilitation project which concerned the popular nineteenth-century French novelist George Sand.

[2] During 1951/52, she obtained an important government advisory role (Hauptreferentin) on languages teaching to the Department for Higher and Technical Education ("Staatssekretariat für Hochschulwesen").

Klemperer was by now well past the conventional retirement age, and it was evident that Rita Schober was being prepared to take over from him as head of the university Institute for Romance studies.

[2] Another reason that she had no time to complete her habilitation on George Sand was the offer she received in 1952 from the Potsdam-based publishing firm of Rütten & Loenning to take charge of a major translation exercise involving Emile Zola's twenty novel Rougon-Macquart cycle.

[8] Although a literary giant in his native France and well-studied by readers and scholars in the English-speaking world, Zola had till this point been little known in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century, and the Rütten & Loenning, most of it completely newly translated, was the first post-war German language set of the works.

In East Germany the government had unwittingly inherited some of the literary tendencies of the Hitler years, and Zola's work was condemned in some official circles as "Gossenliteratur" ("Gutter literature") which should not be permitted to fall into the hands of the people for fear of poisoning their minds.

[7] In 1959, Schober finally took over from her friend and boss Viktor Klemperer as director of the Institute for Romance Stundies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, a post she would retain till her retirement in 1978.

[7][9] She was evidently regarded by the East German authorities as politically reliable, and her leadership role in the Rougon-Macquart cycle also necessitated international contacts with specialist literary academics in France.

By this time, with political tensions between East and West Germany becoming less acute in the aftermath of Chancellor Brandt's bridge-building policy, "Red Rita" was also increasingly present as a participant at international academic conferences on Romance Studies in western venues.

[2][3] Although sources tend in the first instance to concentrate on Rita Schober's contribution to the study of Zola,[3] she was in fact deeply knowledgeable about a wide range of French authors from different period, notably Nicolas Boileau, Louis Aragon and Michel Houellebecq.