Her father was the physician-author Werner Schmidt, whose career opportunities had been brutally truncated during the twelve Hitler years due to a government decision to classify him as "half-Jewish".

[2][8] The child grew up with her family in a large first floor "Jugendstil" apartment in Hanau shared with parents, grandparents and a much younger brother, impatient to grow to adulthood and follow her mother into the acting profession.

[8][10] During the 1970s she undertook a succession of increasingly prominent stage engagements at major theaters in, most notably, Munich, Stuttgart, Cologne, Hamburg, Bochum and West Berlin.

In 1979/80 she took the lead role in "Geburt der Hexe" ("Birth of the witch"), a production from the set designer and film director Wilfried Minks, to whom, at that time, she was married.

[15] Organising the publication of her first narrative book, "Josef stirbt", brought Berkéwicz into contact with Suhrkamp Verlag, a widely respected publishing house based in Berlin.

The two principal protagonists are named only as "the man" and "the woman", but commentators infer that the book is nothing less than a literary requiem by a still grieving widow, and implicitly a powerful celebration of a good marriage to a larger than life husband who had died.

In October 2003 shareholders agreed a reconfiguration and expansion of the management team where by Berkéwicz took over as chair of the main board with Günter Berg as her deputy.

The changes were made following consultation with the "Authors' Advisory Committee", comprising a number of the publisher's best known scholar-authors, including Jürgen Habermas, Alexander Kluge, Adolf Muschg and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.

Unseld-Berkéwicz was suddenly a wealthy woman, and it also became known that Lübbert had become her testamentary executor and a board member at the "Peter-Suhrkamp-Stiftung" ("...foundation"), which had been set up by the firm's founder in 1984 as one of several moves designed to give authors an enhanced role in political-commercial decision making.

This was part of a broader set of developments, which also included a succession of court hearings, that gave rise to recurring reports of ructions at the top of Suhrkamp Verlag over the next few years.