Margarete Steffin went on a convalescence trip in Agra, Switzerland in the spring of 1933, and was never to see Germany again. In the elegant villa where she put on theatre shows with the other patients, she wrote stories and poems about her years as an adolescent in the working-class milieu of the 1920s; friends brought these writings to the Berlin resistance movement. She had spent a lot of time in her youth in the socialist youth groups Verein der Naturfreunde (Friends of Nature) and the Fichte-Sprechchor (a speaking choir). She took acting lessons from Helene Weigel and first met Bertolt Brecht during revue rehearsals in 1931.

From June until the autumn of 1933 she ran an agency in Paris for writers in exile, the “Deutscher Autoren-Dienst”, but it failed when the German Communist Party (KPD) interfered. She followed Brecht to Denmark at the end of 1933 and worked as his secretary and a writing collaborator there, as well as in Sweden and Finland following that. To avoid deportation from Denmark, she entered a marriage of convenience in 1936 with the Danish journalist Svend Jensen Juul. She wrote poems and short stories, the plays Geisteranna and Wenn er einen Engel hätte, translated Martin Andersen Nexös’ Erinnerungen and wrote sonnets with Brecht.

The long wait for a visa to go overseas and the Finnish winter of 1941 took their toll on Steffin, who already had health problems with her lungs. She died in Moscow on the way to the USA, only 33 years of age. Brecht released a collection of exile poems in her name (Steffinsche Sammlung) and Hanns Eisler dedicated a funeral march to her in his Variations for Piano (1942).

Selected work:
Konfutse versteht nichts von Frauen. Nachgelassene Texte (1991)
Briefe an berühmte Männer. Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig (1999)
Briefe an Lou und Hanns Eisler (2008)

Further reading:
Reiber, Hartmut: Grüß den Brecht. Das Leben der Margarete Steffin. Berlin: Eulenspiegel Verlag 2008