 On 1 October, she took up the position of a private secretary to Kurt Schumacher.She later said that since the age of 10, she had wanted to later become a “party secretary”.Upon reading one of his speeches titled “"Wir verzweifeln nicht"” (“"We do not despair"”) her attention was called to the Kurt Schumacher, leader of the Social Democratic Party, who had been tortured in the concentration camps by the Nazis.