She grew up in Berlin and went to school in England. At the beginning of the First World War she returned to Berlin and attended the Fürstin-Bismarck-Lyceum. She studied after graduating from high school in Berlin and Freiburg im Breisgau. She dropped out of her studies on the occasion of her marriage in 1922 to the Berlin contractor Adolf Sommerfeld, who was patron of the Bauhaus and knew a number of artists of the Weimar Republic. They had a son in 1926. In Berlin-Dahlem they lived in a house built by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, the Blockhaus Sommerfeld (Limonenstraße 30, 12203 Berlin, destroyed).
