Lotte Laserstein was born in East Germany; her father died in 1902 and she was raised by her mother and grandmother in what is now Gdansk and Berlin. In 1927, she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, one of the first female students, and was immediately successful. She quickly became known on the city's art scene for her skilled portrait painting, especially of young modern women of the 1920s.

When the Nazis came and took power in 1933, her promising career was cut short when, in accordance with the ideology of the time, she was categorized as 3/4 Jewish (her grandparents were Jewish but her own parents were not). As a result, she was increasingly excluded from the art scene. However, an invitation to exhibit at ...