Gercke, Doris

Doris Gercke is a German author of crime fiction born in Greifswald in the former East Germany. She grew up in a working class family that fled to Hamburg in 1949. She still lives there. Not having the means to attend university, she worked as an administrator and was married in 1957 when she was twenty years old. In 1959, after the birth of her second child, she gave up work and became a housewife. She joined the German Communist Party (DK) at the end of the 1960s and was the DK’s head of women’s issues in Hamburg. Disillusioned, she later abandoned politics, but she still describes herself as an active Socialist.