Katharina (Käthe) Franck, born in Breslau on 22 October 1879, as the daughter of antiquarian Eugen Franck (1847-1911) and Agnes Berthold. Käthe lived for a while in Dresden, until she moved to Stade, near Hamburg, in 1910 where she studied with Wilhelm Claudius (1854-1942) and exhibited her drawings. In December 1910, she participated in a group exhibition in Hamburg’s Kunstverein, followed by an international exhibition in 1914 in Leipzig with the Deutscher Künstlerbund. She was included in the Munich exhibition in the Glaspalast in 1924.

On 4 February 1918, Franck married university professor Ernst Richard Wagner, in Munich. Her conversion to Protestantism did not help: in 1939, identified as a Jew, Käthe was forced to change her name to Sara. Fearful of deportation, she took her own life on 22 September 1939, just shy of her sixtieth’s birthday. The escape from the doomsday scenario of Nazi racial laws made Franck disappear from the art world all together. It was not until 2004 that an exhibition devoted to this forgotten female artist took place in Stade’s City Hall.