Katharina (Käthe) Franck was born on 22 October 1879 in Breslau, the daughter of antiquarian Eugen Franck and Agnes Berthold. After a period in Dresden, she settled in Stade, near Hamburg, in 1910. There, she pursued her artistic training and began exhibiting her work. In December of that year, she participated in a group exhibition at the Hamburg Kunstverein, followed by an international exhibition at the Deutscher Künstlerbund in Leipzig in 1914, and a 1924 exhibition at Munich’s Glaspalast.

On 4 February 1918, Franck married the university professor Ernst Richard Wagner in Munich. Although she had converted to Protestantism, the rise of National Socialism made her Jewish heritage a fatal designation. In 1939, she was forced to adopt the name “Sara,” as required by Nazi racial laws. Fearful of deportation, Käthe Franck took her own life on 22 September 1939, just weeks before her sixtieth birthday. Her tragic escape from the doomsday scenario of Nazi persecution marked the erasure of her visibility from the art world. It was not until 2004 that her work resurfaced when the City Hall in Stade organized an exhibition devoted to this long-forgotten female artist.