- She died of tuberculosis in a private room at High Hills, the best sanitarium in Moscow, at five minutes to nine in the morning, June 4, 1941. She had received a telegram from her collaborator and erstwhile lover Bertolt Brecht that day, as he and his family made their way across the USSR to seek asylum in the U.S. (The Soviet Union was invaded by its ally, Nazi Germany, in less than three weeks.) Her last words were "Doctor, doctor, doctor." Her friend Maria Osten, who checked in on her each day, arrived two minutes too late to say goodbye to her friend. According to Osten's correspondence with Brecht, an autopsy the following day revealed that her lungs were almost completely eroded by the disease. A plaster cast of her face and hands were made for Brecht, and she was cremated on June 6th. Osten and her child "disappeared" into the Gulag within weeks, and she was shot as a spy on August 8, 1942, according to the NKVD.
- There is a street named after her in Berlin, Germany, "Margarete Steffin Strasse" ("Margarete-Steffin-Straße"), south of Humboldt University. Berlin's oldest university, Humboldt was the alma mater of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was the leading university of the Democratic Republic of Germany (East Germany) until the collapse of communism in 1989, eventually becoming part of the state university system of the Federal Republic of Germany. Ironically, Steffin was not allowed to go to university by her father on the grounds that it was inappropriate for her gender and class.
- Was very close to the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, a fellow German who was one of the great essayists of the 20th Century. His "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is one of the seminal works of art criticism.
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