Gast was born in Remscheid during the Second World War and slightly more than three months before most of the town was destroyed in a fire storm caused by aerial bombing. Her father, who died while she was still very young, was a driving instructor. The youngest of three siblings, she grew up in a conservative Catholic household in what became, in May 1949, the German Federal Republic (West Germany). Intelligent and diligent in her studies, she became politically engaged and evidently inherited her parents' political conservatism, joining the &lt;a href="Association%20of%20Christian%20Democratic%20Students"&gt;Association of Christian Democratic (i.e. conservative) Students ("Ring Christlich-Demokratischer Studenten" / RCDS)&lt;/a&gt; and the mainstream centre-right CDU (party). Like many people in western (and central) Europe, she was, according to her own later testimony, opposed to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. By that year she was working on a doctorate in political sciences, supervised by Klaus Mehnert at the university in Aachen. Her chosen topic focused on the role of women in the German Democratic Republic. Her dissertation would be submitted and her doctorate received in 1972.