Smudits was born in 1926 in Vienna. Austria had been the focus of a multicultural empire until 1918: like many of her generation Käthe Smudits grew up bilingual. Her early childhood was spent in the little village of Nebersdorf with her grandmother, an ethnic Croat, in Burgenland, to the south of Vienna. When the time came to go to school she moved to live with her parents, Agnes and Johann Smudits, back in Vienna. The so-called Self-elimination of the Austrian Parliament in March 1933 had eerie parallels with developments in Germany following the régime change in Berlin a couple of months earlier. For many Austrians the 1920s, culminating in exacerbation of the austerity that had followed military defeat in 1918, had been a difficult and disappointing decade, and in 1933 there was a widespread hope that a post-democratic future under Austrofascism could hardly be worse. But there were others, mostly on the political left, who were appalled by the loss of democracy and the populist racism that accompanied it. Agnes and Johann Smudits' parents were both politically committed, in opposing both Austrofascism and, after the annexation of 1938, the National Socialist ("Nazi") dictatorship. In her parents' little apartment in south-central Vienna (10th district) resistance fighters were frequent guests. Because political opposition was becoming illegal, anti-government activists were increasingly forced to operate in secret and beyond the confines of mainstream society. Even as a young school girl Käthe was involved in the production of political leaflets for "distribution" in the city (for instance through being left on trains at the station near their home or on public benches along the streets or in parks).