In 1947, still not yet 17, she married Walter Steineckert. After this she obtained work as a receptionist until the birth of their daughter in May 1951. This period also saw a tentative start to her writing career. In the meantime, in October 1949, the Soviet occupation zone was relaunched as the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), a separated Soviet sponsored German state with its political, social and economic structures consciously modeled on those that had been developed over the previous three decades in the Soviet Union. The political and economic contrast between West and East Germany became progressively more stark. 1953 saw the East German uprising firmly repressed following the intervention of Soviet troops. 1953 was also the year in which Gisela Steineckert's parents and siblings all relocated across the (at this stage still) porous inner-German frontier to West Germany. Gisela, however, remained in East Germany. Her marriage ended in divorce and Gisela took a clerical job at the town hall in Berlin-Pankow. However, sending her daughter to Kindergarten was not an option: no longer having any of her own relatives in Berlin, she married the father of her child a second time. They separated again, this time permanently, in 1957.