Hermynia fell ill with tuberculosis and had to spend many months recuperating at a sanatorium in Davos in Switzerland, where she was still staying in 1914 when the war broke out. She did not return. The Russian Revolution allowed her to obtain a divorce. By 1919 she was in Germany, where she joined the Communist Party and earned her living by translating more than 150 novels from French and English into German, including the entire output of the American writer Upton Sinclair.
