Born as Inge Meyer she was already married for the second time when she met the poet and dramatist Heiner Müller. She is mostly known as his wife, and even though she received the Heinrich-Mann-Preis in 1959 - together with her husband. She committed suicide in 1966, and thereafter the paranoid East German officials did not dare to publish her works anymore. Thus her poems were first published in 1996, thirty years after her death.