Born in Westerland in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, Busse-Reismann was a theater costume and set designer. Her father owned a hotel, while her mother was an artist. At the age of twenty she went to Berlin to study at the Academy of Art. In 1932 she moved to Moscow with her husband, Jánosz Reismann, a Hungarian journalist. In Moscow she designed theatre sets and appeared in German-language plays put on by immigrant theatre companies. She also designed costumes and sets for the Bolshoi opera company. In 1938, with the increasingly harsh Stalinist policies regarding foreigners, she and her husband moved to Paris, where she continued her artistic and theatrical activities, primarily in German immigrant theatre companies. In February 1940 she was arrested and sent to the women’s camp of Rieucros, where she spent part of her internment (April–May 1940) in the camp infirmary. She recorded her time in the camp in a series of drawings depicting daily life in the camp, as well as her fellow inmates. On November 13, 1940, she escaped from the camp with the assistance of her husband, who was living clandestinely in Paris.

Busse-Reismann returned illegally to Schleswig-Holstein, where she was hospitalized in a sanatorium until the end of the war because she had contracted tuberculosis while in the camp. After the war she married set designer Hans Ulrich Schmückle and worked together with him in various theatres in East and West Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, and Switzerland. She died in Augsburg in March 1989. Her works from the period of her internment are held in the Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin-Brandenburg.

(Pnina Rosenberg)