Viola Herms Drath, wife of Albrecht Muth, died Thursday in her Georgetown home at the age of 91. Drath was born in Germany and was a prominent figure in German-American relations. Her death is under investigation as a homicide.

Drath moved to the United States after marrying her first husband, U.S. Army Col. Francis S. Drath.

In Washington, Mrs. Drath became a journalist, writing for Handelsblatt, a German paper, and later for The Washington Times.

She wrote a well-received biography of former German Chancellor Willy Brandt, "Willy Brandt: Prisoner of His Past," which was first published in 1975.

After the death of her first husband in 1986, she married Albrecht Gero Muth, who now survives her.

She was one of the first prominent figures to put forth a detailed proposal for East and West German unification in her work "The Reemergence of the German Question," published in
October 1988.

She served as a foreign policy adviser on the Bush-Quayle campaign in 1988 and more recently served on the White House Commission on Remembrance, where she advocated for remembrance of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

A 2005 article in The Washington Times reported on one of Mrs. Drath's birthdays. The German Ambassador at the time, Wolfgang Ischinger, reportedly said to her, "You have earned the respect of so many [on] both sides of the Atlantic for your role in building bridges of understanding and in strengthening the German-American relationship."