Serafine Strauss was born in 1871 as the second child of stock market agent Ludwig (Louis) Strauss and his wife Gabriele, née Stern. Her brother, the later composer Oskar Nathan Strauss (Straus), was born in 1870, her sister Anna, married Goldberger, in 1874. In 1894, Serafine married the lawyer Norbert Klinger in the Vienna City Temple. The couple had three children: Margarethe (Grete), who died in 1921, Lily, who married Richard Deutsch in 1927, and Julius Erich, who married Charlotte Morgenstern in 1936 and joined his father's law firm after studying law. Serafine Klinger owned an art and antique collection, partly inherited from her uncles, Julius and Alfred Stern, with a total of 76 art objects, mainly from the 17th and 19th centuries, with a focus on works by Jacob and Rudolf Alt. The art collection was kept in the apartment and Klinger family's office located at Schottenring 9/12–13.
After Austria’s annexation to the Nazi German Reich in March 1938, the Klinger couple were exposed to Nazi persecution because of their Jewish origins. Norbert and Julius Erich Klinger had to give up their law firm in July 1938 and as a result no longer had a regular income. Franz Kieslinger, the Dorotheum's expert on medieval art, valued the art collection at approximately RM 12,000. In August 1938, Serafine Klinger was forced, by the mediation of the art dealer Benno Geiger, to sell four watercolours by Rudolf von Alt and four watercolours by Jakob Alt for RM 3,850 to the head of the Reich Office, Ernst Schulte Strathaus. He had to purchase a larger collection of paintings of Jakob and Rudolf Alt on behalf of Hitler’s private secretary Martin Bormann. The proceeds from the sale went into a blocked account. In July 1939, Serafine and Norbert Klinger had to move to an apartment at Hofzeile 12 in Vienna’s 19th district. . Their children Julius Erich Klinger and Lily Deutsch managed to escape to the USA in January and July 1939. They entrusted Serafine and Norbert Klinger's art collection, as far as it still existed, to distant relatives, Katharina and August Makart. Norbert Klinger died in the hospital of the Israelite Community on 5 December 1941. Serafine Klinger was deported from her last registered address, Liechtensteinstein 92 in Vienna’s 9th district, to the Theresienstadt ghetto on 24 September 1942. According to the official death certificate, she died of pneumonia there on 15 February 1943.
According to Katharina Makart, the part of Serafine Klinger's art collection that remained in Vienna was destroyed or stolen during looting at the end of war. In 1946, Lily Delt (formerly Deutsch) and Julius Erich Klinger demanded the return of the old pictures which had been expropriated. Five of the eight pictures were recovered from the Bormann collection in the Altaussee salt mine and were restituted in 1949, but the Lower Austrian State Museum used the Export Prohibition Act of 1923 to obtain a ban on the Rudolf von Alt-Aquarell Holzschiff auf der Donau vor Dürnstein, including the right of first refusal. Therefore, the work was sold to the State of Lower Austria at a price of 4,000 schillings. It was not until 2020 that the picture was restituted to the legal successors of Serafine Klinger based on the results of provenance research and finally repurchased for the Lower Austria State Collections.