We study the temperature dependence of the pseudoscalar meson properties in a relativistic boundstate approach exhibiting the chiral behavior mandated by QCD. Concretely, we adopt the DysonSchwinger approach with a rank-2 separable model interaction. After extending the model to the strange sector and fixing its parameters at zero temperature, T = 0, we study the T -dependence of the masses and decay constants of all ground-state mesons in the pseudoscalar nonet. Of chief interest are η and η ′ . The influence of the QCD axial anomaly on them is successfully obtained through the Witten-Veneziano relation at T = 0. The same approach is then extended to T > 0, using lattice QCD results for the topological susceptibility. The most conspicuous finding is an increase of the η ′ mass around the chiral restoration temperature T Ch , which would suggest a suppression of η ′ production in relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The increase of the η ′ mass may also indicate that the extension of the Witten-Veneziano relation to finite temperatures becomes unreliable around and above T Ch . Possibilities of an improved treatment are discussed.