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Luise Rinser (30 April 1911 – 17 March 2002) was a German writer, best known for her novels and short stories.
Luise Rinser (30 April 1911 – 17 March 2002) was a German writer, best known for her novels and short stories.
Luise Rinser was born on 30 April 1911 in Pitzling, a constituent community of Landsberg am Lech, in Upper Bavaria. The house in which she was born still exists. She was educated at a Volksschule in Munich, where she scored high marks in her exams. After the exams, she worked as an assistant in various schools in Upper Bavaria, where she learned the reformed pedagogical methods of Franz Seitz, who influenced her teaching and writing.[1]
During these years, she wrote her first short stories for the journal Herdfeuer.[2] Although she did not join the Nazi Party, after 1936 she belonged to the NS-Frauenschaft[3] and until 1939 she also belonged to the Teachers' Association.[3] In 1939, she gave up teaching and got married.
In 1944, she was denounced by a Nazi 'friend' and imprisoned in the Traunstein women's prison. Rinser later claimed she was charged with high treason and that only the German defeat saved her from a likely death sentence. However, documents from the Nazi-era People's Court show that she was charged with 'undermining the military', which could also carry the death penalty but did not imply conscious intent to overthrow the government. The indictment was issued in March 1945, three months after Rinser was released on a Christmas leave from which she never returned. Rinser would subsequently claim she had been denied leave and remained in prison until April 1945.[4]
Rinser drew attention after the war with the 1946 publication of her Prison Journal (Gefängnistagebuch). The inmates of the prison were not just political dissidents. She shared her life there with common thieves, sex offenders, vagrants and Jehovah's witnesses. Being among such people was a new experience for Rinser, with her middle-class background. The prisoners had to contend with filth, stench and disease. Starvation was rampant.
Rinser herself managed to survive by helping herself to what she could pilfer in the breadcrumb factory where she was placed. She discovered for the first time how the under-privileged and the downtrodden lived and survived. She also discovered herself. The book became a bestseller and the English-speaking world discovered her through the English translation, Prison Journal. In 1947, Rinser changed her views about the usefulness of the book when she compared her experiences in Traunstein to what had taken place in Nazi concentration camps. However, the book was reissued twenty years later.
She described herself in an ode to Adolf Hitler as opposed to the Nazis.[5]
Her first husband and the father of her two sons, the composer and choir director Horst Günther Schnell, died on the Russian Front. After his death, she married the communist writer Klaus Herrmann. This marriage was annulled around 1952. From 1945 to 1953, she was a freelance writer for the newspaper Neue Zeitung München, and took up residence in Munich.
In 1954, she married the composer Carl Orff, and they divorced in 1959. She formed a close friendship with the Korean composer Isang Yun, with the abbot of a monastery, and with the theologian Karl Rahner. In 1959, she moved to Rome, and later from 1965 onwards she lived in Rocca di Papa, near Rome, where she was recognised as an honored resident in 1986. Afterwards, she lived at her apartment in Munich (Unterhaching) where she died on 17 March 2002.
Rinser kept herself active in political and social discussions in Germany. She supported Willy Brandt in his 1971-72 campaign and demonstrated with the writers Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass and many others against the deployment of Pershing II missiles in Germany. She became a sharp critic of the Catholic Church without ever leaving it and was an accredited journalist at the Second Vatican Council. She also criticized, in open letters, the prosecution of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin and others, and wrote to Ensslin's father: "Gudrun has a friend in me for life.".[6]
In 1984, she was proposed by the Greens as a candidate for the office of President of Germany.
In 1972, she travelled to the Soviet Union, the United States, Spain, India, Indonesia, South Korea, North Korea, and Iran. She saw the Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini as "a shining model for the states of the Third World."[7] – Japan, Colombia and many other countries. She stood up vociferously for the abolition of the Abortion paragraph § 218 in its current form. She also served as a leading voice for the Catholic left in Germany.
Between 1980 and 1992, she traveled to North Korea 11 times, where she met with North Korean leader Kim Il Sung 45 times. She wrote about her travels in her book Nordkoreanisches Reisetagebuch, in which she approvingly described North Korea as a "farm-loving country owned by a farmer father" and a model example of "socialism with a human face" where crime, poverty, and prison camps are unknown and praised the minimal environmental impact of its rationed economy. On her 1981 trip, she was accompanied by Rudolf Bahro, who also found much to admire in North Korea, saying that "It is a lot of crap to put Hitler, Stalin, and Kim Il Sung in the same bag. I believe that [Kim] is, in fact, a great man".[8]
Rinser died in 2002. Contrary to what she had said and written about herself and what others had written about her previously, the biography Luise Rinser – Ein Leben in Widersprüchen (Luise Rinser – A Life of Contradictions), published in 2011 by the Spanish author Sánchez de Murillo exposed her as an 'early' ambitious Nazi.[9] As a schoolteacher, she had herself denounced her Jewish headmaster to further her own career. Murillo says, "She lied to all of us."[10] Her son, Christoph Rinser, collaborated with Murillo in researching this 'authorised' biography.[11]
