Luise Rinser

Early life and education

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.

During these years, she wrote her first short stories for the journal Herdfeuer. Although she refused to join the Nazi Party, after 1936 she belonged to the NS-Frauenschaft and until 1939 she also belonged to the Teachers' Association. In 1939, she gave up teaching and got married.

Imprisonment

In 1944, she was denounced by a Nazi 'friend' for undermining military morale and was imprisoned; the end of the war stopped the legal proceedings against her, which would probably have concluded with a death sentence for treason. She described her experiences in the Traunstein women's prison in her Prison Journal (Gefängnistagebuch) of 1946. 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.

Marriage

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, but 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 but they divorced in 1960. 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.

Political activities

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.".

In 1984, she was proposed by the Greens as a candidate for the office of President of Germany.

Travel

In 1972, she travelled to the Soviet Union, the United States, Spain, India, Indonesia, South Korea, North Korea, and Iran. She saw the Revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini as "a shining model for the states of the Third World." – 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.

Posthumous revelations

Rinser died in 2002. Her relationship with the Jesuit priest Karl Rahner had received a lot of publicity in her own lifetime, something she herself had made public. However, it was the publication of a biography by José Sánchez de Murillo that shocked the literary world. 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 to mark her birth centenary, exposed her as an 'early' ambitious Nazi. As a schoolteacher, she had herself denounced her Jewish headmaster to further her own career. Murillo says, "She lied to all of us." Her son, Christoph Rinser, collaborated with Murillo in researching this 'authorised' biography.

Awards and honors

Novels

Short stories

Autobiographical Writings

Writing for children and teens

Special writings

Literature