Luise Rinser

Luise Rinser (1911-2002) was a prolific 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.

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.

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.

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