Imprisonment 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. 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.
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. 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
Unterhaching near Munich 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 Iranian 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. 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 '''', 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". ==Posthumous revelations==