(1911-2002) novelist,short-story writer
Luise Rinser was born in Pitzling, Bavaria. Her parents Josef and Luise Sailer Rinser were strict Catholics. After she finished grammar school in 1930, Rinser studied psychology and pedagogy at the University of Munich. She earned her teaching diploma in 1934 and spent four years teaching elementary school. After her first husband, conductor Horst-Gunther Schnell, died fighting in World War II, Rinser married composer Carl Orff in 1954.
Rinser began to write in the 1930s and published her first story, “Die Lilie” (“The Lily”) in 1938. Her first published volume Die glasernen Runge (Rings of Glass, 1941) gained popular approval but was banned by the Nazis for promoting values different from those approved by the government. In 1944, Rinser was sent to a concentration camp for opposing the war effort. She described her prison experiences in Gefangnis-Tagebuch (Prison Diary, 1946). After World War II, Rinser wrote short stories and worked as a literary critic and columnist. Her novel Mitte des Lebens (Nina, 1956) became a major international success and was translated into 22 languages. In the 1970s and 1980s, she published six diary volumes and a best-selling autobiography. A political activist, she ran for president of West Germany in 1984 as the Green Party candidate.
Rinser’s influences include the baroque Catholic tradition, Eastern philosophy, Carl Gus-tav Jung, and Ernest Hemingway. A major theme in her works is the plight of the disadvantaged and oppressed. Her specific topics include the fight for female equality in a patriarchal society and power politics in the Catholic Church. Critic Albert Scholz writes in “Luise Rinser’s Gefangnistage-buch” that Rinser “is strongest and most effective in her positive attitude toward the fundamental questions of the present day, in her striving for truth, and in her portrayal of authentic human beings working and suffering.”
Another Work by Luise Rinser
Abelard’s Love. Translated by Jean M. Snook. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
A Work about Luise Rinser
Falkenstein, Henning. Luise Rinser. Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1988.
