Luise Rinser, 90; German Writer Survived Nazis

Luise Rinser, a best-selling German writer who was imprisoned by the Nazi regime and later ran for the West German presidency, has died. She was 90.

Rinser died Sunday, the Am Parksee senior home in Munich announced Monday without giving further details.

Born in 1911 in the Bavarian town of Pitzling, Rinser worked as a teacher until 1939, when her refusal to join the Nazi Party or any other Nazi organization resulted in her exclusion from public employment.

Her first book, “The Glass Rings,” was published in 1941 and chronicled a woman’s struggle for self-discovery despite oppressive social and familial forces. But the publication of a second edition was blocked by Nazi authorities who thought it contained an antiwar message. They also prevented two further novels from appearing.

In late 1944, Rinser was arrested and sentenced to death on charges of high treason and subverting Germany’s military strength. She was jailed at a prison for women in Traunstein and related her experiences there in “A Woman’s Prison Journal,” which appeared in 1946, the year after the war ended.

The book was one of only a few accounts of women’s war experiences to come out of World War II, and it remains one of the prolific author’s most significant works.

She wrote the diary on scraps of toilet paper, which she hid in a mattress until after the Nazi surrender.

Her diary recorded tales of brutality by the prison guards and of sisterhood among the inmates, who included an abortionist, an insane young woman who had been in the Auschwitz death camp, and the wife of an S.S. man who trumped up a charge against her so that he could carry on an illicit affair in her absence.

Rinser was a literary critic after World War II, then turned in earnest to writing novels and stories. She achieved worldwide attention with the 1950 novel “Mitte des Lebens,” which later was translated into English and published as “Nina.” Among her other novels were “Mirjam,” “The Scapegoat” and “Daniela.”

She became increasingly involved in politics, working as a campaign assistant for the center-left Social Democrats in the 1970s under Chancellor Willy Brandt. In 1984, she ran as a presidential candidate for the Greens Party, four years after it was founded by anti-war and environmental activists.

Rinser admired the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, traveling to the isolated Communist country three times from 1980 to 1982 and describing its version of socialism as “a model not just for the Third World” in an account of her experiences there, “Diary of a North Korean Journey.”