Luise Rinser

Luise Rinser was born on 30 April 1911 in Pitzling, a constituent community of Landsberg am Lech, in Upper Bavaria.

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.

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.

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.

[5] Her first husband and the father of her two sons, the composer and choir director Horst Günther Schnell, died on the Russian Front.

She formed a close friendship with the Korean composer Isang Yun, with the abbot of a monastery, and with the theologian Karl Rahner.

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 wrote about her travels in her book Nordkoreanisches Reisetagebuch [de], 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.