Ingrid Strobl researched the history of women in the resistance against the Nazis. She was jailed for five years because of an alarm clock. Now she has died.

Ingrid Strobl in Cologne in 2020 Photo: Jörn Neumann

In 1989, Ingrid Strobl was held in solitary confinement. She must serve five years in prison for supporting a terrorist organization and aiding and abetting an explosive explosion. Meanwhile, her book about women in the resistance against National Socialism is published and becomes a bestseller. She had almost finished researching “Never Say You're Going to the Last Way” when she went to prison. The book is still considered a standard work today.

Strobl was convicted because she had purchased an alarm clock, an Emes-Sonochron, serial number 6457. The radical leftist group Revolutionary Cells, called RZ, used this alarm clock in a bomb that exploded in an attack on a Lufthansa administration building in Cologne in 1986. With the attack, RZ wanted to scandalize sexual tourism, to which flights to the Far East contributed.

The solidarity with Ingrid Strobl, who was already known as a journalist at the time, was enormous. EMMA founder Alice Schwarzer started a launch campaign that was supported by celebrities such as Elfriede Jelinek, Dieter Hildebrandt and Jan Philipp Reemtsma. For decades, Strobl was considered a political prisoner innocently imprisoned and who had become a victim of suspicion as part of the RAF's persecution. There was no doubt that Strobl had bought the alarm clock.

women in prison

Only 30 years later did he admit that he knew what the alarm clock would be used for. In his book “Measured Time. In “The Alarm Clock, the Jail and Me,” which he published in 2020, he remembers his years in prison. She talks in detail about how she self-disciplined herself and began researching “The Fear Only Came Afterward,” her next book about Jewish women in the resistance, while she was in prison.

She talks about the various encounters with women in prison, especially with the guards who, among other things, helped her put books in her cell. An extraordinary vision for a left-wing political prisoner of those years, who in reality saw all prison employees as henchmen of the porcine capitalist system.

Strobl is exceptional anyway. Born in 1952 in Innsbruck, Austria, and raised in very modest circumstances, she fights her own way, studying German and art history and earning a doctorate on “Rhetoric in the Third Reich” at the University of Vienna. Ingrid Strobl. She became involved in the feminist movement, worked as a freelance journalist for the ORF and eventually moved to Cologne, where in 1979 she became editor of the women's magazine EMMA. In 1986 she left EMMA and worked as a freelancer for WDR.

Stories without prizes

When Ingrid Strobel was released from prison in 1990, she was taken in again by the WDR, where she was still busy investigating stories for which there was little attention and no journalistic awards, such as those about drug-addicted women on the streets that she also published. a non-fiction book.

Throughout her life, Ingrid Strobl has studied women's history and has tirelessly researched and published. She has produced radio reports and documentaries and has published dozens of books.

After her stay in prison, she did not dwell on herself, but rather focused on the fate of other women. It was Ingrid Strobl who translated Chaika Grossman's book about the Jewish resistance in Bialystok, “The Underground Army,” and wrote the foreword to the German edition.

His documentary “Mir zeynen do!” on the ghetto uprising and the Bialystok partisans is also available in Hebrew translation in the archives of Yad Vashem and Beit Lochamej haGeta'ot. In 1995, Ingrid Strobl curated the exhibition “In the fight against the occupation and the 'final solution' with Arno Glanzer, among others. Resistance of the Jews in Europe 1939-1945 for the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt.

In a conversation the author had with Ingrid Strobl for the taz in 2020, she said of her reasons for supporting RZ horror: “…I can't find an answer to the question of what I was thinking at that moment and why I did that. I never wonder why I was in the women's movement and why I was so involved there. But the origin of this terrible radicalism is certainly true. There was real hatred in me. It may have been displaced class hatred for me, but that doesn't change the fact that it had nothing to do with my nature.”

Ingrid Strobl died on January 25 in Cologne.