One day, shortly after the war, in 1947, Maria Rank was making her way through the rubble with a typewriter and an atlas to introduce herself to Rudolf Augstein as a new employee. At the age of 23, Augstein had received a license from British press officers to found a news magazine. Maria Rank was similarly young and started fact checking there. She built the renowned documentation department of the Mirror with, which only lost its reputation very long after Rank’s active time – in the Relotius affair, in which forged reports were not recognized even by the in-house experts.
Until 1961, Maria Rank worked at Mirror, but remained loyal to the house as a contemporary witness into old age. Susanne Beyer, Author of the Editor-in-Chief at Mirrorrecalls in her obituary what Rank, who has now died at the age of 97, said at festivals about the early years at the magazine: Back then, you wouldn’t have felt like adults at all: “We were like classmates.”