Later Life
While doing his obligatory community service (Zivildienst) in a West German hospital in 1989, Rust stabbed a female co-worker who had rejected him. The victim barely survived. He was convicted of attempted manslaughter, sentenced to two and a half years in prison and released after having served fifteen months. Since then he has lived a fragmented life, describing himself as a "bit of an oddball." After being released from court, he converted to Hinduism in 1996 to become engaged to a daughter of an Indian tea merchant. In 2001, he was convicted for stealing a cashmere pullover and ordered to pay DM 10,000; the sentence was later reduced to 600 marks. A further brush with the law came in 2005, when he was convicted of fraud and had to pay €1,500 for stolen goods. In 2009 Rust described himself as a professional poker player. Most recently, in 2012, he describes himself as an analyst at a Zurich based investment bank.
Read more about this topic: Mathias Rust
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“If anything characterizes the cultural life of the seventies in America, it is an insistence on preventing failures of communication.”
—Richard Dean Rosen (b. 1949)
“Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child’s wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness, but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded.”
—Alice Miller (20th century)