Ulrike Marie Meinhof, journalist, revolutionary, and co-founder of the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) was born on the 7th October 1934 Oldenburg, Germany.
Her father, Werner Meinhof being a Doctor of Art History became the head of the City of Jena’s museum when Ulrike was two years old. Ulrike's mother, who studied art history, started working as a teacher.
In 1946, her family moved back to Oldenburg. This happened after Jena came under the control of the Soviet Union. Both of her parents died of cancer, her father in 1940 and her mother in 1948.
Ulrike and her older sister were then looked after by her mother’s former border Renate Riemack. Riemack was a committed socialist and his views were to have a big impact on the young and vulnerable Ulrike.
Ulrike was well educated studying sociology, philosophy and German studies at Marburg. In 1957 she was studying at a University near Munster. Here she showed the radicalism that was to lead her to a path of violence, joining the Socialist Student Union, the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS). and took part in protests against Germany getting more weapons and nuclear bombs. These weapons were suggested by the government at the time. Meinhof became a leader in the local "Anti Atomic-Death Committee."
She also demonstrated her skill at article and report writing for the student newspapers which would be her future career.
She joined the outlawed German communist party in 1957 and was the editor of the left wing magazine Konkret from 1962 until 1964. Konkret was very popular among students and thinkers who wanted social change.
During this time she married Klaus Rohl, the publisher of Konkret and gave birth to twins Regine and Bettina in 1962. In 1962 Ulrike had surgery to remove a brain tumour and some claim during the surgery her brain was damaged which lead to her future violent behaviour, a post mortem after her death did show that her brain had been damaged. The couple divorced in 1968 following a year of separation. Her writings were demonstrating a more radical view, and a move from protest to more violent methods.
In February 1968, Meinhof attended a big meeting in West Berlin about the Vietnam War. She signed a statement with other important thinkers.This statement said that the U.S. actions in Vietnam were like a terrible war from the past. It called for action against the harm being done to the Vietnamese people.
On the night of 2 April 1968, two department stores in Frankfurt stood in flames. The arsonists were part of the protest movement that had been demonstrating against the American war in Vietnam, among other things. In court, they spoke about taking action “against the indifference with which people are watching the genocide happening in Vietnam”. They were sentenced to three years in prison.
Two of the convicted arsonists were Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin.
The attempted assassination of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke on 11 April 1968 provoked Meinhof to write an article in konkret demonstrating her increasingly militant attitude and containing perhaps her best-known quote: Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.
She stopped writing for konkret which had in her opinion evolved into a completely commercial magazine in the early part of 1969, and many other authors followed her. She stated that neither she nor her collaborators wanted to give a left-wing alibi to the magazine that sooner or later "would become part of the counter-revolution, a thing that I cannot gloss over with my co-operation, especially now that it is impossible to change its course".
Later, they organised an occupation at konkret's office (along with several members of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition), to distribute proclamations to the employees, something that failed since Röhl learned about it, and moved the employees to their homes to continue their work from there. Finally, Röhl's house was vandalized by some of the protesters. Meinhof arrived in Röhl's villa at 11:30, after police and journalists had already arrived. She was accused by Röhl (and subsequently described by the media) as the organizer of the vandalism. It was difficult to prove, as she was not there when it happened.
Meinhof was approached for her help in securing the release of Baader from police custody. A scheme was developed where Meinhof would approach leftist publisher Klaus Wagenbach, seeking to have him hire Meinhof and the imprisoned Baader in writing a book.
After securing a contract from Wagenbach (who was not aware of Meinhof's ulterior motives), Meinhof petitioned authorities to allow Baader to travel from Moabit Prison to an institute for social research in the Dahlem district of Berlin. The plan was for armed guerrillas to enter the institute and secure the release of Baader; it was intended that no shooting was to take place. Meinhof was to stay behind, and have a plausibly deniable explanation that she was not involved in the planning of Baader's escape.
On 14th May 1968 Baader arrived with two guards, and set to work with Meinhof in the institute's library. Two women compatriots of Ensslin's, along with a man with a criminal record (hired because of his supposed experience with armed encounters) broke into the institute.
The man shot the elderly librarian Georg Linke, severely wounding him in his liver. It was later claimed that the man was holding two weapons, a pistol and a gas canister gun, and accidentally fired the wrong weapon in the confusion.
Because of the shooting of the librarian, it is speculated that Meinhof made a snap decision to join Baader in his escape. Within days wanted posters appeared throughout Berlin offered a 10,000 DM reward for her capture for "Attempted Murder."
In the beginning, Meinhof meant to stay behind to use her power as an influential reporter to help the rest outside, but in the panic after the shooting she joined the others jumping out of the institute's window. Immediately after their escape Meinhof called a friend to pick up her children from school. This call helped illustrate her overall lack of planning.
A few days later, a call to action was published in a militant West Berlin magazine.The group, which still did not have a name, explained to the “potentially revolutionary elements among the People” that “it’s starting now”: “Develop the class struggles! Organise the proletariat! Start the armed resistance! Build up the Red Army!” And “of course you can shoot”.
Those were the words of Ulrike Meinhof on a tape recording, a transcript of which was published in the weekly news magazine “Der Spiegel”, now a full time revolutionary and urban guerilla.
Perhaps her last work as an individual was the writing and production of the film Bambule [de] in 1970, which focused on a group of West Berlin girls in juvenile detention; by the time it was scheduled to be aired, she was wanted for her part in the violent escape from police custody of Baader, and its broadcast was delayed until 1994.[28]
She co-founded the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion or RAF) in 1970, and in the next two years Meinhof participated in the various bank robberies and bombings executed by the group. She and other RAF members attempted to kidnap her children so that they could be sent to a camp for Palestinian orphans and educated there according to her desires; however, the twins were intercepted in Sicily and returned to their father, in part due to the intervention of Stefan Aust.
During this period, Meinhof wrote or recorded many of the manifestos and tracts for the RAF. The most significant of these is probably The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla, a response to an essay by Horst Mahler, that attempts to set out more correctly their prevailing ideology.
The manifesto acknowledges the RAF's "roots in the history of the student movement"; condemns "reformism" as "a brake on the anti-capitalist struggle"; and invokes Mao Zedong to define "armed struggle" as "the highest form of Marxism-Leninism"
It also included the first use of the name Rote Armee Fraktion and, in the publications of it, the first use of the RAF insignia, a submachine gun and the letters “RAF” against a five-pointed star.
The RAF emerged from the radical student protest movement of the late 1960s. Influenced by Marxist-Leninist ideology, the Latin American guerrilla movements, anti-imperialist movements in the Global South the RAF sought to use individual violence as an alternative to the mass mobilization of the working class and sought to dismantle the West German state and confront U.S. influence in Europe. Their actions were a direct response to what they viewed as systemic repression, the Vietnam War, and the close ties between the German government and American military power.
The RAF wanted to “bring conflicts to a head” and to use “armed propaganda” to start a “people’s war”: “We affirm that the organisation of armed resistance groups in West Germany and West Berlin is correct, possible and justified. We further state that it is correct, possible, and justified to conduct urban guerrilla war now”. There was a huge gap between delusion and reality.
This “urban guerrilla” strategy, proved to be a political dead end. Rather than weakening the capitalist state, the RAF’s campaign of bombings and assassinations provided the ruling class with the necessary pretext to expand its repressive apparatus. The West German government used the threat of RAF terrorism to suppress democratic rights far beyond the ranks of the guerrillas alone.
Meinhof's practical importance in the group, was often overstated by the media, the most obvious example being the common name Baader-Meinhof gang for the RAF. (Gudrun Ensslin is often considered to have been the effective female co-leader of the group rather than Meinhof.)
On 14 June 1972, in Langenhagen, Fritz Rodewald, a teacher who had been providing accommodation to deserters from the U.S. Armed Forces, was approached by a stranger asking for an overnighting house the next day for herself and a friend. He agreed but later became suspicious that the woman might be involved with the RAF and eventually decided to call the police.
The next day the pair arrived at Rodewald's dwelling while the police watched. The man was followed to a nearby telephone box and was found to be Gerhard Müller who was armed. After arresting Müller, the police then proceeded to arrest the woman – Ulrike Meinhof.
After two years of preliminary hearings, Meinhof was sentenced to 8 years' imprisonment on 29 November 1974. Eventually Meinhof, Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were jointly charged on 19 August 1975, with four counts of murder, fifty-four of attempted murder, and a single count of forming a criminal association. However, before the trial was concluded, Meinhof was found hanged by a rope, fashioned from a towel, in her cell in the Stammheim Prison on 9 May 1976.
It is highly probable that, if not for her death, she would have been sentenced to 'life imprisonment plus 15 years'. (The remaining three defendants received such a sentence, designed to minimize the possibility of early parole.) The official verdict was that Meinhof had committed suicide.
It was later discovered that she had become increasingly isolated from other RAF prisoners. Notes exchanged between them in prison included one by Gudrun Ensslin, describing her as "too weak". The official findings were not accepted by many in the RAF and other militant organisations, and there are still some who doubt their accuracy and believe that she was murdered by the authorities.
A second investigation was carried out by an international group. The findings of the inquiry were published under the title Der Tod Ulrike Meinhofs. Bericht der Internationalen Untersuchungskommission (The Death of Ulrike Meinhof. Report of the International Investigation Committee) in 1979 and determined that Meinhof had been brutally murdered.
Meinhof's body was buried six days after her death, in Berlin-Mariendorf. Her funeral turned out to be a demonstration of about 4,000 people.
Ulrike's death sparked protests around the world and clashes with police in Paris, Rome, Milan, Venice, Copenhagen, Berlin, Munich, and several cities in West Germany. In Frankfurt, the Armed Forces Recreation Facility at the US Rhein-Main Air Base was blown up.
In a bizarre twist it was discovered that the brain of Ulrike had been removed for study before her burial six days after her death. Evidence shows that it was damaged during an earlier operation to remove a tumour. In 2002 the daughters of Ulrike Meinhof requested the brain be returned and buried with her and despite claims the brains had gone missing it was interred with her in December 2002.
Ulrike's murder marked the beginning of the "final solution" against the militants of the Red Army Faction, long announced and advocated by the ruling bodies of the Federal Republic of Germany.
In the year following Meinhof’s death, the conflict between the state and the RAF escalated into what became known as the “German Autumn.”
A second generation of the RAF carried out a series of high-profile kidnappings and assassinations, including the murder of Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback and the kidnapping of industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer. The state responded by plunging the country into a near-total security lockdown, deploying the GSG 9 special forces and passing the “Contact Ban Law,” which completely cut off the prisoners from any outside communication, including with their lawyers.
On October 18, 1977, rhe remaining RAF militants Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe were found dead in prison under equally suspicious circumstances in the same high-security prison. For example Baader was found shot dead from a 30cm distance in the back of the head with a pistol. Nevertheless this was officially declared a suicide once again. On November 11 of the same year, Ingrid Schubert was found dead.
By this time the RAF had been de facto defeated. Increasingly their actions had as their sole goal to liberate the prisoners, became more and more spectacular assassinations and kidnappings, and they increasingly failed to bring their point across to a population that was far from supportive.
Since her death Ulrike Meinhof'has become something of cult figure and is often given more credit and influence than she really had within the RAF.
She was a contrasting figure to the violent , school drop out of Andreas Baader and fitted the classic profile of the well educated socialist reactionary that often were lured into terrorism due to their idealistic beliefs. She made a good focus for press attention and has had several quotes attributed to her including “Anti-Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism”, it was this comment which lead to some naming the RAF as ‘Hitler’s children” and on political action she is quoted as saying the much paraphrased quote “If one sets a car on fire, that is a criminal offence, if one sets hundreds of cars on fire , that is political action”.
Ulrike Meinhof's life has since her death been the subject, to varying degrees of fictionalisation, of several films and stage productions. Treatment in films include Reinhard Hauff's 1986 Stammheim, an account of the Stammheim trial, Margarethe von Trotta's 1981 Marianne and Juliane and Uli Edel's 2008 film The Baader Meinhof Complex.
Stage treatments include the 1990 opera Ulrike Meinhof by Johann Kresnik, the 1993 play Leviathan by Dea Loher, the 2005 play La extraordinaria muerte de Ulrike M. by Spanish playwright Carlos Be and the 2006 play Ulrike Maria Stuart (de) by Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek. The 1981 French movie Il faut tuer Birgitt Haas (fr) is inspired by Meinhof's death.
In 1978 Dario Fo and Franca Rame wrote the monologue Moi, Ulrike, je crie... The 2010 feature documentary Children of the Revolution tells Meinhof's story from the perspective of her daughter, journalist and historian Bettina Röhl (de).
Subtopia, a novel published in 2005 by Australian author and academic A.L. McCann, is partially set in Berlin and contains a character who is obsessed with Ulrike Meinhof and another that claims to have attended her funeral.
The 2013 book "Revolutionary Brain" by Harold Jaffe features a titular section devoted to the brain of Ulrike Meinhof.
Marianne Faithfull's album Broken English had the title track dedicated to Meinhof. The anarcho punk band Chumbawamba's 1990 album, Slap! featured an opening and closing track, both named after Meinhof. The first track was entitled Ulrike and featured lyrics which directly involved Ulrike Meinhof as the protagonist and the final track was purely instrumental (but unrelated to the first track) and was entitled "Meinhof". The album's liner notes included information and an article relating to the song Ulrike.
Electronica act Doris Days created a track entitled To Ulrike M., in which there is a passage spoken in German throughout the song, presumably an archived audio file from Ulrike Meinhof herself. This track has since been remixed by other electronica acts like Zero 7, Kruder & Dorfmeister, and The Amalgamation of Soundz.
The German duo Andreas Ammer and F.M. Einheit released an album in 1996 entitled Deutsche Krieger, a substantial portion of which consists of audio recordings of and about Ulrike Meinhof. London-based experimental group Cindytalk have an electronic side-project called Bambule, named after the Meinhof film of the same name.
Marianne Faithfull -Broken English
Chumbawamba - Ulrike
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