Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction

Home , Andreas Baader, Axel Springer, Bild, German Autumn, Red Army Faction, Rudi Dutschke

Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction Performing Terrorism

First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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ISBN 978-1-349-34096-5 ISBN 978-0-230-37077-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230370777

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Passmore, Leith, 1981– Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction : performing terrorism / Leith Passmore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Meinhof, Ulrike Marie. 2. Women terrorists—Germany (West)— Biography. 3. Women journalists—Germany (West)—Biography. 4. Terrorism— Germany (West)—History. 5. Rote Armee Fraktion—History. I. Title.

HV6433.G3P37 2011 363.325092—dc22 2011016072

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

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First edition: November 2011 Contents

Acknowledgments vii Preface ix Introduction: Performing Terrorism 1 1 Where Words Fail 13 2 Writing Underground 33 3 The Art of Hunger 61 4 Show, Trial, and Error 83 5 SUICIDE = MURDER = SUICIDE 103 Conclusion: Voices and Echoes 119 Notes 127 Bibliography 183 Index 201

Acknowledgments

This book is based largely on a rich archival source base. The complete konkret catalog, Red Army Faction (RAF) texts, protest leaflets, amateur publications, posters, texts confiscated from defense lawyers and their offices, as well as material willingly donated by defense lawyers, writings found in RAF members’ cells, police reports, and trial transcripts were viewed over many winter’s days at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Hamburger Institut für Sozialfor- schung) and the Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) in Koblenz. I owe the staff at both institutions a debt of gratitude for their interest in the project and, above all, for their tips. Without their help I would not have been able to navigate the reams of paper they brought me. The process of producing a book from this material was a long one. The fact that it was also fruitful and—for my part at least—enjoyable is due in no small part to Alexandra Ludewig and Mark Edele. Their critiques and their advice made my long journey also a steep learning curve. I am proud to count them as colleagues, and very pleased to call them friends. There were also many scholars along the way who tolerated and responded to conference presenta- tions, seminar papers, and ramblings over beer as this project took shape. Such feedback was invaluable. For their generosity, too, I am grateful to the anony- mous reviewers of the book manuscript and to Sarah Colvin for her comments on a late draft. Throughout the research and writing of this book I enjoyed the support of friends and family. My parents, Graeme and Denyse, were, in this endeavor, as with all others, incredibly supportive. For their wonderful friendship and their role in what could be considered the very beginning of this project, I thank the Weisser family and the broader communities of Neuenburg am Rhein and Müllheim. I am indebted to Clara Bowman for everything else. Everything else includes her company, her encouragement, her love, and her deep appreciation of where commas belong in a sentence.

Preface

Born into Hitler’s “thousand-year Reich,” Ulrike Meinhof made a name for herself as a journalist and spokesperson for a restless protest scene in a Ger- many split by the frontline of the Cold War. After her involvement in the 1970 liberation of Andreas Baader from prison, her face disappeared from the pages of the left-wing press and from West German television screens and appeared instead on wanted posters. The Baader- Meinhof Gang, as they were dubbed in the popular press, later took the name Red Army Faction (RAF) and launched a campaign of violence that would dominate the coming years. Meinhof’s fall from journalistic prominence and disappearance into the terrorist underground is inextricably entwined with the story of the young Federal Republic of Ger- many. It is at once a tragic footnote to the waning student movement of the late 1960s and a preamble to the bloodiest period in Germany’s postwar history. Meinhof began her journalistic career while still a university student in the late 1950s. In 1959 she caught the eye of Klaus Rainer Röhl, cofounder and chief editor of the leftist magazine konkret, and soon gave up her studies to write for the magazine. Her recruitment coincided with a courtship, and she and Röhl married in 1961, shortly after she assumed the responsibility of chief editor. The following year Meinhof gave birth to twin girls, Bettina and Regine, before quickly returning to journalism. Her reputation grew alongside the konkret readership as she proved capable of capturing, and in many ways creat- ing, the mood of a growing student movement. This “student movement” was a broad-based groundswell of protest representing interests from the liberal to the radical. A strong sense of solidarity emerged among the different elements largely in response to local political developments. In 1966 the two major West German political parties, the left-of- center Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or SPD) and the conservative Christian Democratic Union (Christlich Demokratische Union, or CDU), formed a ruling “grand coalition” (große Koalition). Many on the left felt betrayed by the SPD and politically disenfranchised by the new partnership, and calls mounted for the student movement to become an extraparliamentary opposition (außerparlamentarische Opposition, APO). Led by figures such as x ● Preface

Meinhof and front man for the Socialist German Student Union (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or SDS), Rudi Dutschke, the APO mobilized against the grand coalition, against draft emergency laws, against the war in Vietnam, and for university reform. Debate within the movement about how best to confront authority and the legitimacy of violence heightened after a number of high- profile incidents. On June 2, 1967, a crowd gathered outside the Deutsche Oper in Berlin to protest the state visit of the Shah of Iran to West Germany. The visit was seen by those who lobbed tomatoes and flour bombs at the official motorcade as tacit support for a regime guilty of human rights abuses against its own citizens. Meinhof had written an open letter to Farah Diba, the Shah’s wife, taking issue with comments she made to the German press that ignored the poverty and exploitation of her people. The biting rebuke was printed in konkret and was also circulated in leaflet form as the Shah and his wife enjoyed a performance of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.1 The demonstration outside the opera escalated into violent clashes between police, Iranian loyalists who had come to cheer the Shah, and protesters. Amid the chaos, plain- clothes police officer Karl- Heinz Kurras shot student Benno Ohnesorg. Ohnesorg’s death was a watershed moment for the APO. After years of speaking about latent fascism in the Federal Republic, here was an example, embodied in a policeman, of an openly violent state.2 The following year, on April 2, 1968, a group that included Baader and his girlfriend Gudrun Ensslin placed a time-delay incendiary device in a Frankfurt department store. Ensslin was a university student who had left her fiancé and their young son for Baader, a petty criminal who had missed the events of June 2 after his arrest in Bavaria for traffic offenses. The fire caused minimal damage and injured no one. Such “violence against property” (Gewalt gegen Sachen) was intended as an attack against what they perceived as rampant capitalism, and during the October trial Ensslin stated the fire was also intended as a “protest against the indifference with which the people [were] watching the genocide in Vietnam.”3 Meinhof visited the accused arsonists in prison before writing an article that condemned arson, but celebrated the illegality of the protest as progressive.4 Baader and Ensslin, as well as Thorwald Proll and Horst Söhnlein, were later convicted of arson and sentenced to three years in prison, in what many saw as an overreaction. A little more than a week after the arson attack, on April 11, Dutschke was approached in the street by Josef Bachmann. The SDS figure enjoyed a high profile after years of speaking at rallies, leading demonstrations, and appearing on television. Pictures of him also appeared in a ring-wing newspaper article under the headline “Stop Dutschke now!” (Stoppt Dutschke jetzt!), which was in Bachmann’s pocket when he drew a pistol and shot Dutschke in the head from point- blank range. The attack, which Dutschke survived, resulted in a violent Preface ● xi protest at the Springer publishing house. Despite the fact that the article found on Bachmann was not published by media magnate Axel Springer, demonstra- tors saw the assassination attempt as a symptom of a wider media campaign led by Springer publications, most notably the Bild newspaper. They blockaded the publishing house and set fire to vehicles in an attempt to disrupt circulation of the Bild. Meinhof was at the demonstration, and in the wake of the Dutschke shooting she famously championed the blockade as crossing the line from ver- bal protest to physical resistance.5 The shooting of Ohnesorg, the attempt on the life of Dutschke, and the controversial sentence handed down to the Frankfurt arsonists were milestones in the evolution of what was, by 1969, an increasingly fractured and frayed student movement. Fundamental disagreements emerged over the legitimacy of violence, and the political conditions that had served to bind the disparate elements had shifted. Emergency laws were passed in 1968 after almost a decade of debate, and in 1969 the grand coalition came to an end when the SPD formed a government with Willy Brandt as chancellor. Brandt entered into a new dia- logue with East Germany as part of his Ostpolitik, which won him the 1971 Nobel Peace Prize. In December 1970 he produced one of the iconic images of postwar German history when he knelt before a monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as a symbol of conciliation. Many students returned to their studies to embark on Dutschke’s “long march through the institutions,” but some, mainly peripheral, elements became more radical. By 1969 Meinhof’s professional and personal relationship with Röhl had broken down, and she left konkret. She was now a well-known commentator as well as a television and radio personality and filmmaker, who focused increasingly on the issues faced by young people on the edges of society. Baader and Ensslin, too, began working with youth groups in Frankfurt upon their early release in June 1969, after serving only 14 months of their sentences. The three formed a friendship largely based on this mutual interest before Baader and Enss lin fled to Paris. Meinhof also housed the pair during their subsequent return to Germany before Baader’s rearrest for violation of his parole conditions. With Baader again in prison, Meinhof agreed to be part of a plan to get him out. She used her profile to organize a meeting at a less secure research institute, and this was to be the extent of her role in the unarmed operation. However, the liberation did not proceed as anticipated. Amid the chaos of unexpected resistance put up by security guards and gunshots fired by a lib- erator roped in at the last minute, Meinhof fled with Baader through an open window. Posters with her picture appeared overnight advertising that she was wanted for attempted murder and that there was a reward of DM 10,000 on her head. This jump out of the window is widely considered to be both Meinhof’s leap into the underground and the birth of the RAF. xii ● Preface

Over the next two years the group underwent arms training in Jordan, put out political statements from the underground, held up numerous banks, and planted a series of bombs. The attacks and skirmishes claimed numerous lives— RAF members, police, civilians, and U.S. soldiers—before the core of the first generation of the group was arrested in 1972. Meinhof spent more time in prison than she spent on the run, and the texts she produced as an inmate would become at least as important as anything she produced while at large. This period climaxed with the most expensive trial in West German history in a purpose-built courthouse next to the Stammheim Prison, where the RAF leaders were held. In April 1977 Baader, Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe were sentenced to life in prison, but Meinhof did not see the end of the trial, as she was found hanged in her prison cell in May 1976. Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe were all found dead, or close to it, in their cells on the morning of October 18, 1977, after the last of several bloody extortion attempts by second- generation RAF members to secure the inmates’ freedom ended without success. Violence in the name of the RAF did not end with the convictions of the founding members or with their deaths. Despite reaching its high point with the “German Autumn” (Deutscher Herbst) of 1977, acts of terrorism continued into the 1980s and 1990s. The RAF officially disbanded in 1998 after failing to recontextualize its struggle after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The scarring is still evident, and unified Germany remains on many levels preoccupied with the RAF. This ongoing relevance is rooted in the fact that the group was central to a period that helped shape contemporary German society. Meinhof’s story is key, as it weaves its way through decades of Germany’s tumultuous postwar history: from the student protest scene of the 1950s and her fame of the 1960s, to her infamy in the 1970s, and her still- lingering twin statuses as master criminal or saintly martyr. She remains a highly polarizing figure capable of inspiring both fierce debate as well as more visceral reactions from the gut of the German public.