Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction Performing Terrorism Leith Passmore ulrike meinhof and the red army faction: performing terrorism Copyright © Leith Passmore, 2011. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011 978-0-230-33747-3 All rights reserved. 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. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. 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. Design by Scribe Inc. 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 mate- rial 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 pro- test 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 dem- onstration 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.