BRAVE NEW WORLD 2

The Rivera mural incident inspired E.B.White to publish the following poem:

I Paint What I See
– by E.B. White

“‘What do you paint, when you paint on a wall?’
Said John D.’s grandson Nelson.
‘Do you paint just anything there at all?
‘Will there be any doves, or a tree in fall?
‘Or a hunting scene, like an English hall?’

‘I paint what I see,’ said Rivera.

‘What are the colors you use when you paint?’
Said John D.’s grandson Nelson.
‘Do you use any red in the beard of a saint?
‘If you do, is it terribly red, or faint?
‘Do you use any blue? Is it Prussian?’

‘I paint what I paint,’ said Rivera.

‘Whose is that head that I see on the wall?’
Said John D.’s grandson Nelson.
‘Is it anyone’s head whom we know, at all?
‘A Rensselaer, or a Saltonstall?
‘Is it Franklin D.? Is it Mordaunt Hall?
Or is it the head of a Russian?

‘I paint what I think,’ said Rivera.

‘I paint what I paint, I paint what I see,
‘I paint what I think,’ said Rivera,
‘And the thing that is dearest in life to me
‘In a bourgeois hall is Integrity;
‘However . . .
‘I’ll take out a couple of people drinkin’
‘And put in a picture of Abraham Lincoln;
‘I could even give you McCormick’s reaper
‘And still not make my art much cheaper.
‘But the head of Lenin has got to stay
‘Or my friends will give the bird today,
‘The bird, the bird, forever.’

‘It’s not good taste in a man like me,’
Said John D.’s grandson Neslon,
‘To question an artist’s integrity
‘Or mention a practical thing like a fee,
‘But I know what I like to a large degree,
‘Though art I hate to hamper;
‘For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks
‘You painted a radical. I say shucks,
‘I never could rent the offices—–
‘The capitalistic offices.
‘For this, as you know, is a public hall
‘And people want doves, or a tree in hall
‘And though your art I dislike to hamper,
‘I owe a little to God and Gramper,
‘And after all,
‘It’s my wall . . .’

‘We’ll see if it is,’ said Rivera.


e08/22/2009

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Kanikōsen (蟹工船?) (published in English as The Crab Canning Ship or The Crab Ship) is a novel by Takiji Kobayashi, written in 1929. Written from a left-wing point of view, it concerns the crew of a crab fishing ship's hardships as they struggle under capitalist exploitation. The book has been made into a film and as manga. It is a short work, totalling around 80 pages in its English language translation.In 2008, Kanikosen became the "surprise runaway best-selling book of the year" in Japan.

Synopsis:
A crab fishing ship goes to the open sea off Kamchatka (now in Russia but then in the Soviet Union). The crew do not favour their prospects; one crewman declares "We're going to Hell!" The crew revolt against their sadistic captain and foreman, form a union and take over the ship. However the new order on board is suppressed by soldiers.
The book expresses its pessimism from the beginning, not only in the opening remark but in the description of the harbour of Hakodate being filled with rubbish, and the smaller boats being compared to insects.

The Author

Takiji Kobayashi (小林 多喜二 Kobayashi Takiji?, October 13, 1903 – February 20, 1933) was a Japanese author of proletarian literature.

Kobayashi was born in Odate, Akita and was brought up in Otaru, Hokkaidō. After graduating the Otaru School of Higher Learning, which is the current Otaru University of Commerce, he worked at the Otaru branch of Hokkaido Takushoku Bank. His most famous work is Kanikosen, or Crab-Canning Boat – a novel published in 1929. It tells the story of several different people and the beginning of organization into unions of fishing workers. He joined the Japanese Communist Party in 1931. The young writer was killed during a torture session by Tokkō police two years later, at age 29.

At the age of four his family moved to Otaru, Hokkaidō. The family was not wealthy, but Kobayashi's uncle paid his schooling expenses and he was able to attend Hokkaido Otaru Commercial High School and Otaru Commercial School of Higher Learning. While studying he became interested in writing, and submitted essays to literary magazines, served in the editorial committee for his school's alumni association magazine, and also had his own writing published. One of his teachers at school was economist, critic, and poet Nobuyuki Okuma. Around this time, due to financial hardship and the current economic recession of the time, he joined the labor movement.
After graduating school he worked in the Otaru branch of the Hokkaido Takushoku Bank. In the 1928 general election, Kobayashi helped with election candidate Kenzo Yamamoto's campaign, and went to Yamamoto's campaign speech in a village at the base of Mount Yōtei. This experience was later incorporated into his book 東倶知安行. In the same year his story March 15, 1928 (based on the March 15 incident) was published in the literary magazine Senki ("Red Flag" in Japanese). The story depicted torture by the Tokkō police, which in turn infuriated government officials, and would become the trigger for Kobayashi's eventual murder.
In 1929 his story Kanikosen was also published in Senki, and quickly gained attention and became the standard bearer of proletarian literature. In July of that year it was adapted into a theatrical performance and was performed at the Imperial Garden Theater under the title 北緯五十度以北 (North of latitude 50 degrees north). However the police (in particular the Tokkō police of the time) marked him for surveillance. In the same year his essay "Absentee Landlord" (Fuzaijinushi) published in Chūōkōron magazine became grounds for his dismissal from his job at the bank.
In the spring of 1930 he moved to Tokyo and became the secretary general of the Proletarian Writer's Guild of Japan. On May 23 he was arrested on suspicion of giving financial support to the Japan Communist Party, and was temporarily released on June 7. After returning to Tokyo on June 24, he was again arrested and in July, due to Kanikosen he was further indicted on charges of Lèse majesté. In August, he was prosecuted under the Public Order and Police Law of 1900 and was imprisoned in Toyotama Penitentiary. On January 22 1931 he was released on bail. He then secluded himself at the Nanasawa Hot Spring in Kanagawa Prefecture. In October 1931 he became a member of the outlawed Japan Communist Party . In November he visited the mansion of Naoya Shiga in Nara Prefecture. In the spring of 1932 he went underground.
On February 20 1933 he went to a meeting spot in Akasaka to meet with a fellow Communist Party member, who was in reality a spy from the Tokkō police who had infiltrated the party. The Tokkō were lying in wait for him, and although he tried to escape, he was captured and arrested. He was apparently stripped naked in the freezing winter cold, beaten with thick sticks, and then taken to a hospital where he died at 7:45 pm.
Police authorities announced the following day that he had died of a heart attack. However the next day when his family received his body, they saw his whole body was swollen from torture, in particular the lower half of his body was darkish from internal haemorrhaging. No hospital would perform an autopsy for fear of the Tokkō police. His postmortem face was published in the Communist Party newspaper Shimbun Akahata.

Other Version:
n 1953 the film Kanikōsen was released, directed by Sō Yamamura and starring himself, Masayuki Mori and Sumiko Hidaka. It was awarded the best cinematography prize at the 1954 Mainichi Film Concours.
A manga version of the book first appeared in 2006.
A remake of the film Kanikōsen, directed by Hiroyuki Tanaka and starring Ryūhei Matsuda and Hidetoshi Nishijima was completed in 2009.

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Hans Memling's Christ Giving His Blessing (1478) is used as the visual representation of the state-sanctioned deity

The Movie
THX 1138 is a 1971 science fiction film directed by George Lucas, from a screenplay by Lucas and Walter Murch. It depicts a dystopian future in which a high level of control is exerted upon the populace through omnipresent, faceless, android police officers and mandatory, regulated use of special drugs to suppress emotion, including sexual desire.
It was the first feature-length film directed by Lucas, and a more developed, feature-length version of his student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which he made in 1967 while attending the University of Southern California, based on a one and a quarter page treatment of an idea by Matthew Robbins.[citation needed] The film was produced in a joint venture between Warner Brothers and Francis Ford Coppola's then-new production company, American Zoetrope. A novelization by Ben Bova was published in 1971.

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On Strikes
by V.I. Lenin

Written: Written at the end of 1899
Published: First published in 1924 in the magazine Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya, No. 8-9. Published according to a manuscript copied by an unknown hand.

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In recent years, workers’ strikes have become extremely frequent in Russia. There is no longer a single industrial gubernia in which there have not occurred several strikes. And in the big cities strikes never cease. It is understand able, therefore, that class-conscious workers and socialists should more and more frequently concern themselves with the question of the significance of strikes, of methods of conducting them, and of the tasks of socialists participating in them.

We wish to attempt to outline some of our ideas on these questions. In our first article we plan to deal generally with the significance of strikes in the working-class movement; in the second we shall deal with anti-strike laws in Russia; and in the third, with the way strikes were and are conducted in Russia and with the attitude that class-conscious workers should adopt to them.

I

In the first place we must seek an explanation for the outbreak and spread of strikes. Everyone who calls to mind strikes from personal experience, from reports of others, or from the newspapers will see immediately that strikes break out and spread wherever big factories arise and grow in number. It would scarcely be possible to find a single one among the bigger factories employing hundreds (at times even thousands) of workers in which strikes have not occurred. When there were only a few big factories in Russia there were few strikes; but ever since big factories have been multiplying rapidly in both the old industrial districts and in new towns and villages, strikes have become more frequent.

Why is it that large-scale factory production always leads to strikes? It is because capitalism must necessarily lead to a struggle of the workers against the employers, and when production is on a large scale the struggle of necessity takes on the form of strikes.

Let us explain this.

Capitalism is the name given to that social system under which the land, factories, implements, etc., belong to a small number of landed proprietors and capitalists, while the mass of the people possesses no property, or very little property, and is compelled to hire itself out as workers. The landowners and factory owners hire workers and make them produce wares of this or that kind which they sell on the market. The factory owners, furthermore, pay the workers only such a wage as provides a bare subsistence for them and their families, while everything the worker produces over and above this amount goes into the factory owner’s pocket, as his profit. Under capitalist economy, therefore, the people in their mass are the hired workers of others, they do not work for themselves but work for employers for wages. It is understandable that the employers always try to reduce wages; the less they give the workers, the greater their profit. The workers try to get the highest possible wage in order to provide their families with sufficient and whole some food, to live in good homes, and to dress as other people do and not like beggars. A constant struggle is, therefore, going on between employers and workers over wages; the employer is free to hire whatever worker he thinks fit and, therefore, seeks the cheapest. The worker is free to hire himself out to an employer of his choice, so that he seeks the dearest, the one that will pay him the most. Whether the worker works in the country or in town, whether he hires himself out to a landlord, a rich peasant, a contractor, or a factory owner, he always bargains with the employer, fights with him over the wages.

But is it possible for a single worker to wage a struggle by himself? The number of working people is increasing: peasants are being ruined and flee from the countryside to the town or the factory. The landlords and factory owners are introducing machines that rob the workers of their jobs. In the cities there are increasing numbers of unemployed and in the villages there are more and more beggars; those who are hungry drive wages down lower and lower. It becomes impossible for the worker to fight against the employer by himself. If the worker demands good wages or tries not to consent to a wage cut, the employer tells him to get out, that there are plenty of hungry people at the gates who would be glad to work for low wages.

When the people are ruined to such an extent that there is always a large number of unemployed in the towns and villages, when the factory owners amass huge fortunes and the small proprietors are squeezed out by the millionaires, the individual worker becomes absolutely powerless in face of the capitalist. It then becomes possible for the capitalist to crush the worker completely, to drive him to his death at slave labour and, indeed, not him alone, but his wife and children with him. If we take, for instance, those occupations in which the workers have not yet been able to win the protection of the law and in which they cannot offer resistance to the capitalists, we see an inordinately long working day, sometimes as long as 17-19 hours; we see children of 5 or 6 years of age overstraining themselves at work; we see a generation of permanently hungry workers who are gradually dying from starvation. Example: the workers who toil in their own homes for capitalists; besides, any worker can bring to mind a host of other examples! Even under slavery or serfdom there was never any oppression of the working people as terrible as that under capitalism when the workers cannot put up a resistance or cannot win the protection of laws that restrict the arbitrary actions of the employers.

And so, in order to stave off their reduction to such extremities, the workers begin a desperate struggle. As they see that each of them, individually, is completely powerless and that the oppression of capital threatens to crush him, the workers begin to revolt jointly against their employers. Workers’ strikes begin. At first the workers often fail to realise what they are trying to achieve, lacking consciousness of the wherefore of their action; they simply smash the machines and destroy the factories. They merely want to display their wrath to the factory owners; they are trying out their joint strength in order to get out of an unbearable situation, without yet understanding why their position is so hopeless and what they should strive for.

In all countries the wrath of the workers first took the form of isolated revolts—the police and factory owners in Russia call them “mutinies.” In all countries these isolated revolts gave rise to more or less peaceful strikes, on the one hand, and to the all-sided struggle of the working class for its emancipation, on the other.

What significance have strikes (or stoppages) for the struggle of the working class? To answer this question, we must first have a fuller view of strikes. The wages of a worker are determined, as we have seen, by an agreement between the employer and the worker, and if, under these circumstances, the individual worker is completely powerless, it is obvious that workers must fight jointly for their demands, they are compelled to organise strikes either to prevent the employers from reducing wages or to obtain higher wages. It is a fact that in every country with a capitalist system there are strikes of workers. Everywhere, in all the European countries and in America, the workers feel themselves powerless when they are disunited; they can only offer resistance to the employers jointly, either by striking or threatening to strike. As capitalism develops, as big factories are more rapidly opened, as the petty capitalists are more and more ousted by the big capitalists, the more urgent becomes the need for the joint resistance of the workers, because unemployment increases, competition sharpens between the capitalists who strive to produce their wares at the cheapest (to do which they have to pay the workers as little as possible), and the fluctuations of industry become more accentuated and crises[1] more acute. When industry prospers, the factory owners make big profits but do not think of sharing them with the workers; but when a crisis breaks out, the factory owners try to push the losses on to the workers. The necessity for strikes in capitalist society has been recognised to such an extent by everybody in the European countries that the law in those countries does not forbid the organisation of strikes; only in Russia barbarous laws against strikes still remain in force (we shall speak on another occasion of these laws and their application).

However, strikes, which arise out of the very nature of capitalist society, signify the beginning of the working-class struggle against that system of society. When the rich capitalists are confronted by individual, propertyless workers, this signifies the utter enslavement of the workers. But when those propertyless workers unite, the situation changes. There is no wealth that can be of benefit to the capitalists if they cannot find workers willing to apply their labour-power to the instruments and materials belonging to the capitalists and produce new wealth. As long as workers have to deal with capitalists on an individual basis they remain veritable slaves who must work continuously to profit another in order to obtain a crust of bread, who must for ever remain docile and inarticulate hired servants. But when the workers state their demands jointly and refuse to submit to the money-bags, they cease to be slaves, they become human beings, they begin to demand that their labour should not only serve to enrich a handful of idlers, but should also enable those who work to live like human beings. The slaves begin to put forward the demand to become masters, not to work and live as the landlords and capitalists want them to, but as the working people themselves want to. Strikes, therefore, always instil fear into the capitalists, because they begin to undermine their supremacy. “All wheels stand still, if your mighty arm wills it,” a German workers’ song says of the working class. And so it is in reality: the factories, the landlords’ land, the machines, the railways, etc., etc., are all like wheels in a giant machine—the machine that extracts various products, processes them, and delivers them to their destination. The whole of this machine is set in motion by the worker who tills the soil, extracts ores, makes commodities in the factories, builds houses, work shops, and railways. When the workers refuse to work, the entire machine threatens to stop. Every strike reminds the capitalists that it is the workers and not they who are the real masters—the workers who are more and more loudly proclaiming their rights. Every strike reminds the workers that their position is not hopeless, that they are not alone. See what a tremendous effect strikes have both on the strikers themselves and on the workers at neighbouring or nearby factories or at factories in the same industry. In normal, peaceful times the worker does his job without a murmur, does not contradict the employer, and does not discuss his condition. In times of strikes he states his demands in a loud voice, he reminds the employers of all their abuses, he claims his rights, he does not think of himself and his wages alone, he thinks of all his workmates who have downed tools together with him and who stand up for the workers’ cause, fearing no privations. Every strike means many privations for the working people, terrible privations that can be compared only to the calamities of war—hungry families, loss of wages, often arrests, banishment from the towns where they have their homes and their employment. Despite all these sufferings, the workers despise those who desert their fellow workers and make deals with the employers. Despite all these sufferings, brought on by strikes, the workers of neighbouring factories gain renewed courage when they see that their comrades have engaged themselves in struggle. “People who endure so much to bend one single bourgeois will be able to break the power of the whole bourgeoisie,”[3] said one great teacher of socialism, Engels, speaking of the strikes of the English workers. It is often enough for one factory to strike, for strikes to begin immediately in a large number of factories. What a great moral influence strikes have, how they affect workers who see that their comrades have ceased to be slaves and, if only for the time being, have become people on an equal footing with the rich! Every strike brings thoughts of socialism very forcibly to the worker’s mind, thoughts of the struggle of the entire working class for emancipation from the oppression of capital. It has often happened that before a big strike the workers of a certain factory or a certain branch of industry or of a certain town knew hardly anything and scarcely ever thought about socialism; but after the strike, study circles and associations become much more widespread among them and more and wore workers become socialists.

A strike teaches workers to understand what the strength of the employers and what the strength of the workers consists in; it teaches them not to think of their own employer alone and not of their own immediate workmates alone but of all the employers, the whole class of capitalists and the whole class of workers. When a factory owner who has amassed millions from the toil of several generations of workers refuses to grant a modest increase in wages or even tries to reduce wages to a still lower level and, if the workers offer resistance, throws thousands of hungry families out into the street, it becomes quite clear to the workers that the capitalist class as a whole is the enemy of the whole working class and that the workers can depend only on themselves and their united action. It often happens that a factory owner does his best to deceive the workers, to pose as a benefactor, and conceal his exploitation of the workers by some petty sops or lying promises. A strike always demolishes this deception at one blow by showing the workers that their “benefactor” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

A strike, moreover, opens the eyes of the workers to the nature, not only of the capitalists, but of the government and the laws as well. Just as the factory owners try to pose as benefactors of the workers, the government officials and their lackeys try to assure the workers that the tsar and the tsarist government are equally solicitous of both the factory owners and the workers, as justice requires. The worker does not know the laws, he has no contact with government officials, especially with those in the higher posts, and, as a consequence, often believes all this. Then comes a strike. The public prosecutor, the factory inspector, the police, and frequently troops, appear at the factory. The workers learn that they have violated the law: the employers are permitted by law to assemble and openly discuss ways of reducing workers wages, but workers are declared criminals if they come to a joint agreement! Workers are driven out of their homes; the police close the shops from which the workers might obtain food on credit, an effort is made to incite the soldiers against the workers even when the workers conduct themselves quietly and peacefully. Soldiers are even ordered to fire on the workers and when they kill unarmed workers by shooting the fleeing crowd in the back, the tsar himself sends the troops an expression of his gratitude (in this way the tsar thanked the troops who had killed striking workers in Yaroslavl in 1895). It becomes clear to every worker that the tsarist government is his worst enemy, since it defends the capitalists and binds the workers hand and foot. The workers begin to understand that laws are made in the interests of the rich alone; that government officials protect those interests; that the working people are gagged and not allowed to make known their needs; that the working class must win for itself the right to strike, the right to publish workers’ newspapers, the right to participate in a national assembly that enacts laws and supervises their fulfilment. The government itself knows full well that strikes open the eyes of the workers and for this reason it has such a fear of strikes and does everything to stop them as quickly as possible. One German Minister of the Interior, one who was notorious for the persistent persecution of socialists and class-conscious workers, not without reason, stated before the people’s representatives: “Behind every strike lurks the hydra [monster] of revolution.”[4] Every strike strengthens and develops in the workers the understanding that the government is their enemy and that the working class must prepare itself to struggle against the government for the people’s rights.

Strikes, therefore, teach the workers to unite; they show them that they can struggle against the capitalists only when they are united; strikes teach the workers to think of the struggle of the whole working class against the whole class of factory owners and against the arbitrary, police government. This is the reason that socialists call strikes “a school of war,” a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labour, from the yoke of government officials and from the yoke of capital.

“A school of war” is, however, not war itself. When strikes are widespread among the workers, some of the workers (including some socialists) begin to believe that the working class can confine itself to strikes, strike funds, or strike associations alone; that by strikes alone the working class can achieve a considerable improvement in its conditions or even its emancipation. When they see what power there is in a united working class and even in small strikes, some think that the working class has only to organise a general strike throughout the whole country for the workers to get everything they want from the capitalists and the government. This idea was also expressed by the workers of other countries when the working-class movement was in its early stages and the workers were still very inexperienced. It is a mistaken idea. Strikes are one of the ways in which the working class struggles for its emancipation, but they are not the only way; and if the workers do not turn their attention to other means of conducting the struggle, they will slow down the growth and the successes of the working class. It is true that funds are needed to maintain the workers during strikes, if strikes are to be successful. Such workers’ funds (usually funds of workers in separate branches of industry, separate trades or workshops) are maintained in all countries; but here in Russia this is especially difficult, because the police keep track of them, seize the money, and arrest the workers. The workers, of course, are able to hide from the police; naturally, the organisation of such funds is valuable, and we do not want to advise workers against setting them up. But it must not be supposed that workers’ funds, when prohibited by law, will attract large numbers of contributors, and so long as the membership in such organisations is small, workers’ funds will not prove of great use. Furthermore, even in those countries where workers’ unions exist openly and have huge funds at their disposal, the working class can still not confine itself to strikes as a means of struggle. All that is necessary is a hitch in the affairs of industry (a crisis, such as the one that is approaching in Russia today) and the factory owners will even deliberately cause strikes, because it is to their advantage to cease work for a time and to deplete the workers’ funds. The workers, therefore, cannot, under any circumstances, confine themselves to strike actions and strike associations. Secondly, strikes can only be successful where workers are sufficiently class-conscious, where they are able to select an opportune moment for striking, where they know how to put forward their demands, and where they have connections with socialists and are able to procure leaflets and pamphlets through them. There are still very few such workers in Russia, and every effort must be exerted to increase their number in order to make the working-class cause known to the masses of workers and to acquaint them with socialism and the working-class struggle. This is a task that the socialists and class-conscious workers must undertake jointly by organising a socialist working-class party for this purpose. Thirdly, strikes, as we have seen, show the workers that the government is their enemy and that a struggle against the government must be carried on. Actually, it is strikes that have gradually taught the working class of all countries to struggle against the governments for workers’ rights and for the rights of the people as a whole. As we have said, only a socialist workers’ party can carry on this struggle by spreading among the workers a true conception of the government and of the working-class cause. On another occasion we shall discuss specifically how strikes are conducted in Russia and how class-conscious workers should avail themselves of them. Here we must point out that strikes are, as we said above, “a school of war” and not the war itself, that strikes are only one means of struggle, only one aspect of the working-class movement. From individual strikes the workers can and must go over, as indeed they are actually doing in all countries, to a struggle of the entire working class for the emancipation of all who labour. When all class-conscious workers become socialists, i.e., when they strive for this emancipation, when they unite throughout the whole country in order to spread socialism among the workers, in order to teach the workers all the means of struggle against their enemies, when they build up a socialist workers’ party that struggles for the emancipation of the people as a whole from government oppression and for the emancipation of all working people from the yoke of capital—only then will the working class become an integral part of that great movement of the workers of all countries that unites all workers and raises the red banner inscribed with the words: “Workers of all countries, unite!”

Notes

[1] We shall deal elsewhere in greater detail with crises in industry and their significance to the workers. Here we shall merely note that during recent years in Russia industrial affairs have been going well, industry has been “prospering,” but that now (at the end of 1899) there are already clear signs that this “prosperity” will end in a crisis: difficulties in marketing goods, bankruptcies of factory owners, the ruin of petty proprietors, and terrible calamities for the workers (unemployment, reduced wages, etc.). —Lenin

[2] Lenin wrote “On Strikes” for Rabochaya Gazeta when he was in exile (see the “Letter to the Editorial Group,” p. 207 of this volume). Only the first part of the article is in the archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism; it is not known whether the other parts were written.

[3] Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Moscow, 1958, p. 260).

[4] Lenin quotes a statement made by the Prussian Minister of the Interior, von Puttkamer.

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Ulrike Meinhof (October 7,1934 - May 9,1976) mother, writer, journalist, revolutionary, leader, woman


“Objection is when I say: this doesn't suit me. Resistance is when I make sure that what doesn't suit me never happens again.”* Ulrike Meinhof



Ulrike Meinhof ended her turbulent life after 41 years by committing suicide in her prison cell - this was her last act of rebellion. Her personality remains a mystery until today. Unexpectedly, she transformed from a gifted, beautiful woman and a committed peace activist into the co-founder of Germany’s top-terrorist organization, the RAF.
Ulrike Meinhof was a mother, a wife, and a woman suffering from pathological aggression as well as never-ending self-doubt.

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“We [RAF] believe that every human being, in every situation, subjected to every system, in every state, has the task to be a human being and help his fellow human beings to realize humanness.”** Ulrike Meinhof

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Family origin

Ulrike Meinhof was born on October 7th 1934 to Ingeborg and Werner Meinhof in Oldenburg, Northern Germany. Her family on her father’s side was known for producing Protestant theologians. However, Dr. Werner Meinhof himself became a curator of the Jena Municipal Museum. Ingeborg’s side of the family had its roots in Hesse. Ulrike’s maternal grandfather was a cobbler’s son working as a teacher and school inspector before the Nazis prohibited him from doing so in 1933 on the grounds of his Socialist convictions.
The Meinhofs’ were a typical German bourgeois family. The parents with their two daughters, Ulrike and the four-year older Weinke, lived in an ivy-covered house in a middle-class residential area in Jena.

Childhood influences

As the influence of the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) and Hitler expanded in Germany, the family turned away from this domination and changed their affiliation from the Protestant Church, which had fallen in line with the ideologies of the time, to a small parish called the “Hessian Dissent.” It had its origins under Bismarck after the founding of the German Reich, objected to all state control over the church, and was a gathering point for church opposition to the Nazi regime.
Ulrike’s and Weinke’s childhood was overshadowed by the sudden death of their father in 1940. After the death of her husband, Ingeborg received a grant that allowed her to continue her studies in art history that she had discontinued because of her marriage.

Soon, Renate Riemeck – a nineteen year-old, clever, and dynamic history, German and art history student – moved in with the family. Hence, the girls had two mothers.
Both women opposed the Nazis, had loose contact with a resistance group in the Zeiss optical works in Jena, and listened to BBC news during the war, albeit it was strictly prohibited. Meanwhile, they passed their first state examinations.

After the war ended in 1945, Jena was occupied by the Americans who later withdrew in accordance with the Yalta agreement to then leave the area subjected to Soviet rule. As a result, the family immigrated west to Oldenburg where Ingeborg Meinhof and Renate Riemeck took their second state examinations and qualified as teachers. Both had also joined the SPD (Social Democratic Party) in 1945.
The city was overflowing with immigrants from the East and the only school that was willing to take Ulrike was the Roman Catholic School of Our Lady. The legacy of this school to Ulrike was a deep fascination with the Catholic belief during her childhood and youth.

A young woman searching for an identity

The same year Ingeborg Meinhof died of an infection that she had contracted after a cancer operation leaving Ulrike behind as an orphan at the age of 15. Renate Riemeck stayed with the two girls and seemed to have had an enormous influence on Ulrike who copied the only fourteen-year older foster mother. For example, Renate Riemeck wore trousers and had her hair cut short and so did Ulrike. Renate Riemeck published academic books and acquired the status of a professor at the Wilburg Institute of Education. At that time, Ulrike attended the Philippinium in Weiburg, a grammar school with the highest academic standards. She was known as a popular, very intelligent, and charismatic student. Her charm impressed teachers and classmates alike. In her free time, she read many books from classics to modern literature which deeply shaped her opinion and worldview.
On the one hand, Ulrike was a role model middle-class young woman and on the other hand, she cultivated rather atypical interests such as smoking the pipe as well as self-rolled cigarettes and danced boogie-woogie all night long. In contrast to what was expected of a well-behaved girl, she was not afraid to voice her opinion in school on issues concerning unjust treatments of students. She contradicted teachers publicly and passionately, which almost caused her to become expelled from school.
Expressing and living out her political interests was an essential part of her life. Ulrike was not only part of the student government and a member of the Europe movement but she also showed an interest in journalism and worked as a co-editor for her school’s magazine.

Political activism against nuclear armament

At the age of 20, following her graduation from grammar school after the successful completion of the Abitur examinations, Ulrike attended the University of Marburg on a grant from the Study Foundation of the German People (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes). She started studying psychology and education and was involved in a movement of the young Protestants that worked towards incorporating more elements of the Catholic belief into the Protestant liturgy.
In 1957, Ulrike transferred to the University of Münster, where she was later elected spokeswoman of the Socialist German Student’s Union (SDS) that protested by forming an anti-atomic death committee. This topic was very delicate in Germany at the time. On April 12th, the Göttinger Declaration was published in which 18 West German atomic scientists expressed their disagreement with any nuclear armament of the Federal Republic of Germany. The scientist and Nobel Prize Winners were not the only ones that believed Germany could best protect itself and promote stability for the region and the world if it voluntarily abstained from the possession of nuclear arms. Albert Schweizer called for a halt on nuclear arm tests. These concerns sparked the activism of many young people. Trade unionists and intellectuals supported the student movement. Ulrike Meinhof became very active in the anti-nuclear armament movement: as a journalist, she published articles on the nuclear issue in a variety of student newspapers; as an activist, she helped to organize demonstrations, petitions, and a boycott of lectures.

In 1955, Renate Riemeck left the SPD because she did not agree with the rearmament of West Germany which she saw as a step towards the intensification of the Cold War. Renate Riemeck opposed Konrad Adenauer’s plans to obtain nuclear weapons and actively supported the German-Polish reconciliation through the recognition of the disputed Oder-Neisse boarder. Her attitudes conflicted with those of her employer, the Land North Rhine-Westphalia, and she consequently resigned her professorship when she was elected to the committee of the German Peace Union (Deutsche Friedensunion).
According to Stefan Aust, Ulrike Meinhof entered the political arena in May 1958 when she made a speech to 5000 neatly dressed students after a silent march through Münster. Ulrike Meinhof, with her Sophie Scholl style haircut, came across as a self-confident young peace activist and thus, caught the attention of the editorial office of the left-wing student newspaper Konkret that was devoted to the anti-nuclear movement.

In 1958, Ulrike Meinhof joined the banned Communist Party (KPD). However, she had not studied the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin or Luxemburg and was only familiar with the neo-Marxism of the student movement.

Ulrike Meinhof’s childhood experiences nourished her aspiration to become a politically active journalist concerned with achieving social justice.

Konkret

Konkret started off as a left-wing student journal in Hamburg called the Studentenkurier (Student Courier) in the early fifties. Originally funded by donations from publishers and independent politicians, this magazine wrote about culture and politics. It was founded by Klaus Hübotter who was an official of the Communist FDJ (Free German Youth), Klaus Rainer Röhl (later the editor), and Peter Rühmkorf. In 1957, the journal was renamed konkret (German website) to attract a broader readership. In 1958, Röhl met Ulrike Meinhof at a press conference and later traveled with her to East Berlin where they met members of the banned communist party.

In January 1959, Ulrike Meinhof participated in a large student congress against atomic weapons in West Berlin. The congress split the students into two factions, the konkret faction of the SDS, the student body of the SPD (Social Democratic Party) for whom Ulrike Meinhof spoke which believed in the reunification of West and East Germany, and the more moderate SPD faction. Ulrike Meinhof and the SDS finally appealed for negotiations with the DDR (German Democratic Republic) openly questioning the anti-Communist consensus of the time. The West German press strongly criticized the move to the left of the political spectrum and the SPD excluded all people that worked for konkret from the SDS.
Meinhof soon started working for konkret where she published her first column in the fall of 1959 “Peace Makes History” commenting on the end of the Cold War as well as the meeting of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President Eisenhower at Camp David. Her language is full of hope that the desire for peace will guide political actions – that humanity and reason have finally won over the rivalry and arms race of the leading nations.

“…We have reached the turning point; peace is now the decisive factor in political negotiation. The forces of reason and humanity have prevailed in Camp David. Those who weaken them are fighting in a lost cause. Those who strengthen them have the mandate of history and are negotiating on behalf of the future” (Aust 1985, 1998).

In her early work for konkret, Meinhof mainly dealt with social aspects and wrote about discrimination against women, young offenders, and assembly line work. These themes were relatively new in post-war German journalism. During this time, she convincingly participated in TV discussions and played the role of a young female star journalist drifting between two worlds. On the one hand, she was part of the high society living in an old Jugendstil villa in Blankensee furnished with antiques and on the other hand, she sought contact with the people she wrote about spending an increasing amount of time in Berlin with the student movement.

Her diary red: “My relationship with Klaus, my acceptance by the Establishment, my work with the students – three aspects of my life that seem irreconcilable are pulling and tearing at me. Our house, the parties, Kampen, all that is only partly enjoyable, but among other things it’s the basis from which I can be a subversive element. TV appearances, contacts, the attention I get, they’re all part of my career as a journalist and a Socialist…I even find it pleasant, but it doesn’t satisfy my need for warmth, solidarity, belonging to a group. The part I play…corresponds only very partially to my real nature and needs, because it involves me in adopting the attitude of a puppet, forcing me to say things smilingly when to me, to all of us, they are deadly serious – so I say them with a grin, as if masked” (Aust 1985, 1998).

Only a few months later Ulrike Meinhof became editor-in-chief of konkret in January 1960. In 1961, she married Klaus Rainer Röhl, the publisher of konkret.

In 1961, she had published an article “Hitler in you” in which she wrote: “As we ask our parents about Hitler, we shall be asked about Herr Strauss one day” (Aust 1985, 1998).
This resulted in a case of Franz Josef Strauss against Meinhof that Meinhof’s defending counsel, Gustav Heinemann, Minister of the Interior under Adenauer and later President of the Federal Republic of Germany 1969–1974, won. This made her famous overnight.

In 1962, Ulrike Meinhof became pregnant and suffered from severe headaches. Doctors advised her to be operated immediately but she chose to give birth first. After seven months, her twin girls were born via Caesarian section and she had a brain operation. After the operation, she immediately plunged back into work. According to her foster mother, she needed the reassurance of others because she was not very self-confident, a stronger personality to support her, and she mirrored her environment. This description fits very well to Ulrike Meinhof, the terrorist, who followed Baader and subjected herself to his leadership in the group.

In response to President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22nd 1963, she writes: “The grief fades, the emptiness remains. The man the nations of the world believed would make peace is dead” (Aust 1985, 1998). Many people in Germany saw in Kennedy a young dynamic leader who would really change things for the better: the peaceful end of the Cold War, justice for the Third World, and the eradication of poverty and racial bigotry in America. He had won the hearts of the young Germans during his State visit to West Germany and his famous sentence “Ich bin ein Berliner” in his speech to the population of West Berlin on June 26th 1963 made a lasting impression on the Germans.

She continues by pointing out that Germany must find “alternative ways…it must be understood in Germany that our fate is better kept in our own hands than in the hands of any big brother who is himself the playing of the forces beyond his control. It is time for the Federal Republic of Germany to make sovereign use of the sovereignty she gained eight years ago” (Aust 1985, 1998).

At this stage in Meinhof’s career, she does not only hold peace as a key value but she also fully acknowledges the Western nation states and their politics. There is no indication of the Ulrike Meinhof she will become one day, no mention of the autonomous mechanisms of the repressive German society, the interchangeable puppets in an inhumane system, and the police state, full of capitalist pigs. This vocabulary is already prevalent among young, radical, left-wing students, foremost a group affiliated with the SDS that formed around Rudi Duschke.

From protest to resistance*

In 1968, her columns adopted a more extreme tone. Sentences such as, “If one throws a stone, it’s a crime. If thousand stones are thrown, that’s political. If you set fire to a car it’s a crime, if a hundred cars are set on fire that’s political” (Aust 1985, 1998) show her increasing radicalism, her new propensity to violence, and the very disconcerting assumption that a political statement uplifts a crime into something morally justified. To Ulrike Meinhof, a political crime under German law is no longer reprehensible because it is supposed to convey a message thus, a crime to her becomes a political action. However, a crime remains a crime, no matter on what scale and with which intention it is committed.

After the attempt on Rudi Duschke’s life, the leader of the student movement, in April 1968 she wrote: “It is protest if I say this or that does not suit me. It is resistance if I ensure that what does not suit me no longer occurs” (Aust 1985, 1998). With these words, she maybe unconsciously formulates what is changing her life. Her focus slowly but surely drifts from the observant, passive role of the journalist influencing through information to an active role with the desire to directly influence the way things go.

Yet, she is still careful when it comes to violence as political means: “Counter-violence runs the risk of turning to violence where police brutality decides the rules of the game, where helpless rage takes over from cool rationality, where the paramilitary actions of the police encounter a paramilitary reply” (Aust 1985, 1998).

During this time, she increasingly made use of vocabulary that centered on struggle and violence in her column headlines: “Counter- violence”, “The struggle in the Big Cities”, “From Protest to Resistance,” and “Class struggle emergency” (Aust 1985, 1998).

Early 1968, Meinhof divorced Röhl and moved to Berlin where she continued to be active as a journalist and write columns for konkret. She received DM 1500,-- per comment. In April 1969, she quitted working for konkret and wrote an explanatory note to the Frankfurter Rundschau in which she explained, “I am giving up writing for the journal because it is in the process of becoming an instrument of counter-revolution…I am abandoning my fight for the journal in order to avert the danger of our polishing up its leftwing image by continuing to contribute to it, lending it new creditworthiness” (Aust 1985, 1998).

Ulrike Meinhof did not leave it at that. She initiated a meeting to discuss konkret. It was proposed that the editorial offices should be occupied and a group traveled from Berlin to Hamburg to carry out the plan. Röhl already knew about the activity beforehand and abandoned the office. After this failed attempt, Ulrike Meinhof became increasingly isolated.

In short, her increasingly radical ideas predisposed her to become associated with militant left-wing groups.

Ulrike Meinhof – a family of her own

On December 27th in 1961, Ulrike Meinhof married Klaus Rainer Röhl, a communist by conviction and the founder of konkret. She gave birth to twin girls, Regine and Bettina, on September 21, 1962.
In 1968, she divorced Klaus Rainer Röhl and claimed the girls. In 1970, she moved to Berlin. During this time, she became involved with more radical individuals. After she helped Andreas Baader escape from prison, she had to go underground. Her children disappeared the same day after school. The father searched for them via Interpol, but in vain. While Ulrike Meinhof was educated at a Palestinian terrorist camp in Jordan, the group developed the plan to ultimately bring the children to a Palestinian orphanage camp.

To prevent the father from contacting his children, Ulrike Meinhof organized their escape. The twins stayed with a friend in Berlin for a few days until two women drove them south and crossed the boarder into France illegally on foot. Another woman received the children in France and continued towards Italy where they crossed the boarder by driving over a still closed pass street. Sicily was the end of the journey. The women returned to Germany, leaving the children with a girl named Hanna for several weeks during which the children played on the beach, studied their school books, and played hide and seek games. After Hanna returned to Berlin, the girls stayed behind in huts close to Mount Etna where four German Hippies looked after them.
Stefan Aust, the author of the most comprehensive book about the RAF, flew down to Sicily to fly the children home safe before they could be claimed by another member of the group. Although the children had no papers with them, Stefan Aust managed to bring them back to Hamburg to reunite them with their father. The following night, he was warned by a friend that he would be killed by the Baader-Meinhof Gang.

At times, Ulrike Meinhof showed remorse and signs of weakness because she missed her children, but group pressure, a mixture of threats and accusations proved to be successful, and Ulrike Meinhof surrendered to the fact that she could not be a terrorist and a mother. She abandoned her children for what she believed to be a political fight against the imperialistic state seeking justice in the world. The greater plan demands personal sacrifices.

This decision is telling about Ulrike Meinhof’s personality. As much as she was the brain of the group and voice to the outside world, she was weak and submissive on a personal level to Baader and Ensslin. She was nervous and tended to engage in harsh self-criticism.

Nowadays, Regine lives in Berlin secluded from the public eye.
Bettina is a freelancing journalist who lives in Hamburg. She has published several articles on the Baader-Meinhof group and has written a long essay about Ulrike Meinhof and the debate about her brain. “The dignity of the dead Ulrike Meinhof. The madhouse republic? Is the German Terrorism imaginable without the media? Or: The story of Ulrike Meinhof’s medical brain diagnosis that was suppressed for 26 years”


The birth of the Baader-Meinhof Group

On May 14th 1970, Andreas Baader imprisoned for setting fire to two department stores, was allowed to meet the journalist, Ulrike Meinhof, at the German Central Institute for Social Questions (“Deutsches Zentralinstitut für Soziale Fragen”) to write a book together about young offenders. However, during this “meeting” Baader was forcefully liberated, which marks the birth of the Baader-Meinhof Group also known as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and later on as the Red Army Faction (RAF).

After the Baader liberation, Ulrike Meinhof was interviewed by Michèle Ray, a French journalist, whom she gave three reasons for her action:
” First, of course, because Andreas Baader is a cadre and because among those who have now grasped what must be done, and what is right, we can’t afford the luxury of assuming we can dispense with certain individuals. Second, we freed a prisoner as our first action because we believe that the people whom we want to show what politics is all about today are the kind who will have no difficulty in identifying with the freeing of a prisoner themselves…Third, another reason we began by freeing a prisoner was to make it quite clear that we mean business” (Aust 1985, 1998).
When asked about the police, she follows the argumentation “that they are naturally brutal because of their job, beating and shooting people is their job, repression is their job, but then again that is only the uniform, only the job and the man who wears the uniform and does the job may be a perfectly pleasant character at home… This is a problem, and of course we say the cops are swine, we say a man in uniform’s a pig, not a human being, so we must tackle him. I mean we mustn’t talk to him…of course there may be shooting” (Aust 1985, 1998). This Ulrike Meinhof sounds radically different from the young journalist and peace activist. It seems that Ulrike Meinhof has become disillusioned by the influence she had as a journalist and has turned to more radical means to change Germany. Many speculations exist for her unusual development from a prestigious journalist to a revolutionary embracing violence ranging from a fanatic disposition to the hypothesis that her brain had been damaged during an operation.

On the 21st of June 1970, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin (the two most influential members of the RAF fulfilling leadership roles), and Ulrike Meinhof traveled to Jordan along with other members of the RAF where they were educated in guerilla tactics including shooting with Kalaschnikovs, throwing of hand grenades, robbing of banks. The stay in the camp gave rise to many conflicts between the Germans and the Palestinian Fedayin regarding food, living quarters, and the training itself. Baader believed that the training the RAF received in Jordan was irrelevant for the task awaiting them in Germany. Another source of conflict was the conviction of the Germans that anti-imperialistic struggle and sexual liberation go hand in hand.
Ulrike Meinhof was judged by Baader as useless, a comment that she accepted without contradicting him. It was during their stay in Jordan that the RAF forged ties to Abu Hassan, a specialist in guerrilla tactics and a famous fighter for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, PLO, and member of the Fatha. He later became one of the top terrorists worldwide.


The struggle

Back in Berlin, the Baader-Meinhof Group prepared for a secret, underground struggle that would have to be conducted with great efficiency. Ulrike Meinhof contacted people she knew from her days as a journalist. Although not many appreciated the idea of an armed struggle central to the RAF doctrine, she was fairly successful because people empathized with her now that she was classified as a public enemy and searched for by the police.

In contrast to what the name Baader-Meinhof Gang implies, Ulrike Meinhof’s influence in the group was rather weak during this time because she was very insecure when it came to interpersonal relationships within the group even though she was assertive, strong, and convincing in her publications,.

Ulrike Meinhof started to adapt to life in illegality, planning attacks, and coordinating their survival. Numerous banks were robbed to secure the financial basis, cars were stolen (by the famous ‘doubles method’), and flats were rented. The justification for these actions was that they did not harm the little man, only the capitalist. Ulrike Meinhof learned how to break into cars and carried a pistol at all times. She did not prove to be very successful at practical things, she broke off a wheel of the car she tried to steel, she left most of the money in the bank after a robbery, and she wrote wrong addresses on parcels with blank passports and identity card forms, official stamps as well as official papers she had previously stolen.
The group was much smaller than people expected. About 25 people planned the revolutionary overthrow in the Federal Republic of Germany. The members of the RAF thought of themselves as the spark for a mass revolution led by the working class. The group itself was influenced by a new sense of the importance of the ‘primacy of praxis.’ The right to act is justified by its feasibility.

In November 1970, Ulrike Meinhof started to drive through Germany in a VW-bus with Karl-Heinz Ruhland. On the way they visited many friends of Ulrike all of whom later were charged with aiding and abetting a criminal association. The purpose of their journey besides networking and obtaining forged papers was to investigate how to break into an arms depot.

Ex-members of the Baader-Meinhof Group claim that Ulrike Meinhof was the most nervous person with the least stabile stimulus threshold. Apparently, she kept rubbing her fingers together and often made little paper balls, which the police later started looking for in suspicious flats. Moreover, she was the most politicized and was obsessed with overanalyzing every situation by imposing a political line of argumentation that involved the creation of an independent and politically conscious proletariat. Political discussions within the group decreased so that Ulrike Meinhof, who was in charge with finding apartments for the group to stay in, had to rely on discussions with her acquaintances that often offered refuge to the group.

On Christmas 1970, the remaining members of the RAF met in Stuttgart. However, after only living six months underground, more members had been arrested than met that day. On this day a fundamental argument between Baader and Meinhof about the way the group was organized permanently changed their relationship. Ulrike Meinhof argued that the RAF was too unorganized, not precarious enough, and not taking enough time to adequately prepare their actions. According to Baader, all mistakes made in the past had been solely the responsibility of an individual and not of the structure of the group. The rude use of language among group members led to increased social isolation.

The origin of the name Red Army Faction

The Baader-Meinhof Group or Baader-Meinhof Gang had not expressed themselves in writing since the organized interview with the French journalist, Michèle Ray, after Baader’s liberation. In 1971, Horst Mahler wrote a “Statement of Position” while he was imprisoned that was unfavorably looked upon by the rest of the group. In response, Ulrike Meinhof was instructed to produce a manifesto that would present the group to the outside world. As a result, the Urban Guerrilla Concept originated in which the name Red Army Faction was used for the first time. In this document, the well-known logo of an H&K machine pistol with the abbreviation RAF above it and a red star in the background is depicted.

he Urban Guerrilla Concept begins with a Mao quote:
“ If the enemy fights us, that is good, not bad” and further “If the enemy opposes us vigorously, paints is in the blackest colors, and will allows us no good points, that is even better; it shows that not only have we drawn a clear dividing line between ourselves and the enemy, our work has also proved brilliantly successful” (Aust 1985, 1998).
Furthermore, Ulrike Meinhof states that “We do not ‘make reckless use of guns.’ The cop who finds himself in the contradictory situation of being a ‘little man’ and a capitalist lackey, a low wage-earner and a police officer of monopoly capitalism, is not under absolute compulsion to act. We shoot when we are shot. We spare the cop who spares us” (Aust 1985, 1998). This might have been true for the initial phase of the RAF but towards the end of the first generation when more and more members were captured, the others became increasingly tense, bearing arms at all times.
Ulrike Meinhof concludes that “People are right when they claim that all the resources expended on hunting us down are really intended for the whole socialist left in the Federal Republic and West Berlin. The small sums of money we are said to have stolen, the occasional thefts of cars and documents with which we are charged, the attempted murder they are trying to pin on us, are their justification for it all.
Our rulers are afraid to the marrow of their bones…” (Aust 1985, 1998).

Give up, Ulrike

In November 1971, Renate Riemeck tried to reason with her foster daughter. She published a letter in konkret titled “Give up, Ulrike!” (Aust 1985, 1998: The full text is printed in Chapter 2, subsection 31). This letter was a mixture of criticism of the actions of RAF and praise for her past political engagement and benevolent character. Riemeck tried to change Meinhof’s point of view by charming her and reasoning with her. In this letter, she pointed out that she believed Ulrike was “too intelligent and reasonable to confuse anti-authoritarian rebelliousness with the beginning of a broad revolution.” She also wrote that “Germany is not a place for an urban guerrilla movement in the Latin American style” and asked “Who… still understands the political and moral impulse behind your actions? A spirit of sacrifice and the readiness to face death become ends in themselves if one cannot make them understood.” She continues by commenting on the recent deaths of three victims, demanding “You must correct yourselves.” She concludes with an appeal: “I do not know how far your own influence within the group extends how far your friends are amenable to rational considerations. But you should try to measure up the chances of an urban guerrilla movement in the Federal Republic against the social reality of this country. You can do that, Ulrike.”

Ulrike Meinhof’s answer was found in a garbage can three weeks later. It was titled: “A slave mother entreats her child” (Aust 1985, 1998: The full text is printed in Chapter 2, subsection 32). Ulrike Meinhof has rewritten the letter from the point of a slave mother, Renate Riemeck, asking her daughter to deny freedom, turn around and be content with being an obedient, exemplary slave who could become an overseer if she accepted the authorities and her life as a slave. With this sarcastic response, Ulrike Meinhof cut the last bond to her past and consciously decided to dedicate her life to terrorism, ironically believing to be acting on higher moral grounds, fighting for the right thing, even if nobody except the Baader-Meinhof-Group understood this reasoning.

Terrorism and the German response

Meanwhile, the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) appointed a new Chief Commissioner, Horst Herold, who invented a computer program that was able to save data of tens of thousands of suspects. Horst Herold was a main character in fighting the inner-state war, the military and political conflict between the bourgeois and capitalist state, and its radical opponents.
Herold is quoted as saying: “The first question is to decide whether terrorism, in its manifestations in Germany or indeed all over the world, is a product of the brains of its perpetrators, …or whether terrorism is a reflection of certain social situations in the Western and indeed in the Eastern worlds, so that its superstructure only mirrors problems which have an objective existence. In so doing, we would have to consider who… should be primarily engaged in the struggle against terrorism: The police or the politicians…we are concerned with exerting influence on historical causes and effects.” (Aust 1985, 1998) Furthermore, he added that Germany was forced to increasingly think in terms of international law on top of traditional military terms because the RAF tried working together with terrorist groups worldwide to build up a counterweight to the state system. This was a complicated subject matter for Germany because the problem exceeded the national boundaries. It was revealed much later that the Stasi of the GDR was well-informed about the actions of the terrorists, had arrested and questioned many of them, and then helped them re-enter into the Federal Republic of Germany.
Germany reformed the BKA to transform it into German version of the American FBI which required of the Interior Ministers of the Länder to waive some of their power to a centralized institution, thus constructing a new system of communication between the Federal Criminal Investigation Office and the regional police authorities with special anti-terrorist commissions.
A so-called Radicals Edict aimed at preventing the bureaucracy from being invaded, allowed for the rejection of an applicant on the grounds of his political membership profile if it was doubtful whether a person would remain loyal to the principles of free democracy under all circumstances.

The game continues…

While the German state prepared its response to the terrorists, the RAF killed a police officer while robbing another bank in December 1971.

In March 1972, the press reported the alleged death of Ulrike Meinhof but in reality she was in Italy during this time and later returned to Hamburg where she recruited members. The year that followed was hectic: bombings of the US army in Frankfurt and Heidelberg, the police station in Augsburg, the Munich Regional Criminal Investigation Office, the car of the Federal Judge Budenberg, and the Axel Springer building in Hamburg.

Ulrike Meinhof seemed very depressed after the Springer bombings. Many friends told her to stop her terrorist activity but she replied that this was only the beginning of a long struggle.

On June 15th 1972, Meinhof was arrested in a flat where she had hidden. At first, the police officers failed to notice that they had arrested Ulrike Meinhof since she had changed dramatically in appearance – she was much thinner and looked sick. To verify the identity of the woman, she was forcibly anaesthetized and x-rays were taken of her head to look for the silver clamp put in ten years ago during her brain operation.

Imprisonment

From June 16th 1972 until February 9th 1973, Ulrike Meinhof was imprisoned in the ‘dead section’ of Köln-Ossendorf, completely isolated from normal life in prison and from the other RAF members who had been captured in the meantime. She was only allowed to see her family every two weeks for 30 minutes under supervision during her stay in the ‘quiet section’ for eight months.

She summarized her feelings during this time:
“ The feeling that your head is exploding. The feeling that the top of your skull must be going to split and come off. The feeling of your spinal cord being pressed into your brain…The feeling that the cell is moving. You wake up and open your eyes: the cell is moving; in the afternoon, when the sin shines in, it suddenly stops. You can’t shake off that sense of movement… Furious aggression for which there is no outlet. That’s the worst thing. A clear awareness that your chance of survival is nil. Utter failure to communicate that. Visits leave no trace behind them. Half an hour later, you can tell if the visit was today or last week only by mechanically reconstructing it. On the other hand, a bath once a week means a moment’s thawing out, recovery- and that feeling persists for a few hours.
The feeling that time and space interlock” (Aust 1985, 1998; Original Version in German).

It was incredibly hard for Ulrike Meinhof to be alone and acoustically as well as physically isolated. Sometimes she talked to the wardens although that was against RAF policy. It was also a maxim not to provoke, but to defend yourself with all methods.
Once after Ulrike Meinhof had disregarded these rules, she noted: “I hit one of the cop-nuts here over the head with a lavatory brush. The same old crap: I was only thinking of myself – wanted to let of steam in a fight – self criticism: I didn’t think of the consequences, how the cops could use that against the RAF.”

On September 5th 1972, the drama in the Olympic village in Munich resulting in 11 dead Israeli athletes, one German policeman, and five dead terrorists unfolded before the eyes of millions of spectators. This event led Ulrike Meinhof to write a manifesto entitled “The Action of Black September at Munich – Towards the Strategy of the Anti-imperialist Struggle” in which she reflects about the relationship of Germans, Palestinians, and Israelis as a result of World War II. She summarized the manifesto in a letter to Gudrun Ensslin stating that it contained a summary of the common aims of the RAF and Black September: “Material annihilation of imperialist rule. Destruction of the myth of the all-powerful system. The propaganda operation expressed in material attack: the act of liberation in the act of annihilation” (Aust 1985, 1998). She was also deeply impressed by Berthold Brecht’s didactic play The Measure (Die Massnahme) from which she took the line: “How low would you not stoop, to destroy the low?”

Because she had time on her hands and was inspired by Brecht, she rewrote the song “Praise of the Party” as “Song of the RAF” with a subtitle that reads “Praise of the Anti-imperialist Struggle”.

“The RAF is in the can of the masses,
It fights their battle
With classic methods
Strike the fascists where it hurts.”

(As quoted in Aust 1985, 1998)

During this time, she also kept up correspondence with her two daughters.

In September 1972, Ulrike Meinhof was flown to Zweibrücken where she was to take part in an identity parade.

In October 1972, the ten year-old twins came to visit her mother for the first time after they had not seen her in three years. They were allowed to visit once a month for two hours. In December 1973, Ulrike Meinhof suddenly broke off the contact with her children without any explanation. She refused to answer their letters and returned their presents.

Ulrike Meinhof participated in all four hunger strikes that were fought to improve the conditions of imprisonment for the RAF members. But Meinhof, as well as Ensslin and Baader, ate secretly in hierarchical order whereas other RAF members died of hunger.

In February 1974, she received company for a certain number of hours a day because Gudrun Ensslin was transferred into the cell next to Ulrike Meinhof. In April, both women were moved to Stuttgart-Stammheim where they were to reside in the high security wing.
Their rooms were to be double locked at all times, they were allowed to wear their own clothes, to exercise together in the yard for one and a half hours daily, and could be locked up together for a maximum of four hours a day. Baths were granted twice a week and they were barred from all community activities including church service.

On August 27th 1974, Ulrike Meinhof was transferred to Berlin due to her involvement in the liberation of Baader in 1970. Ulrike Meinhof appeared sick and barely perceived the presence of Mahler. She explained the struggle she fought with RAF at her trial as follows: “The anti-imperialistic struggle, if it is to be more than mere chatter, means annihilation, destruction, the shattering of the imperialist power system – political, economic and military” (Aust 1985, 1998). The reaction evoked by Meinhof among the people present at the trial is a feeling of pity more than anything else. Ulrike Meinhof is compared to Joan of Arc, a self-made martyr whose followers merely existed in her head. Meinhof is sentenced to eight years of imprisonment on November 29th 1974.

Back in Stammheim, she was due to begin her work on an essay about the history of the RAF, the preliminary title was to be “On the Anti-Imperialist Struggle.” Her notes show that she put the RAF into the time frame of ‘68 and portrayed the RAF as the rescuer of these ideals, ensuring the continuation of the struggle. Although Gudrun Ensslin reassured Ulrike Meinhof that she was the voice of the RAF, Meinhof was plagued by severe self-doubt that impeded her creativity. She accused herself of not having completely dissolved all bonds to her past in the establishment, of lacking revolutionary power, and of accepting the game of domination and submission, of fear and clinging to the rules.

The Stammheim trial

On October 2nd 1974, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Meinhof, Hoger Meins and Jan-Carl Raspe were officially identified as the five most important members of the RAF and accused of five murders. During the Stammheim trial, 1,000 witnesses and 70 experts would be heard and the files on case ran to 170 amounting to nearly 100,000 pages. The files were internally named “Baader – Meinhof – Complex.”

In November 1974, Günter von Drenkmann, a judge who is not affiliated with the trial is killed by the 2. June Movement.

Whereas the first generation RAF was imprisoned, the second generation tried to liberate them. They stormed the German embassy in Stockholm killing several people. Several RAF groups existed that were ignorant of each other’s existence.

On May 21st 1975, the trial commenced in a building, which had been built next to the Stammheim prison on purpose.

The trial was nerve-racking and protracted over two years. The defendants had to be thrown out of the courtroom many times and some attorneys were expelled. It took weeks until the conditions were such that the personalities could be checked. The Bundestag had revised the Code of Criminal Procedure prior to this trial.

Several recurring themes of the trial included the question of the defending lawyers, the bugging of the Stammheim prison cells, the length of the hearing per day, and the issue of fitness of the defendants to stand trial.

During day 23 of the trial, on August 5th, Ulrike Meinhof commented on terrorism: “Terrorism is the destruction of utilities such as dykes, waterworks, hospitals, power stations. All the targets at which the American bomb attacks in the North Vietnam were systematically aimed from 1965 onwards. The city guerilla movement, on the other hand, carries fear into the machinery of the state…The actions of urban guerillas are never never directed against people. They are always directed against the imperialist machine. The urban guerilla fight the terrorism of the state” (Aust 1985, 1998). This statement expresses the feelings of the first RAF generation only.

On the 39th day of the trial, September 23rd 1975, the findings of three medical experts unanimously reported that the defendants were suffering from weakness, disorders of speech and vision, being underweight, and were able to concentrate only poorly. Ulrike Meinhof was unable to concentrate at all.

Ulrike Meinhof talked about the impossibility of defection in the 41st day of the trial, October 28th 1975. She asked the judge: “How can a prisoner kept in isolation show the authorities…that his conduct has changed?...The prisoner has only one possible way of showing that his conduct has changed and that is betrayal….That means that in a situation when you’re in isolation there are just two alternatives: either...you silence a prisoner…by which I mean he dies, or you get him to talk. And that means confession and betrayal. That is torture, that’s nothing less than torture by isolation, defined by the need to extort confessions, to intimidate the prisoner so as to penalize and confuse him” (Aust 1985, 1998). These remarks express an emotional distance to the group and most likely reflect her own thoughts of her situation. Doubt for the RAF was equal to betrayal.

On January 13th, the defendants claimed ‘political responsibility’ for the bomb attacks, but did not comment on the criminal aspect. To them the motivations for their actions were purely political and thus, they executed political acts.

After four years of imprisonment, the conflicts within the group intensified. The relationships particularly between Ensslin and Meinhof were at their lowest in the spring of 1976. They were brutal, cruel, underhand, and played tricks at each other. Ulrike Meinhof wrote that she could not stand that situation any longer.

Ulrike Meinhof had been officially excluded from the trial for a month from March 19th to April 10th and voluntarily stayed away from then onwards.
Four days after Gudrun Ensslin disassociated herself from the attack on the Axel Springer publishing house, which was a public notice that the solidarity between the group had come to an end, Ulrike Meinhof was found dead in her cell

Ulrike Meinhof commits suicide:

politicization of a private decision

During the night of Saturday, May 8th 1976, the anniversary of the war, Ulrike Meinhof hung herself in her prison cell. She was found the next morning. The post-mortem examination was carried out that afternoon by Professor Rauschke and Professor Mallach at the Stuttgart Citizens’ Hospital. The brain and parts of organs were removed from the body for detailed examination of the tissue at a later stage. The definite conclusion reached that day was suicide by strangulation with no extraneous factors. Another autopsy requested by her sister led to the same conclusion.

The press sparked an intense debate: Was it murder or suicide? Did the German government or justice system kill Ulrike Meinhof? Certainly, the isolation of the prisoners led to this outcome.

In hindsight, it almost seems as if the death of Ulrike Meinhof was used by the extra-parliamentary left to further politicize the German population as well as increase the influence of their ideology and doctrines. According to the RAF theory, Meinhof did not commit suicide but was murdered. Even if she hanged herself, the RAF argued it was the entirety of the hated German state – the judicial system, the police “Bullenschweine,” and the capitalist ruling class – that murdered Ulrike Meinhof. She was the victim of a political show trial that deprived her of other alternatives so that she had to kill herself by default in order to be heard. Months before her death, she had noted on the margin of a paper on strategy “Suicide is the last act of rebellion”(Aust 1985, 1998).

Among others, Otto Schilly, who later became the Federal Minister of the Interior, called for an ‘International Investigatory Commission’ that subjected the official results to another critical evaluation. The commission looked into the findings of the chemical examinations carried out by the Stuttgart Police which at first suggested rape, but plausibly explained that the protein traces could not result from spermatic filaments. Moreover, the length and texture of the toweling rope used by Ulrike Meinhof to hang herself was cause for doubt according to the Commission. In addition, the absence of a farewell note stroke the commission as highly untypical.

Among the extra-parliamentary left, everybody was suspicious: from SPD Chancellor Helmut Schmidt to the wardens. They all were partly to blame for the death because they were moral accomplices and belonged to the corrupt system. Rumors of special agents of the secret service that intruded the cell and murdered her disguising their act as a suicide made the rounds. Many such theories circulated and provoked a heated political debate.

Why did Ulrike Meinhof commit suicide?

The next Sunday would have been mother’s day. Was it Meinhof’s guilty consciousness that plagued her? At this point, she had broken off all contact to her daughters whose letters she returned unopened.
Did Ulrike Meinhof commit suicide as an act of last resistance, the ultimate expression of free will and rebellion? Or was it the last refuge of a completely exhausted, desperate woman who could not bear the isolation in prison anymore and was simply worn out by the many arguments with Ensslin and Baader as well as torn apart by the cruel group pressure. Instead of fighting united against a defined goal, the RAF leadership spent more time fighting against each other in a psychological warfare that was not only cruel and pointless but also self-destructive and counterproductive. It was partly a consequence of living under the strict prison conditions, but also an expression of the emergence of subliminal conflicts that had influenced the group latently since its foundation. They were foremost a result of the interactions of incompatible human beings that were overcoming difficult interpersonal relations. Peter Jürgen Boock who had to decode secret messages between the RAF prisoners remembered having read that the best that Ulrike Meinhof could have done with her miserable life was to kill herself. Group internally nobody doubted her suicide and the extent of the disagreements within the group became clear. The sorrow seemed to be a mere mask to support the murder thesis.

As a result of her suicide, the proceedings against her were at end, however, the trial continued against the defendants Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe.

On May 16th 1976, Ulrike Meinhof was buried on the cemetery of the protestant Holy Trinity church in Mariendorf, West Berlin. Over 4000 supporters followed her coffin, but her daughters had to stay home for security reasons. On the graveside, people remembered Meinhof’s commitment to the anti-atomic bomb campaign, the Vietnam War, her journalistic work that she ultimately regarded as ineffective, and her fate-determining decision to go underground to fight the system. The Berliner publisher, Klaus Wagenbach, attributed her going underground partly due to the external conditions which labeled people as extremists who questioned the status quo.
The theologian, Helmut Grollwitzer, posed the question whether Ulrike Meinhof might have made a different decision if she had had a larger group of supporters to work with towards a more humane society.
One year later on April 7th 1977 when the so-called command Ulrike Meinhof shot down the Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback, the revenge for the supposed murder was completed. A letter claiming responsibility for the deed read: “History will always find a way for such protagonists of the system as Buback. On 7.4.77 the Ulrike Meinhof Commando executed Federal prosecutor General Siegfried Buback…” (Aust 1985, 1998).

Terrorism: a willful act or a mere brain damage?

The morbid fascination of scientists with Ulrike Meinhof’s brain is one of the lesser known details in relation to the RAF. The obscure metamorphosis of the intelligent, gifted, bourgeois girl into a cold-minded killer appalled many people.

Did a brain damage influence Ulrike Meinhof’s development into a terrorist?
The 26-year old Ulrike Meinhof had to undergo surgery because a tumor was suspected in her brain, which turned out to be a benign tumor. Scientists hypothesized that this operation might have affected Ulrike Meinhof’s emotional control center. Was she of sound mind? In retrospective, what effect does this debate have on the history of the RAF? Does brain research dismantle the “I”?

Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide in her prison cell on May 9th 1976, which can be interpreted as the ultimate act of free will or the ultimate act of resistance executed by an extraordinarily woman who strongly believed in a vision and that the means justified the ends.

In November 2002, Bettina Röhl, Meinhof’s daughter, discovered that her mother’s brain was stored in a cardboard box at the University of Tübingen without the family’s permission. The autopsy after Meinhof’s suicide was carried out by the neurologist, Professor Jürgen Pfeiffer, who noticed unusual deformations of Meinhof’s brain. He stated that a causality between the brain operation and a loss of a sense for the reality was more than likely, concluding that Ulrike Meinhof’s brain showed pathological abnormalities which should have led to reduced culpability or acquittal at the trial. In 1974, Ulrike Meinhof was sentenced to eight years in prison assuming that she was fully mentally fit and responsible for her actions.
Pfeiffer corresponded with Renate Riemeck who confirmed that Ulrike Meinhof underwent a profound personality change after the operation resulting in a partial self-estrangement. Bettina Röhl claims that Pfeiffer wrote a report on his findings that was published in 1976 and included the above mentioned thesis with photographic evidence. This report circulated among RAF sympathizers but never reached the mass media. Even the tribunal under Otto Schilly refused to inform the public about the report. Arguably, it would have destroyed not only the legitimatization of the RAF but also the credibility of the entire movement of the extra-parliamentary left if it had become known that a pathologically sick woman was the voice of their movement, the author of many central pieces that laid out the RAF ideological framework, and one of the founding members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
Ulrike Meinhof’s ex-husband, Klaus Rainer Röhl, had hypothesized independently from the findings mentioned above that his ex-wife suffered from the late consequences of her brain operation. As he states in his book “Fünf Finger sind keine Faust” (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974), his wife had undergone changes, she had become cooler, more distanced and sexually unfeeling. During their divorce process, Ulrike Meinhof had devastated their mutual house. According to Klaus R. Röhl, the change in personality is connected with Ulrike Meinhof’s becoming a terrorist.
The medical history of Ulrike Meinhof was published by Dr. Kautsky in 1968, anonymous under the acronym U.R. as story of a successful operation and healing process.
In 1997, Pfeiffer gave the psychiatrist, Bernhard Bogerts, Ulrike Meinhof’s brain and he conducted research on her brain for five years at the University of Magdeburg. He claims that Meinhof had a brain operation in 1962 that may have contributed to her becoming one of Europe’s most feared urban guerillas and terrorists. Her right brain-half, which deals with emotional response, had been injured by the clamping off of a tumor in a brain operation in 1962. The operation led to pathological modifications of her brain possibly resulting in an increased aggression of Meinhof as well as behavioral changes that turned her from an aspiring journalist to becoming the co-founder of the far-leftist RAF terrorist group.
The Spiegel published before long an article on Ulrike Meinhof and her brain diagnosis. The Spiegel editor-in-chief, Stefan Aust, was an important figurehead in deciphering the Baader-Meinhof complex since he had undergone journalism training under Ulrike Meinhof, was present at the violent demonstration against the Axel-Springer publishing house, and was involved in returning her twins to their father.
Bettina Röhl has filed a lawsuit on charges of disturbing the peace of the dead for secretly removing Meinhof’s brain after her death and is seeking to have her brain buried with the rest of her remains in Berlin. Röhl claims that a dead terrorist has a right to be treated fairly and the right to a decent burial. In 2002, the brain of Ulrike Meinhof was buried in Berlin.

While the brain operation might have had a profound influence on Ulrike Meinhof’s behavior, it will always remain an unanswered question in how far external circumstances such as friends and society as well as a longing for adventure and a meaningful life have been decisive factors that influenced her transformation from an aspiring journalist admired by the high society, celebrated as highly sensible and gifted, and valued for her opinions into a woman devoted to the armed urban guerrilla struggle against the capitalist and imperialist German state.

In 2002, just after the daughters of Ulrike Meinhof had finally obtained the permission to burry her brain BBC reported missing the brains of Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe who committed suicide in jail in 1977. The director of the Neurological Research Institute of the University of Tübingen, Richard Meyermann, has no explanation concerning the whereabouts of the brain.


The Janus Face of Ulrike Meinhof

Ulrike Meinhof is much more than a terrorist for the Germans; she is a myth that cannot be forgotten. Audacious journalists referred to her as Joan of Arc, a courageous fighter against injustice, fantasized about a Meinhof-Medea who had abandoned her children, portrayed Ulrike Meinhof as the victim of a promiscuous husband, and glorified her acts of terrorism.


In 1976, just after Meinhof had committed suicide the former Chancellor Gustav Heineman said:
“Whatever she did, however incomprehensible it might have been, she did it for us.”
Up to this day, Ulrike Meinhof remains a much debatable figure. By some, she is referred to as “Ulrike,” she is admired, mocked, and loathed by others. Nevertheless, many people identify with her consciously or subconsciously. Somehow the imagination of a strong Ulrike Meinhof with a machine pistol is fascinating, even more so because many share a mistrust against the state desiring change.

Ulrike Meinhof is seen as the intellectual force of the RAF and the woman that shaped the ideology by utilizing her journalistic experience to present the RAF to society. It has been stressed over and over again that she was a talented student, a young journalist with extraordinary rhetorical skills, and a passion for politics. She is depicted as a political peace activist, a convinced socialist who tirelessly worked towards poverty alleviation and social justice within Germany as well as worldwide. 1968 was the watershed in Meinhof’s life in which she abandoned her life as a star journalist and began to slide into a life illegality. As co-founder of an urban guerilla movement that embraced militant struggle against the imperialist state, she is seen as a heroine who did not hesitate to risk her life to spark the revolution. However, she proved to be much less influential than the name Baader-Meinhof Gang suggests. After nearly four years in prison, she took her life at the age of 41.


Although the RAF had separated itself from the student movement since it embraced the principle of violence as a means to force social change, the members were still children of the time. Hatred against the establishment, admiration for socialist theory were underlying factors of both movements, and so was the importance of fantasy, the belief than can change your behavior.


So why did women, including Meinhof, become terrorists?
Some women, for example Ulrike Meinhof, take part in terrorism when there are few perceived outlets for gender equality. Frustrated with a lack of outlets for their public activism, women turn to the kinds of strategies that many alienated groups have adopted: to fight against mainstream political institutions/states using extreme tactics including terrorism. Ulrike Meinhof became a terrorist because she saw few alternatives for pursuing political justice and had little trust in the German government or other institutions. However, the RAF did not specifically encourage women to become terrorists. Rather, it was the fear of the outbreak of a global atomic war, the desire for long-term peace, and the confrontation with the National Socialist past, the rebellion against the Neo-Nazis, and the hate for the “system/state” that united these young female and male intellectuals causing them to establish the left-wing terrorist group – the RAF. It should be noted, that women in the group were stronger or equally represented as the men.