Ulrike Meinhof

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Ulrike Meinhof as a young journalist (around 1964)

Ulrike Marie Meinhof (born October 7, 1934 in Oldenburg ; † May 9, 1976 in Stuttgart - Stammheim ) was a well-known German journalist and radical leftist who later became a left- wing terrorist .

In the 1950s she was involved in the Fight against Atomic Death Movement , since 1959 as editor of the magazine specifically , since 1965 in the Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO). In 1970 she took part in the liberation of Baader , helped found the Red Army Faction (RAF) and wrote its ideological concept.

She took part in the Red Army Faction's May Offensive in 1972, was arrested in June 1972 and spent the rest of her life in custody, largely isolated from outside contact. In November 1974 she was sentenced to eight years imprisonment for attempted murder during the liberation of Baader. From 1975 she was accused in the Stammheim trial with the other RAF leaders of fourfold murder and 54fold attempted murder. Before the end of the trial she was found hanged in her cell in the Stuttgart- Stammheim correctional facility . Two autopsies excluded outside interference.

Live and act

childhood

Ulrike Meinhof's parents, the art historians Werner Meinhof (1901–1940) and Ingeborg Meinhof (* 1909 as Guthardt, died 1949) married in 1928. From March 1928 Werner Meinhof was a research assistant at the State Museum for Art and Cultural History in Oldenburg . In 1933 he joined the NSDAP and from 1936 headed the Jena City Museum . In 1937 he delivered hundreds of modern works of art to the Nazi regime as " degenerate art ". He died in 1940. His wife Ingeborg took in her friend Renate Riemeck . After her death in 1949, Riemeck was given guardianship for her daughters Ulrike and Wienke Meinhof (1931–2017). From 1946 they lived in Oldenburg again.

There Ulrike Meinhof attended the Catholic Liebfrauenschule in Oldenburg from 1946 to 1952 and for a while the Rudolf Steiner School in Wuppertal . In 1955 she passed her Abitur at the grammar school Philippinum Weilburg , where she founded the school newspaper Spektrum .

Study time

In April 1955 Meinhof began studying psychology , pedagogy and German studies in Marburg . The German National Academic Foundation sponsored it. In the winter semester of 1955 she gave up psychology and German studies and switched to art history and historical studies . She regularly attended the university church, whose pastor Karl Bernhard Ritter had founded the Michaelis Brotherhood in the Berneuchen movement .

Since the summer of 1956 Meinhof read publications by opponents of nuclear weapons ( Robert Jungk , Karl Bechert ), Christian pacifists ( Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster ) and anti-fascist theologians ( Karl Barth , Dietrich Bonhoeffer ). She welcomed the appeal of the Göttingen Eighteen in April 1957, which, however, found little support in Marburg. For the winter semester of 1957 she moved to the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster . There she regularly wrote articles for two Christian student newspapers, in which she justified the resistance to nuclear weapons from the New Testament . Encouraged by Elisabeth Heimpel , in April 1958 she founded a “Student Working Group for a Nuclear Weapons -Free Germany”, which was part of the Fight against Nuclear Death movement . In a leaflet, she called for resistance to nuclear armament analogous to the Nazi era: "We do not want to have to plead guilty to God and man again for ' crimes against humanity '."

On May 20, 1958, Meinhof spoke publicly for the first time at a rally by opponents of nuclear weapons in Münster. From June onwards she helped to prepare an anti-nuclear congress in West Berlin, founded the student magazine Das Argument and continuously reported with Jürgen Seifert on the West German anti-nuclear committees. Their cooperation with concrete organized her friend Reinhard Opitz . He was a member of the KPD, which had been banned since 1956 . Meinhof joined SDS Münster in July . In the main committee of the anti-nuclear initiatives, she ensured that initiatives that were specifically cooperating with were tolerated. In September, they met for the first time the Hamburg concrete -Redakteur Klaus Rainer Röhl . At the end of October she joined the KPD after meeting with West German communists in East Berlin. Her then fiancé Lothar Wallek did not want to marry her anymore.

She wrote articles for the SDS papers david and standpunkt . From November to December 1958 she was a member of the AStA of the University of Münster, but was excluded after she had published an article on neo-fascism in the AStA organ . In argument articles on the Berlin crisis , she advocated the Rapacki plan for a nuclear weapon-free zone in Central Europe and the demilitarization of all of Berlin, rejected the Hallstein doctrine and criticized Konrad Adenauer's government policy as a “resurgence of a militant German megalomania and revenge”.

At the “Student Congress Against Nuclear Armament” on January 3rd and 4th, 1959 in West Berlin, Meinhof managed against the SPD representatives under Helmut Schmidt that the leadership was directly elected and not only SPD members came in. The demand for direct negotiations between the two German states on peace, disarmament and reunification reached a large majority. Meinhof also prepared the Frankfurt “Congress for Democracy - Against Restoration and Militarism” in June 1959. A resolution she wrote called for the abolition of compulsory military service , the exclusion of former Wehrmacht officers from the Bundeswehr , negotiations with the GDR for gradual reunification and the recognition of the Oder-Neisse border as the all-German eastern border. A “ concrete dossier” initiated by the SPD party executive made 13 “key people”, including Meinhof, responsible for a communist infiltration of the SDS.

In July 1959, the concrete employees left SDS Münster. Meinhof attended the seventh World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna and studied, among other things, Friedrich Nietzsche's early writings, Renaissance architecture and the work of Gian Lorenzo Bernini . She wanted to do her doctorate in Hamburg and get into the editorial office of concrete . At the end of August, she studied for a month in Jena for her dissertation on Erhard Weigel . In a report that was not sent to her sister, she praised the level of education of many GDR citizens and criticized the dogmatism of some SED functionaries . In December 1960 she broke off her dissertation in order to devote herself entirely to political work.

Journalist

From October 1959 Meinhof was the only woman to be part of the seven-strong concrete editorial team, responsible for foreign policy, press reviews, visual arts and cover pictures. She turned down the editor-in-chief offered by the KPD leadership in East Berlin out of loyalty to Röhl. It enabled celebrities to make guest contributions (such as Frans Masereel , Thomas Lenk , Erich Kuby , Hans Magnus Enzensberger , Simone de Beauvoir , Pablo Neruda ), criticized the torture of the colonial power France in the Algerian war , supported the Cuban revolution and read works by Mao Zedong . Your first editorial "Peace Makes History" welcomed the previous meeting between the leaders Nikita Sergejewitsch Khrushchev (Soviet Union) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (USA) as the end of the Cold War , which required a different German policy.

In 1960 Meinhof protested with many initiatives against the fact that a CDU minister had revoked Renate Riemeck's examination permit for political reasons. She was committed to the German Peace Union (DFU), sponsored by the SED , which strived for a neutral, nuclear-free Germany as a whole. To do this, she met the GDR politician Albert Norden , shot an election commercial and in March 1961 took over the editor-in-chief of concrete , because Röhl was the campaign manager of the DFU. As a result of the construction of the Berlin Wall (August 13, 1961), the DFU did not receive any seats in the 1961 federal election .

In May 1961 Meinhof wrote in the leading article " Hitler in you": Just as your generation asked about Hitler, they would one day be asked about Franz Josef Strauss . As Federal Minister of Defense, Strauss promoted the armed forces' nuclear weapons and sued Meinhof's sentence without success. The process made them known nationwide. Your defense lawyer Gustav Heinemann resigned as Minister of the Interior in 1950 because of the rearmament .

In December 1961 she married Röhl and moved in with him. With articles against German emergency laws , about the “ New Left ” and calls for the Easter marches, she reached concrete new readers. Because of the newspaper's criticism of militaristic aspects of GDR policy, the KPD leadership finally demanded in June 1962 that the "agitation against the GDR" be stopped and threatened to change the editorial team.

Meinhof gave birth to her twin daughters Regine and Bettina Röhl in September 1962 . In the article "Human dignity", she described the planned emergency legislation as a coup-like departure from the Basic Law . In October, she had an operation on suspected brain tumor, suffered traumatic pain for a week, and could not see her children for three months. Since then, her marriage to Röhl has been in a crisis.

After the fatal assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy in November 1963, she recommended that the federal government break away from its "big brother" USA and pursue independent foreign policy.

In June 1964, demanded KPD representatives Josef Angenfort from the concrete editorial staff to assign the name of the sheet and the content control to leave, otherwise the KPD will cease funding. Meinhof asked him to keep Röhl as editor, to give him the naming rights and to contribute about 80,000 DM in deficit. When Angenfort refused, she and Röhl left the KPD. This left Röhl the naming rights and devices purchased with KPD funds. Meinhof and Röhl continued to run the paper with well-paid private advertisements from West German publishers. From then on she worked as a freelance journalist for specific and some West German broadcasters, but turned down their offers for a permanent position. Her report on the trial of the Holocaust perpetrator Karl Wolff , a radio broadcast on the Warsaw Ghetto , for which she interviewed the Holocaust survivor Marcel Reich-Ranicki , and her contribution “Arbeitsun Accidents” for the NDR magazine Panorama on May 24, 1965 , were particularly recognized . The HR never rejected her choice of subject, because their contributions always thoroughly researched and were thought out conceptually. She had original texts read by professional speakers and combined them with scenes from the game.

After the separation from the KPD, specifically in the course of the "sexual revolution" at the time and for more circulation , it showed cover pictures with naked women. Meinhof's article was published with a passport photo and signature of the author. She was now responsible for her own line and at times also criticized her editorial team. This contributed to the nationwide success of the paper in the emerging APO. After the Spiegel affair , in October 1964 she described Strauss as the “most infamous German politician”. This time, however, he succeeded with his injunction. In 1965 she produced radio reports about " guest workers " and "children in the Federal Republic". Hardly any medium had dealt with these fringe groups before. For the 1965 Bundestag election , she wanted to recommend the DFU again to the specific readers, whereupon Röhl printed election appeals from Günter Grass for the SPD.

In December 1965, Meinhof and about 15 people protested in front of the NDR building against the end of the popular satirical program “ Hello Neighbors ”, accompanied by a large police presence. The NDR canceled its planned report on the Lengede mine disaster of 1963. Your leading article "Wage War" criticized the fact that the Gesamtmetall employers and the then federal government under Ludwig Erhard used xenophobia to lower wages . Since March 1966 she has been active against the Vietnam War and criticized the fact that the German media hardly reported on the Easter march protests against it. In July, the NDR dismissed Joachim Fest for making a critical contribution to the emergency laws; against this, Meinhof organized a protest. Through police interrogations, participants learned that Meinhof's phone calls with friends had been tapped. She has not worked for the NDR since then.

From December, specifically after the Brown Book on war and Nazi criminals in the Federal Republic and Berlin (West), material on the behavior of Federal President Heinrich Lübke during the Nazi era was published by Meinhof from SED representatives Friedrich Karl Kaul and Gerhard Dengler in East Berlin had received.

She commented on the grand coalition formed on December 1, 1966 : The SPD had been working towards entering government since the Godesberg program of 1959. All expectations of the SPD were self-deception. With Röhl and other left-wing intellectuals, she attended festivals organized by the CIA- funded Congress for Cultural Freedom in Hamburg. She discussed with conservative journalists like Peter Coulmas and planned a book on the subject of emancipation and marriage .

APO activist

In the spring of 1967 Meinhof asked the National Council of the GDR for some 1,000 construction workers' helmets as protection for West Berlin demonstrators. The request was examined but not fulfilled. In June she commented on the military coup in Greece of April 21, 1967 : The state of emergency had been carried out in Greece, which the emergency laws would also make possible in the Federal Republic. In this way, a politically successful opposition, which is currently lacking in the Federal Republic, can just as easily be disempowered. So she no longer trusted the parliamentary opposition. In the same issue she wrote an "Open Letter to Farah Diba ", the Shah's wife, on the upcoming Shah's visit in 1967 . In it, she recalled the violent overthrow of the democratically elected Shah's predecessor Mohammad Mossadegh , described illiteracy, poverty and high child mortality rates in Iran , according to Bahman Nirumand , and criticized the West German tabloids. Because the magazine Der Spiegel obtained an injunction against Meinhof's satirical gloss "Spiegel sold to Springer", its "Open Letter" was reprinted in large numbers and distributed to many universities.

Meinhof commented on the shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at the demonstration on June 2, 1967 in West Berlin on a television program: The protests against a police chief (the Shah) had exposed the state as a police state. The rulers had shown themselves ready to "openly terrorize" democrats who were exercising constitutional rights. In a specific column she called for the expropriation of the Axel Springer publishing house because its newspapers had called citizens to vigilante justice against left-wing students and were therefore jointly responsible for Ohnesorg's shooting. From then on she supported the APO as part of the left opposition it had been striving for since the 1950s. She was repelled by the indifference of many Hamburg leftists towards Ohnesorg's shooting. As a result of further affairs Röhls and political differences, she separated from him in October 1967 and filed for divorce. In order to obtain custody of her daughters, she initially stayed in Hamburg. After the divorce in April 1968, she moved with them to West Berlin.

Meinhof met the student leader Rudi Dutschke for the first time in early 1967 and saw him as a political friend. She read works by Herbert Marcuse , Frantz Fanon and other influential authors of the New Left. She participated in the APO's search for effective forms of action against the Vietnam War and the conditions in West Germany, which were experienced as oppressive. She was familiar with the “organizational report” from September 1967, in which Dutschke and Hans-Jürgen Krahl called for an “ urban guerrilla ” to support resistance movements in the Third World . At an SDS meeting in October 1967, she called for more information on the situation of workers and for a stronger connection between student and worker protests.

In February 1968 she induced Peter Weiss not to cancel his contribution to the “ International Vietnam Congress ” of the SDS in the FU . She took part with Giangiacomo Feltrinelli at the congress and the subsequent large-scale demonstration against the Vietnam War and supported the program that was decided there. This demanded a campaign “Smash NATO ”, material aid for the National Front for the liberation of South Vietnam , calls for deserters against US soldiers and sabotage actions against essential infrastructure. Because of these goals and the popularity of the APO, Meinhof believed that positive changes in German society were possible for the first time.

Left-wing students made the Bild newspaper jointly responsible for the attempted murder of Dutschke on April 11, 1968 and wanted to prevent its extradition. Meinhof took part in a car barricade in front of the Springer printing works in Kochstrasse and passed stones forward as projectiles. At a student meeting the following day, she said: Throwing a stone and setting a car on fire is a criminal offense, but throwing a thousand stones and setting fire to hundreds of cars is a political action. With many of them she was charged with property damage and coercion. The police had recorded the gathering and held their statements from April 12 and, more specifically, texts. So she learned that she had been observed for a long time. Because the then concrete employee Stefan Aust confirmed that she had been a reporter on Kochstrasse and had not found a parking space, she was acquitted in 1969.

In May 1968 she advocated limited effective rule violations as legitimate resistance in the specific article “From Protest to Resistance”, but also warned against irrational counter-violence from impotent anger, which will damage the APO: “Protest is when I say this and that fits not me. Resistance is when I see to it that what I don't like no longer happens. Counter-violence, as it was practiced in these Easter days, is not suitable for arousing sympathy, not for drawing frightened liberals to the side of the extra-parliamentary opposition. Counterviolence runs the risk of becoming violence where the brutality of the police determines the law of action, where impotent anger replaces superior rationality, where paramilitary use of the police is answered with paramilitary means. ”In August 1968 Meinhof visited Dutschke in Rome. After troops of the Warsaw Pact forcibly ended the Prague Spring on August 21, she wrote: The critical solidarity of many leftists with the Soviet Union can no longer be continued. The failure of Czech reform communism is also due to a lack of “self-organization of the masses” in “council structures” .

In October 1968 the trial of the perpetrators of the department store arson took place on April 2, 1968 . Gudrun Ensslin admitted her involvement and described the act in court as an error and error. Meinhof asked her about her motives on a visit to prison. In the specific article "Department store arson", she criticized this form of action as "preserving the system" and "counterrevolutionary" because the unintentional endangerment of people cannot be ruled out and the destruction of goods does not attack the consumer world, but rather complies with the profit principle because insurance pays for it. However, she saw a "progressive moment" in the fact that the action had broken the law that protected the owner, not the exploited manufacturer of the goods. She tried to interpret this crime as a failure to observe certain capitalist, misanthropic laws.

According to Jutta Ditfurth , Meinhof paid for the explosives for a sabotage attack in October 1968 on a Portuguese warship from the Blohm + Voss shipyard after she had made sure that no one could be injured. Many leftists approved of the attack, although it did not trigger the desired media reports on German arms exports for colonial rule.

Separation of "concrete"

For years Meinhof had rejected concrete pornographic tendencies and increased circulation at any cost. Since 1968 she tried to strengthen the influence of the APO on the sheet. In the summer of 1968, Röhl surprisingly offered her the editor-in-chief. She was ready to talk, but didn't want to be captured again. Then Röhl allowed a group of authors of the Berlin SDS, even edited articles in concrete to publish. However, he canceled the contract after three issues, among other things because the joint articles were sold too poorly due to the lack of author names. He kept some APO representatives as regular authors without giving them any editorial say.

In January 1969 Meinhof criticized this concept in the article "Columnism". Contrary to its radical left image, the newspaper only satisfies consumer needs according to market laws. The authors are isolated and exposed to deadline pressure and competition, so that they often did insufficient research and turned those concerned into objects. The APO, on the other hand, needs a self-determined newspaper with democratic editorial work. However, Roehl said in the same issue of the professional journalism and the gap in the market specifically in contrast to the course book filled in the APO. At an editorial conference in March 1969, he and the Berlin APO representatives decided on a three-person editor-in-chief, consisting of Röhl, Uwe Nettelbeck and Peter Rühmkorf . Meinhof then submitted an SDS essay on the situation at the universities, which Röhl did not print. She then terminated her collaboration with a press release.

Nettelbeck dismissed Röhl's opponents, including Meinhof's new friend Peter Homann . In one initiated by her discussion evening on May 5, 1969 on concretely decided a subscriber majority, then two days a hamburger actually occupy editorial staff to prevent the delivery of the next issue and urge Röhl to resign. He found out about it beforehand, had the editorial offices vacated and the occupants arrested by the police. Some then caused property damage in Röhl's villa. Röhl presented the action in concrete terms as an attempt to “ synchronize ” with Meinhof and did not print any more columns from her. She lost some friends who interpreted the occupation attempt as a private act of revenge on Röhl. She took legal action against the allegations and saw them as a distraction from the originally intended democratization of the editorial team. It was not until December 1969 that the Berlin SDS declared that it had nothing to do with the occupation.

In the spring of 1969 Meinhof had received a teaching assignment for journalism at the Free University. She developed radio programs with her students; together they planned an independent, anti-authoritarian left newspaper. In November, three newspapers from Springer Verlag attacked their seminars and teaching methods as agitation work by the “red Ulrike”. According to spy reports, CDU MPs had made nine small inquiries about their activities in the Senate by January 1970. This found no evidence of unconstitutional behavior. Because of the belittling and spying on her work, Meinhof did not extend her teaching post. Because the Communist Party of Germany (organizational structure) took over the weekly newspaper Rote Presse Korrespondenz , it could no longer publish any articles there.

Relationship to the women's movement

In 1968 and 1969 Meinhof dealt increasingly with the women's movement . Her article Wrong Consciousness described their successes, illusions and deficits from her point of view: Working women are not yet socially emancipated because, as mothers, they are often more exposed to attacks on mother work etc. In April Hans Magnus Enzensberger invited her to contribute to a course book on the question of women. To this end, she met with the “ Action Council for the Liberation of Women ”. Its founder Helke Sander then believed that Meinhof, as an emancipated working woman, wanted nothing to do with the Action Council. Indeed, she continually tried to balance her political and professional activity with raising her children. She looked unsuccessfully for a suitable shared apartment for collective child rearing. Because her daughters' kindergarten was run in an authoritarian manner, she enrolled them in a private school run by the Queen Luise Foundation . In July 1969 she gave the lecture “The Liberation of Women” in Tübingen, whereupon a women's group was formed. In a film interview, she said that raising children is highly political because it shows how free you are. The family is essential for children as a stable place of relationships. The fact that politically conscious women like her have the same problems privately as all working mothers, however, shows the persistent core of the oppression: the separation of the private from the political.

Home campaign

Since 1965 Meinhof had critically described the upbringing of children and young people in West German child care homes in a number of articles and radio broadcasts . Since 1966, she has called for a ban on all types of violence against children and self-determined learning, similar to anti-authoritarian education .

Since moving to West Berlin, she was planning a film about home girls in which they would play the leading roles. In May 1968 she received an order from the Südwestfunk (SWF) for this and the official permission to research homes in West Berlin. She found a pedagogue who allowed the girls in her home independent learning, going out, smoking, paid work and living together with female partners, and who was very hostile for doing so. In the main nursing home and in the Eichenhof (Tegel) home, some girls told her about their frequent punishment, beatings and exploitation. She achieved the release of 17-year-old Irene Goergens by vouching for her and taking her in. In August, SWF program director Günter Gaus received permission to film in these homes from the Berlin Senate, against resistance from the home managers. Meinhof's script was accepted without reservation.

In December 1969 Meinhof published the radio show "Bunker-Bunker" about her previous home research. At the request of the participating broadcaster Free Berlin , a Berlin senator confirmed the factual content of their broadcast manuscript. In February 1970 filming began for the television film Bambule . The director Eberhard Itzenplitz commissioned by the SWF turned down the actress Barbara Morawiecz wanted by Meinhof . Even the home girls, whom she had already promised the roles, were not allowed to play them themselves. She then withdrew from filming and considered her project to have failed: The film had become a consumer item and was cheating on the girls once more. Only those affected could change their situation; outsiders would have to actively support their self-organization.

The ARD wanted to broadcast the film on May 24, 1970. Intendant Helmut Hammerschmidt , however, deposed him after Meinhof's participation in the liberation of Baader (May 14) despite protests by 122 SWF employees. It wasn't broadcast until 1994.

Baader exemption

On October 31, 1968, Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin and two other department store arsonists were sentenced to three years' imprisonment without parole, but were released in June 1969 pending a revision judgment. Then, as part of the fringe group strategy, they helped young people who had broken out of the Staffelberg youth home ( Biedenkopf ) to find apprenticeships and apartments. Meinhof made friends with them while researching another Hessian youth home. When, on February 4, 1970, after the revision, Baader and Ensslin's petition for clemency was rejected, they went into hiding in West Berlin. Meinhof took her into her apartment for a few weeks.

On April 4, 1970, Baader was arrested on the way to a sale of weapons made by the secret service agent Peter Urbach . He had to reckon with up to 34 months imprisonment and, like Horst Mahler and others, would not have been covered by the impunity law that the SPD / FDP government had announced. The “illegals” in the APO therefore also considered the release of prisoners. Mahler's group wanted to free Baader from imprisonment in order to build an illegal revolutionary group with him and to maintain a pioneering role in the scene. Meinhof decided to participate.

According to Bahman Nirumand , she explained to him at the time: she was determined to “finally end this mendacious bourgeois life and take all the consequences of a consistent struggle on myself.” The waving of social democrats and salon leftists only served to prolong the survival of capitalism . You have to force the state with armed actions to show its true colors. This is the only way to shake people up and prepare a revolution. The chances of success are greater than with left-wing journalism, which only reaches like-minded people and serves as a democratic fig leaf.

Meinhof signed a contract with the publisher Klaus Wagenbach for a book on home education, on which Baader was supposed to contribute. Then she applied to the authorities for permission to research the book with Baader at the German Central Institute for Social Issues . So she used her reputation as an author to get Baader out and scouted the institute's library. On May 14, 1970, she and two other women waited on site until Baader was shown inside. Two armed people joined them and took Baader's guards by surprise. One shot at the library employee Georg Linke who happened to be present and seriously injured him. Meinhof fled with the other four perpetrators out of a window and got into a waiting getaway car. She left her purse, which contained a mortgage letter but no weapon. It is believed that she may have decided to flee after the shooting. The police presented her with a profile that only showed her portrait photo as the main perpetrator wanted for attempted murder. So the investigators assumed her leadership role and agreement with Baader and Ensslin even before the exact results of the investigation.

In June, Der Spiegel published excerpts from a conversation that the French journalist Michèle Ray-Gavras had and recorded with Meinhof. In it she stated that Baader was indispensable for the planned establishment of an armed resistance. Many could identify with his liberation. It shows "that we mean business". In response to the objection that police officers are also human beings, Meinhof pleaded, based on the American Black Panther Party, for calling police officers "pigs" and justified the use of firearms:

“That's a problem and of course we say the cops are pigs. We say the guy in uniform is a pig, he's not a human, and that's how we have to deal with him. That means we don't have to talk to him and it is wrong to talk to these people at all, and of course you can shoot. "

In April 1971 Meinhof wrote in the RAF concept that the recording was not authentic, came from a private discussion and was intended as a mnemonic for an independent article by Ray. The group “tricked” them by passing them on. If they had suspected that a civilian employee would intervene and be shot, then they would have omitted the rescue operation. An unarmed attempt at liberation would have been "suicidal".

Custody battle

On the morning of May 15, 1970 Meinhof had her daughters brought to Bremen to see her friend Lilli Holtkamp. On the same day Röhl applied for provisional custody of them, which he received the following day, and had Interpol searched for them. Meinhof tried through her lawyers to place her daughters with her sister and to keep custody. She told her lawyer Heinrich Hannover that she had not known anything about the plan to free Baader and had only fled because the action had not gone as planned. The judicial error of the murder charge will be cleared up. Röhl and Renate Riemeck insisted that Meinhof's daughters had to live with their father. Meinhof then had her taken to a village in Sicily at the beginning of June. There they lived with a carer in a house with three rooms.

On June 22, 1970 Meinhof, Baader, Ensslin, Mahler and others flew from East Berlin to Damascus and then traveled to a Fatah camp in Jordan to complete several weeks of military training. This led to conflicts in the group. Some got out, including Peter Homann. He informed Stefan Aust about the whereabouts of Meinhof's children and claimed that she wanted to take them to a camp for Palestinian orphans in Jordan. Aust got them from Sicily hours before Meinhof's arrival and brought them to Röhl, where they grew up from September 1970. Although Meinhof ultimately received custody, she could not prevent this. Aust's account that he saved the children from being transported to that Palestinian camp is contested by Meinhof's sister and some Meinhof biographers.

RAF texts

Meinhof co-wrote the appeal to build up the Red Army , which appeared on June 6, 1970 in the left-wing scene magazine Agit 883 and gave its readers the task of making the aims of the group around Baader clear to the exploited sections of the population. Baader's liberation was only the beginning of an "armed resistance" in the Federal Republic that was linked to resistance movements all over the world. The approachable "potentially revolutionary sections of the people" only discipline the fear of the police. You should be informed that the "end of the cop rule" is imminent. In contrast to Meinhof's earlier texts, there was no social analysis of the circumstances under which people become aware of their situation and are ready for social change. The appeal presupposed that a paramilitary avant-garde could and must use armed actions such as the Baader liberation to enlighten the population about their oppression and directly generate revolutionary readiness.

At an RAF meeting on December 24, 1970, two days after the arrest of Karl-Heinz Ruhland , Ali Jansen and Beate Sturm, Meinhof complained about the poor preparation and lack of a political strategy of the RAF's previous actions. She asked for a written concept, which she then wrote herself on behalf of the group: the urban guerrilla concept . In doing so, she responded to criticism from the radical left of the RAF's actions, which were only aimed at self-preservation. The RAF published the text collectively on April 30, 1971. With reference to Marxist authors (especially Mao), he concluded from the collapse of the APO, a right-wing development of the SPD and the lack of West German proletarian mass movement: The West German urban guerrilla must prepare the armed uprising of the masses before the Federal Republic becomes a dictatorship like in Latin America have developed. The RAF thus claimed a leading role in the radical left and ruled out any return to legal anti-capitalist forms of resistance. The RAF saw itself now as a strictly illegal anti-imperialist fighting force in a worldwide resistance against the western operators of the Vietnam War, to which they counted the Federal Republic. Because Meinhof was considered to be the originator of this concept, the law enforcement authorities saw her from then on as "Public Enemy No. 1".

In June 1970 the imprisoned Horst Mahler published his own summary of the RAF ideology ( On the armed struggle in Western Europe ), which the rest of the RAF interpreted as a criticism of the Meinhof text. When the publisher Klaus Wagenbach published Mahler's text in November 1970 to stimulate discussion, the book was immediately banned.

Criminal offenses

As a result of the large-scale manhunt by the police, the roughly 25 members of the RAF at the time largely ceased their contacts with other left-wing radical groups and gave up the initially sought-after combination of illegal and legal political actions. On September 29, 1970, they raided three banks in West Berlin in order to obtain the funds they needed for illegal activities. Meinhof took part in the attack on a savings bank, in which four people, one of them armed, captured 8,100 DM, but overlooked another 97,000 DM available. From October 1970 she helped to break into an ammunition depot and a town hall in West Germany in order to steal weapons and identification forms. After five RAF members, including Horst Mahler, were arrested in West Berlin, the first break-in did not take place. The second had to be repeated because the captured forms were lost in the mail. In November 1970, Meinhof fled a police check and left her forged papers with a newer photo, so that her appearance at the time became public. When visiting friends she was given some alternative quarters, so that the RAF moved to West Germany in December 1970.

On January 15, 1971, unidentified RAF members attacked two savings banks in Kassel. The investigators thought Meinhof was involved. In May 1972 she carried six RAF bomb attacks. Two of them hit the military logistics of the US Army, two other police authorities, one an investigating judge and one the Axel-Springer-Verlag. A total of four people were killed and 74 injured. Which attacks Meinhof was directly involved in and how is unclear. The RAF dropout Karl-Heinz Ruhland later accused her of having committed the attack on a publishing house in Hamburg (May 19; 17 injured, some seriously). On the other hand, the RAF defendant Brigitte Mohnhaupt testified that Meinhof did not know anything about it and only afterwards traveled to Hamburg to meet and criticize the perpetrators of the "June 2nd" command. Ensslin emphasized in the later Stammheim trial that independent sub-groups had carried out the attack without agreement; the RAF leadership rejected him.

Manhunt

Since 1971 Meinhof stayed more often in the Hamburg area, where one of eight subgroups of the RAF was formed. During a major manhunt on July 15, 1971, the police initially reported that Meinhof had been shot "while trying to escape". In fact, 20-year-old Petra Schelm was killed , who, like other members of the Socialist Patients' Collective (SPK), wanted to join Meinhof's subgroup on that day. On October 21, 1971, Meinhof was almost caught at an RAF meeting in Hamburg. Gerhard Müller, who was also tracked down, shot and killed a police officer while trying to escape. Police officers killed Georg von Rauch and Thomas Weisbecker with close-range shots and treated Manfred Grashof , Margrit Schiller and Carmen Roll after they were arrested in such a way that Meinhof also expected killing or inhuman imprisonment. For her protection, RAF members Ralf Reinders and Klaus Jünschke often accompanied her after Weisbecker's death.

From statements by Renate Riemeck and Klaus Rainer Röhl, the BKA commissioner Alfred Klaus created a personality profile of Meinhof, which attributed her to a changed identity and reduced sanity , possibly caused by her brain operation. In November 1971, Riemeck published an open letter to Meinhof in concrete . Under the title “Give up, Ulrike!” She appealed for Meinhof to see the hopelessness of her fight and convey it to her fellow combatants. The RAF plays the role of a “ghost band” that only creates new anti-communism without being able to justify its actions like the Latin American Tupamaros. Riemeck agreed to Alfred Klaus that he was ready to meet Meinhof in East Berlin to persuade her to give up and gave the BKA possible contact persons for Meinhof. According to Stasi files , Riemeck wanted to persuade Meinhof to leave for Cuba , but then refused to meet her.

Meinhof's unsent reply letter was found on December 10, 1971 in a garbage bag. Under the title “A slave mother conjures up her child” she satirized Riemeck's appeal: “I want you to remain a slave - like me. […] Your courage is heartless, because how can we still keep our cowardice hidden from him? ”According to Riemeck, she had to come to terms with the overpowering system of rule and take on the role of a house slave, who at best could become an overseer for other slaves. With a quote from Rom 13.1  LUT she referred to a Protestant spirit of submission in her family.

Meinhof stayed in Italy from December 1971 to March 1972 in order not to have to constantly change locations. That is why the Federal Border Guard temporarily lost its track. To provoke a reaction from the RAF, some German daily newspapers reported that Meinhof had committed suicide or died of a tumor and was secretly cremated under a false name. Unlike Andreas Baader, who publicly contradicted false reports, Meinhof did not respond. Some media misinterpreted their political decision for the RAF as sexual dependence on Baader.

On December 23, 1971, the Bild newspaper had accused the RAF of another bank robbery and police murder without evidence. The writer Heinrich Böll criticized this on January 10, 1972 in his article “ Will Ulrike grace or safe conduct? “As sedition . Because the criminal acts aimed at the system by the few RAF perpetrators could not endanger the Federal Republic, the state reaction was strongly disproportionate. Under these circumstances, Meinhof could not be advised to surrender. In order to guarantee a “fair trial”, the state must offer her “grace or safe conduct” (protection of her life during and after arrest). In contrast to Nazi perpetrators, she has so far only expected "total mercilessness" from the German judiciary. Böll was therefore attacked by many politicians and the media as a “ sympathizer ” of the RAF.

arrest

At night on June 14, 1972, the teacher Fritz Rodewald in Langenhagen near Hanover received a visit from a woman he did not know. She asked him to let two people spend a few days in his apartment the next day. He agreed, but informed the police on the afternoon of June 15 that he feared RAF members would want to live with him. Police officers observed his apartment building and arrested Gerhard Müller and Ulrike Meinhof in the late afternoon when they were visiting Rodewald's apartment. Meinhof was very emaciated and did not look like the mug shot. In their luggage they found weapons, explosives, a canteen bomb and a text with instructions from the imprisoned Gudrun Ensslin.

Meinhof was taken to the police headquarters. She wasn't allowed to call a lawyer. The police promised to brief their lawyers, but did not do so. When she resisted having her fingerprints taken, she was threatened with general anesthesia. The police also used this method, which is life-threatening in the case of resistance, with other remand prisoners of the RAF. Meinhof was forcibly undressed in order to find an abdominal scar (caesarean section). In addition, the chief investigator wanted to have her skull x-rayed to clearly identify her. He received a court order for it. Meinhof was taken to the X-ray unit of an accident clinic at night and did not want to enter it without a lawyer. As a result, four police officers handcuffed her, her head and legs were strapped, and she was blindfolded. According to witnesses, she was physically abused. One of the people present regretted "that we no longer have Hitler ". An official said to her: "We are to people like a person, to pigs like a pig, if it has to be like a wild boar." The power of attorney Heinrich Hannover was rejected by all court instances. He did not find out where she was and was only allowed to visit her after four days, when she had already been moved to Cologne-Ossendorf. He described this delay as an unlawful attempt "to prolong as long as possible the time it was exposed to the perpetrators of state violence without legal assistance and to wear them down through degrading treatment."

The media reported in detail on the “alienating behavior of those captured”, which they often interpreted as delusional and attributed to their brain surgery, and hardly any legal violations in their dealings with her.

Detention

From June 16, 1972 Meinhof was in solitary confinement and strict isolation, until February 1973 initially in the empty psychiatric women's department of the Cologne penal institution . Their imprisonment conditions there were tougher than those of other RAF prisoners and are now classified as inhuman. It was visually and acoustically separated from normal everyday life in the institution. Her cell, including the furniture, was completely white, soundproof, and illuminated by neon lights even at night. She was forbidden to have any contact with other prisoners because she was considered a political agitator and should not cause any disturbance. She was not allowed to take part in group events and only have contact with her lawyers, relatives and prison staff because, like Astrid Proll , who was previously imprisoned there, she was considered particularly dangerous and prone to violence. According to Jutta Ditfurth, Meinhof, unlike other prisoners on remand, was monitored around the clock, woken up several times at night during controls, body inspected daily, was only allowed to bathe once a week and was not allowed to meet anyone on the daily yard. Private visits were accompanied by three to four officers and immediately broken off during discussions about the detention situation. Buying a radio, books, magazines, and participating in debates outside of custody were prohibited; only after months of legal complaints did she receive a radio without FM reception.

In January and February 1973 Meinhof took part in a hunger strike , with which the RAF prisoners wanted to enforce their amalgamation and mobilize the public. The prison doctor, who had warned in November 1972 against their further "strict isolation", saw their limits on February 1st and considered the isolation "no longer justifiable in its current form." On January 31st, however, the conditions were initially tightened : She was banned from smoking and observed at least every ten minutes at night. The institutional psychologist warned that with her "almost complete isolation" from environmental perceptions, psychological damage could not be avoided in the long term. At the request of her lawyer, she wrote down her detention impressions and described the deprivation of all environmental impressions in the “dead wing” as life-threatening “ white torture ”.

The RAF lawyers presented the detention conditions since 1973 as “isolation torture” and “extermination custody” and published Meinhof's undated “Letter from the Dead Wing”. In another letter she described her “Auschwitz fantasies” in the “dead wing” as “realistic”. The RAF thus gained more supporters. On February 9, when the RAF lawyers started a four-day solidarity hunger strike before the BGH, Meinhof was transferred to the male psychiatry. There she heard noises, but was still not allowed to contact fellow prisoners. Attempts by the institutional psychologist to lift this ban were strictly rejected by the Attorney General. From March 5, she was allowed to talk to a non-RAF member selected by the prison administration on her daily courtyard walk. From April, however, she turned down this offer because she was afraid that the "bystanders" would take advantage of her need for contact to spy on her.

In June 1973, Meinhof's lawyer Ulrich K. Preuß filed a criminal complaint against the head of the institution and the state minister of justice, Diether Posser . In it he described the detention conditions as a deliberate "violent attack on the personal identity" of his client. The monotonously white, bare, soundproof, permanently illuminated cell, which is constantly hypothermic in winter, should kill all sensory stimuli. At first the window could not be opened at all, later only a crack. Meinhof was only allowed to receive a visit from relatives for a maximum of 30 minutes every 14 days. Against the accusation of torture, the prison director emphasized in August 1973: Like all cells, Meinhof's cell was painted white for reasons of hygiene and, due to the low level of occupancy in its department, was silent. The fly screen in front of the window was supposed to prevent contact and transfer of objects. Meinhof was allowed to hang up small pictures, had contact with prison staff during daily outdoor activities and food distribution, one lawyer visit lasting several hours per week, a total of 22 30- to 70-minute private visits, regular doctor visits, received several daily newspapers and magazines and received radio. Left-wing magazines, which the judiciary viewed as a threat to the institutional rules, were withheld from it.

Since January 1973 the Attorney General had planned to send Meinhof to a psychiatric institution for an opinion on her mental state. When she found out, she tried to prevent the forced detention by legal means. In May, she threw the psychiatrist Hermann Witter out of her cell, who wanted to examine her sanity on behalf of the BGH. The reason was a "personality break" that had allegedly occurred since her brain operation in 1962. During the RAF's second hunger strike (May 8 to July 7, 1973) Witter visited her again, again unsuccessfully. Then he wanted to have Meinhof examined for a brain tumor with a risky scintigraphy and possibly carry out a forced intervention with the neurosurgeon Friedrich Loew in order to correct suspected psychological changes. 30 university doctors stated that this would be against the constitution if there was no acute health risk. On July 13, 1973, the BGH nevertheless allowed the intervention. Many celebrities now took part in the protests. On August 27, 1973, Der Spiegel recalled a Meinhof medical file that had been accessible since 1968. After that, no after-effects of the 1962 operation were found and she was in full health. On the same day, Witter stated that due to the findings now known, a scintigraphy was unsuitable for detecting psychological changes. In an interview he continued to portray the intervention as harmless and exaggerated by RAF supporters, because Meinhof's insanity "would be fatal for the chief ideologist and her gang". Meinhof's June criminal complaint against assault in office was dismissed in February 1974.

In July 1974 the Office for the Protection of the Constitution drew up a secret report with intercepted correspondence between Meinhof and her lawyers. In it, she is said to have demanded that celebrities be persuaded of the state's intention to torture and that public opinion on the circumstances of their detention should be rhetorically influenced with certain terms. This should prove that she had systematically engineered and directed the campaign against "isolation torture" from prison.

Statements on repentance of guilt, Israel, Jews

In the spring of 1965 condemned Meinhof in concrete terms the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 as "barbarism and inhumanity". The “ anti-Hitler coalition degenerated into what it was fighting”. Meinhof portrayed the German people as a victim who "had themselves been betrayed" without mentioning victims of National Socialism in this context. She put the number of those killed in the air raids at 200,000 and referred to a book by the later Holocaust denier David Irving . The anti-Semitism researcher Samuel Salzborn judged that this text made the “ historical revisionist perception of Dresden” extremely popular in Germany.

In July 1967, after the Six Day War , Meinhof affirmed the left's solidarity with Israel and all those who were racially persecuted. To question Israel's existence would hit the persecuted again. As with Poland, reconciliation is to be sought with Israel. On the other hand, petroleum interests are behind the solidarity of the USA with Israel. She criticized the German media, which celebrated the Six Day War with Nazi expressions as " Blitzkrieg ": "... not the insight into one's own crimes, but the Israeli Blitzkrieg, the solidarity with the brutality, the expulsion, the conquest led to questionable reconciliation." The left should not allow itself to be absorbed by this. It must honor the legitimate interests of the Arabs, but demand that they renounce Palestine and coexist with Israel. The threat to destroy Israel remains intolerable. Left solidarity even includes Moshe Dayan , "if he is to be murdered." His politics and right-wing radicalism exclude them. Anyone who wants peace for Israel must allow criticism of Israel's policies and demands to withdraw to its pre-war borders. Israel must decide for itself whether it wants to live or to win. Meinhof defended Israel's right to self-determination and existence against other leftists . So she was isolated in the concrete editorial team. In the following edition, Röhl described the founding of Israel ahistorically as the occupation of a foreign country; the Six Day War endangers Israel's “right to life”.

In November 1972, in her isolated detention situation, Meinhof wrote a text on the hostage-taking of Munich on September 5, 1972, which the lawyers published as an RAF declaration without prior agreement. In it she praised the hostage-taking as an exemplary revolutionary act full of "sensitivity to historical and political contexts". You have "carried back" a mass murder of Palestinians to the country that caused it historically, namely persecuted the Jews and forced them to emigrate. The German authorities had deliberately carried out a massacre similar to "Moshe Dayan fascism - this Himmler of Israel". Israel burned "its athletes like the Nazis burned the Jews - fuel for the imperialist extermination policy". The hostages were ready to be flown out with the perpetrators. But the authorities have deceived and sacrificed them.

Equating Dayan with the main Nazi perpetrator Heinrich Himmler and Israel's Palestine policy with extermination and fascism are anti-Semitic statements. In contrast to 1967, according to the historian Volker Weiß , Meinhof no longer criticized Israel's Palestinian policy in solidarity in memory of the Shoah, but equated it with the Shoah and identified himself uncritically with the Palestinians' struggle for liberation and this with international liberation from imperialism. Veit Medick (taz) calls these statements "pogrom rhetoric", which only reflects the anti-Zionism of the left that was common at the time . Jutta Ditfurth also criticizes those statements as "anti-Semitic failures" with which Meinhof seems to have forgotten her earlier solidarity with Israel. After Ensslin's criticism of the text, she called it "bleak" and never wrote anything like it again.

In December 1972 Meinhof said at the trial of Horst Mahler: “Auschwitz means that six million Jews were murdered and carted to the rubbish dump in Europe as what they were supposed to be - as money Jews. Anti-Semitism was essentially anti-capitalist. With the extermination of six million Jews, the Germans' longing for freedom from money and exploitation was also murdered ... Without us acquitting the German people from fascism - because the people really did not know what was going on in the concentration camps we don't mobilize it for our revolutionary struggle. ”For the political scientist Anton Pelinka , this“ amazing presumption ”explains the RAF's collaboration with forces in the Middle East who wanted to destroy Israel. He sees this as a smooth transition from left to right extremism.

Legal proceedings

In January 1974, the federal prosecutor charged Baader, Ensslin, Meinhof, Meins and Raspe with the murder of four and attempted murder of 54 people, robbery, bomb attacks and the founding of a criminal organization before the Stuttgart Higher Regional Court . In February, the Attorney General confiscated correspondence with lawyers, private letters and other texts from Meinhof's cell. One of her lawyers was arrested and charged with supporting the RAF. She turned down the GDR lawyer Friedrich Karl Kaul as an additional defense lawyer because he did not see her as a Marxist. In March, the indictment against her was supplemented: She wrote all RAF writings to a large extent so that all crimes of the RAF were ideologically justified, co-planned and supported and was thus an accomplice in all murders and attempted murders of the RAF, even if she was not directly involved.

On April 28, 1974 Meinhof and Ensslin were relocated to the newly built prison in Stuttgart-Stammheim. Their neighboring cells were isolated from the rest. They were allowed to spend four hours together in a concrete cage on the roof of the building every day. This “enclosure” was deleted after Meinhof hit a guard impulsively on the head with a toilet brush on July 30th. On August 27, she was relocated to West Berlin without prior notice for the trial for the liberation of Baader. At the beginning of September 10th, she declared that the RAF rejected this process as psychological warfare. Baader's liberation was indispensable for building up the RAF. She called for a third hunger strike against the "extermination detention". In addition, she called on the "Red Aid" committees that had been created in the meantime to conduct solidarity campaigns with Amnesty International , Young Socialists , the Pen Club and other groups via smuggled out info texts . In doing so, she reaffirmed the RAF's claim to leadership.

Holger Meins died on November 9, 1974 as a result of a hunger strike, force-feeding and a lack of medical supervision. From November 6th, Meinhof was force-fed in Moabit. Her lawyer, Hans-Christian Ströbele , decided not to question any further witnesses in order not to prolong her isolated detention situation. Although none of nine witnesses confirmed the "illicit possession" charge, she was sentenced on November 29 to eight years' imprisonment for joint attempted murder and prison release. She was prepared to ruthlessly use firearms, complicit in the shots at Georg Linke and used them "systematically" to escape with Baader. Later "words of regret" did nothing to change that. On December 2, she was transferred back to Stammheim. In October 1975 the BGH rejected its appeal against the judgment.

Former Federal President Gustav Heinemann asked Meinhof and the RAF in a private letter on December 11, 1974 to end the hunger strike in order to save their lives. The occasion was omitted because the detention conditions have already largely been changed and further simplifications are being examined. If the strike is intended to result in incapacity to stand trial, criminal procedural law could be tightened (this happened nine days later). The strike will fail to achieve the desired political effects and make positive reforms of the criminal law more difficult. Meinhof replied: The aim of the strike was to end the isolation of all RAF prisoners. If that happens, it will be stopped immediately. The RAF will not come to terms with anything less after the force-feeding and "execution" of Holger Meins, which was partly carried out as torture. She invited Heinemann to visit her and Baader for 15 minutes each to find out about their detention situation. He refused.

When four RAF prisoners were allowed to have contact with one another in pairs in Stammheim, they ended their hunger strike on February 5, 1975. The Stammheim trial began on May 21st . Based on the amended Code of Criminal Procedure, four lawyers of trust were excluded as alleged accomplices of the RAF, two of them were later arrested and their files were confiscated. The others were banned from collective defense. Public defense attorneys appointed by the court regarded the defendants as assistants in the prosecution and refused to cooperate with them. They were initially declared fit to negotiate without, then despite medical reports to the contrary. When appraisers commissioned by the court classified the detention conditions as “extreme” and hazardous to health, and demanded a break in the proceedings for several months and merging into larger groups, Judge Theodor Prinzing forbade the reading and publication of the reports and excluded the accused from the trial because of self-inflicted inability to stand trial. The BGH rejected the complaint and claimed without evidence that they had planned the kidnapping of Peter Lorenz (February 27, 1975) and the hostage-taking of Stockholm (April 25) from prison, had wanted to be released or agitated other prisoners. From October 28, Prinzing allowed them to participate in the proceedings again as long as they felt they were able to do so. Meinhof stated on the BGH decision that they could not endanger the institutional regulations because of the years of non-contact. The isolation leaves only the choice between dying or confessing, that is, betrayal of the RAF. On November 7th, one of her attorneys was released and another was lost. Her two new lawyers were disfellowshipped after their first appearance in court. In January 1976 the Federal Constitutional Court confirmed the expulsion of the accused as lawful, so that they could no longer legally challenge their detention situation. While the court opposed any allegation that the process was politically motivated, MPs who had supported the special laws ("Lex RAF") admitted political reasons. Meinhof, but also trial observers like Gerhard Mauz , repeatedly highlighted this contradiction.

On January 13 and 14, 1976, the defendants declared the origins and aims of the RAF, assumed political responsibility for the attacks without giving any details, and justified them as counter-violence against imperialism and the Vietnam War. After an initial rejection, Meinhof agreed to the proposal of her new lawyer, Axel Azzola , to apply for prisoner of war status for her on the basis of international law . She did not expect the application to be successful or a reduction in her sentence, but she did expect a chance to publicly explain her political motives and prepared herself intensively by reading other cases. Without Meinhof's knowledge, Azolla Prinzing asked for relief from her detention at the end of April 1976 because he feared for her life. Prinzing refused. From March 10 to April 10, she was again excluded from the trial. On May 4, 1976, she appeared in court for the last 15 minutes to request the summons of prominent politicians such as Richard Nixon and Willy Brandt , who were supposed to testify to the Federal Republic's participation in the Vietnam War. After she left the courtroom, Ensslin testified: The RAF was politically responsible for attacks like the one on the Springer high-rise. But other RAF groups carried out these autonomously, "whose conception we do not agree with and which we have rejected in its process."

death

On May 9, 1976, judicial officers found Ulrike Meinhof hanging on the window grille of her cell with a rope knotted from strips of towel around her neck. Your lawyers were not allowed to accompany the forensic investigation. Forensic doctors Joachim Rauschke and Hans Joachim Mallach autopsied the corpse and found strangulation as the cause of death without outside interference. Werner Janssen autopsied the deceased again on May 10th on behalf of her sister and confirmed that Meinhof had died by hanging: "According to the examination findings available so far, there is no evidence of outside influence." The findings of the first autopsy were not presented to him.

Even before the autopsy, the public prosecutor told the media that suicide was the cause of death and that Meinhof was ostracized by fellow prisoners as the motive. The defense attorneys questioned the suicide on May 10 because of the lack of a suicide note and unsuccessfully demanded a break in the process. For the first time, a public defender agreed to this request. Ensslin testified that she and Meinhof had discussed further steps in defense the day before her death. At night she heard music from Meinhof's cell.

Meinhof's cell was renovated on May 12, 1976. On June 10, the investigation into Meinhof's death was closed. On the initiative of Otto Schily , an international commission of inquiry was set up in August 1976 to support the murder thesis and to consist of opponents of the Federal Republic of Germany. She checked the autopsy and investigation reports, found contradictions in them (especially about the length of the rope) and concluded from them in 1978 that Meinhof's suicide had not been proven. It is possible that she was strangled and then hung. Press reports from 1977 about a second stairwell with a door next to Meinhof's cell and that the Office for the Protection of the Constitution had secretly bugged and wiretapped five to seven cells fueled the doubts.

German media criticized the murder thesis as a misinterpretation of the autopsy findings. As evidence of a motive for suicide, they cited Ensslin's attacks on Meinhof in info letters that prosecutors had launched to the press. Lorenz Jäger (FAZ) interpreted Meinhof's statement of October 28, 1975, which he erroneously dated March 1976, as a “cry for help” and a hidden departure from the RAF. Stefan Aust interpreted Ensslin's statement of May 4, 1976 as distancing himself from Meinhof and as a motive for suicide. Mario Krebs, on the other hand, interpreted this statement as a discharge, because Irmgard Möller confirmed it in the process a few weeks after Meinhof's death: Meinhof had not proposed and carried out the attack on the Springer building, but only went to Hamburg afterwards to criticize the perpetrators to discuss this attack. According to Jutta Ditfurth, Ensslin and Meinhof had settled their dispute two months before Meinhof's death at the latest.

The news of his death led to numerous, sometimes violent, demonstrations inside and outside the Federal Republic and to attacks on German facilities in other countries. On April 7, 1977, the RAF's Ulrike Meinhof command shot the Federal Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback and his companions.

Ulrike Meinhof's grave

Since many congregations in Germany refused to provide a grave site and only the congregation of Trinity Cemetery III in Berlin-Mariendorf agreed to be buried, Ulrike Meinhof was buried there on May 15, 1976. About 4,000 people demonstrated at the funeral. The Protestant theologian Helmut Gollwitzer , who was friends with Rudi Dutschke and the pastor of Ulrike Meinhof, gave the funeral speech. The publisher Klaus Wagenbach said that she perished because of the “German conditions”. The burial site is in field 3A-12-19. The grave is in the area of ​​the cemetery that is to be closed.

During the first autopsy, the neurologist Jürgen Peiffer removed Meinhof's brain. In autumn 2002 Meinhof's daughter Bettina Röhl learned that the brain had not been buried. Instead, it had been stored in formalin for decades and examined again in the Magdeburg Psychiatric University Clinic after the fall of the Wall . The first autopsy in 1976 found damage to the amygdala . This was based on an unsuccessful removal of a benign tumor from 1962. The autopsy results, which were unpublished at the time, indicated that Meinhof was probably less responsible for the brain damage. The professors from Magdeburg came to a similar conclusion in their investigations. An ethics committee then forbade them to continue researching the brain or to publish their previous research. The Stuttgart public prosecutor arranged for a cremation and handed over the urn vessel to the relatives. On December 22, 2002, an urn burial took place in the Trinity Cemetery.

reception

In secondary literature

Ulrike Meinhof became, according to the journalist Gerd Koenen , “the icon and martyr figure of the left par excellence, and especially the 'undogmatic'.” In 1985, the journalist Stefan Aust presented Der Baader-Meinhof-Complex, an influential depiction of her life, which was the basis for 2008 for the film of the same name . Aust's portrayal is criticized for demonizing Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin in order to rehabilitate or legitimize Meinhof. Last but not least , the publicist Jutta Ditfurth set herself apart from the “ myth ” that Aust had built with her Meinhof biography (2007). Conversely, Ditfurth was accused of portraying Meinhof too positively. In the same year the political scientist Kristin Wesemann published "a political biography" in which she criticized Meinhof's communist ideals above all. The British German scholar Sarah Colvin referred in her publications primarily to Meinhof's language, which had a decisive influence on the language of the RAF and thus also on their actions and which she criticized both as a criticism of the language of the radical left and as a criticism interpreted in the masculine economy of knowledge.

Colvin also pointed out that Meinhof's life was surrounded by myths and legends . On the one hand, she identifies the motif of the “ angel ”, which is already mentioned in Meinhof's foster mother Renate Riemeck's autobiography Ich bin ein Mensch für mich (1992) . Riemeck had previously provided other authors with material and memories about Meinhof's childhood. Also Meinhof's husband Klaus Rainer Röhl in his autobiography describes five fingers are not Faust (1974) in an anecdote of how the student Ulrike Meinhof a teacher contrary. This anecdote is used both by Mario Krebs in his biography Ulrike Meinhof. A life in contradiction (1988) as well as quoted by Aust in the Baader-Meinhof complex . The theologian Helmut Thielicke described the break in Meinhof's life as a " Luciferian crash". These motifs were linked by Alois Prinz in his biography Lieber angry than sad (2003), which received the 2004 German Youth Literature Prize in the non-fiction category. Prince characterizes Meinhof as a fallen angel .

A saying by former Federal President Gustav Heinemann is often quoted . Helmut Gollwitzer had thus initiated the imprint of his mourning address on Ulrike Meinhof, according to which Heinemann, already terminally ill, whispered to the news of Ulrike Meinhof's death: "She is now in God's gracious hand - and with everything she has done, it is so incomprehensible was for us, she meant us. ”This quote is interpreted differently. According to the journalist Reinhard Mohr , Heinemann expressed “the diffuse hagiographic consensus in Protestant clarity”. After Meinhof's death, Heinemann had "found conciliatory words from the state" for the author Willi Winkler . Heinemann, according to the interpretation of the political scientist Kristin Wesemann, unlike Gollwitzer, Kurt Scharf , Heinrich Böll and Jean-Paul Sartre, no longer tried to understand Meinhof, but wanted to prevent further deaths. As a devout Christian, he always saw Meinhof as a person and admitted that her deeds did not follow the pure joy of doing, but had an intention. Who he meant by "us" he left open.

A memory by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his memoir Mein Leben (1999/2001) caused a stir . He reported on a conversation that Meinhof had with him in 1964 after appearing as a witness in the trial of Karl Wolff about the living conditions in the Warsaw ghetto . Reich-Ranicki was amazed at her interest and remarked that she had "tears in her eyes" at the end of the conversation. He therefore wonders whether it is "conceivable that there is a connection between their burning interest in the German past and the path that has led them to terror and crime." In 2004 this encounter became the subject of public interest, because Bettina Röhl told Reich-Ranicki that her mother had sought contact with him on behalf of the KPD in order to be able to publicly expose him as a collaborator if necessary. Meinhof's motivation was questioned in the newspapers Die Welt and Frankfurter Rundschau , and Reich-Ranicki himself did not want to revise his perception of Meinhof. According to Colvin, the biographies of other terrorists such as Baader, Ensslin or Inge Viett were not linked to German history in the same way as the Meinhofs.

To describe the adult Ulrike Meinhof, according to Colvin, comparisons with militant and martyr-like female figures were sought. Peter Rühmkorf ("a holy Joan"), Joachim Fest ("the Joan of Arc of the Left") and again Klaus Röhl compared Meinhof with Joan of Arc . Reinhard Baumgart , Timon Koulmassis and Erich Fried were reminded of Rosa Luxemburg by her . In her play Ulrike Maria Stuart, Elfriede Jelinek superimposed Meinhof's biography with Maria Stuart's biography . Further comparisons associated Meinhof with Sophie Scholl (Röhl and Aust) or referred to her as "recorder girl" ( Reinhard Opitz , Mario Krebs, Uwe Backes ) and emphasized her seriousness and integrity ("the serious girl", Aust; "intellectual honesty incarnate") , Röhl) Heinrich Böll gave Meinhof the prospect of " getting into the boiling pot of demagogy as the classic red witch ". Colvin points out that violent or criminal women are generally viewed as active and libidinal and thus perceived as male. Conversely, it was crucial to defend Meinhof to emphasize her femininity, such as her motherhood or her rejection of weapons, as Klaus Röhl, Aust and Alois Prinz in particular did. The report by her daughter Regine Röhl, for example, that her mother had carried weapons, had been forgotten.

Fiction, art

  • The life story of Ulrike Meinhof is the subject of Johann Kresnik 's play of the same name, which premiered in 1990 in the Bremen theater. In the 2005/2006 season it was part of the Bonn Opera program.
  • The play Ulrike Maria Stuart by Elfriede Jelinek was performed in 2006 at the Hamburg Thalia Theater .
  • The play La extraordinaria muerte de Ulrike M. by Carlos Be .
  • The play Ulrike. Moon time - neon time by Helma Sanders-Brahms
  • The play Leviathan by Dea Loher describes Ulrike Meinhof's decision-making situation - almost unrecognizable under her middle name "Marie" - whether she should stay underground for Baader after the liberation campaign or return to normal.
  • The scenic text collage Resistance / Failure by Roswitha Kämper
  • In the novel Am Rubikon, completed in 1975 and published in 1987 . The terrible incidents in the municipality of André Müller sen. , who treats the psychological genesis of the RAF satirically, Ulrike Meinhof plays a leading role as Sophie.
  • The painting cycle October 18, 1977 by Gerhard Richter from 1988 is about the horrific suicides in Stammheim.
  • Dagmar Leupold : The Brightness of the Night , CH Beck, Munich 2009. The novel fakes letters from Heinrich von Kleist , the author of the story Michael Kohlhaas , to Ulrike Meinhof, in which he a. a. deals with the question of where the point is that triggers the turn to terrorism.
  • The arrest of Ulrike Meinhof on June 15, 1972 at Walsroder Strasse 11 stuck in the collective memory of the city of Langenhagen . 25 years later, the artist group pttred ( paint the town red ) recalled in their one-week artistic action extra-parliamentary situation (February 24-28 , 1997) on art in public space: "Ulrike Meinhof talks about her arrest in Langenhagen."
  • Stefan Micheel at the >> open grave << of ulrike meinhof. With a multi-part installation Micheel dedicates himself to the history of Ulrike Meinhof's grave. The work was created in the period 1996-2003-2009 in Berlin and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.

music

  • The GDR band AufBruch dedicated the song Für Ulrike to her .
  • The song Ulrike by the German artist crument from his EP Klassengesellschaft , released in September 2010 .
  • The song Liebe Ulrike by the Italian EBM band Pankow
  • The song Letters from the dead wing of the band Guts Pie Earshot is set to music by Ulrike Meinhof.
  • The song Stammheim (Kampf) by the band Weena Morloch also sets a quote from Ulrike Meinhof to music.
  • The title track of Marianne Faithfull's Broken English album of the same name refers to Ulrike Meinhof.
  • The German hip-hop formation Freundeskreis refers to Meinhof's experiences in the "dead wing" of the Ossendorf prison in the title Cross the Tracks on their first album Quadratur des Kreises from 1997 . These are linked to the Huntington State Penitentiary's death row, which is based on the experience of Mumia Abu-Jamal .
  • A British punk band named itself after Ulrike Meinhof (Meinhof) .
  • The German band Der Plan released the track Ulrike in 2004 with their album The Conspiracy , on which Meinhof's voice can be heard.

Movie

Publications

  • Human dignity can be touched. Essays and Polemics. (1980) Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3-8031-2491-3 .
  • Klaus Rainer Röhl, Hajo Leib (ed.): Ulrike Meinhof: Documents of a Rebellion. 10 years of concrete columns. concrete book publisher, 1972.
  • Bambule - care, care for who? (1971) Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-8031-2428-X . (Screenplay for the television play of the same name, Bambule , Südwestfunk, 1970. Director: Eberhard Itzenplitz).
  • Germany Germany among other things. Essays and Polemics. (1967) Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2012, ISBN 3-8031-2690-8 .
  • Danger from the assembly line. Work accidents - observed and critically described. Evening studio , Hessischer Rundfunk, 1965. Directed by Peter Schulze-Rohr
  • Karl Wolff or: Portrait of an adaptable German. Evening studio, Hessischer Rundfunk, 1964. Director: Heio Müller

literature

Biographical
  • Anja Röhl: My father's wife. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2013, ISBN 978-3-89401-771-2 .
  • Katriina Lehto-Bleckert: Ulrike Meinhof 1934–1976. Your path to becoming a terrorist. Tectum Wissenschaftsverlag, Marburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8288-5613-4 .
  • Sara Hakemi, Thomas Hecken: Ulrike Meinhof. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 3-518-18233-1 .
  • Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof. The biography. Ullstein, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-550-08728-8 .
  • Alexander Gallus (ed.): Meinhof, Mahler, Ensslin. Years of study for three “gifted” students - the files of the German National Academic Foundation . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-525-30039-8 .
  • Kristin Wesemann: Ulrike Meinhof. Communist, journalist, terrorist - a political biography. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2007, ISBN 978-3-8329-2933-6 .
  • Bettina Röhl: This is how communism is fun. Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl and the Konkret files. European Publishing House, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-434-50600-4 .
  • Jürgen Seifert: Ulrike Meinhof. In: Wolfgang Kraushaar (ed.): The RAF and left-wing terrorism. Edition Hamburg, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-936096-65-1 , pp. 350–372.
  • Alois Prinz: Better angry than sad . The life story of Ulrike Marie Meinhof. Beltz & Gelberg, Weinheim 2003, ISBN 3-407-80905-0 .
  • Uwe Backes : Terrorist Biographies: Ulrike Meinhof . In: Ders .: Leaden years. Baader-Meinhof and afterwards (= series Extremism and Democracy . Vol. 1). Straube, Erlangen a. a. 1991, ISBN 3-927491-36-5 , pp. 119 ff.
  • Mario Krebs: Ulrike Meinhof. A life in contradiction. Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1988, ISBN 3-499-15642-3 .
  • Peter Brückner : Ulrike Meinhof and the German situation. Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 1976, ISBN 3-8031-2407-7 .
RAF
  • Alain Lacroix: Ulrike Meinhof: 68 - 76 RFA. Pontcerq, Rennes 2014, ISBN 978-2-919648-13-9 .
  • Leith Passmore: Ulrike Meinhof and the Red Army Faction: Performing Terrorism. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-33747-3 .
  • Sarah Colvin: Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism: Language, Violence, and Identity. Camden House, New York 2009, ISBN 1-57113-415-8 .
  • Stefan Aust: The Baader-Meinhof complex. (1985) 3rd expanded and updated edition, Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-455-50029-5 .
  • Ulf G. Stuberger : The RAF files. Actions and motives. Perpetrator and victim. Herbig, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7766-2554-7 .
  • Butz Peters : Deadly mistake. The history of the RAF. Argon, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-87024-673-1 .
  • Jillian Becker: Hitler's children? The Baader Meinhof terrorism. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-596-23413-1 .
Stammheim trial
Testimonies
  • Regina Leßner: Ulrike Meinhof: Myth and Reality. (Radio feature and CD) Audio Verlag, 2003, ISBN 978-3-89813-269-5 .
  • Bahman Nirumand: Ulrike Meinhof: "You have to unmask the state." In: Bahman Nirumand: Living with the Germans: Letters to Leila. 8th edition, Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1989, ISBN 3-499-12404-1 , pp. 109–122.
  • Pieter H. Bakker Schut: Das Info: Letters from prisoners from the RAF, 1973-1977. Neuer Malik-Verlag, 1987, ISBN 3-89029-019-1 .
  • Frank Grützbach (Ed.): Heinrich Böll: Free passage for Ulrike Meinhof. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1972, ISBN 3-462-00875-7 .

Web links

Commons : Ulrike Meinhof  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
biography
bibliography
Audio documents
items

Individual evidence

  1. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 20–63.
  2. Alexander Gallus: A beginning that did not let the end wait. The scholars Meinhof, Mahler, Ensslin, Vesper and the elite support of the early Federal Republic - a file reading. In: Jahrbuch Extremismus & Demokratie, 24/2012, ISBN 978-3-8329-7999-7 , pp. 13-29.
  3. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 92 f.
  4. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 97-108.
  5. Kristin Wesemann: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 105.
  6. Georg Biemann: Children's pictures for a companion. On the biography of the journalist and political scientist Reinhard Opitz. Forum Wissenschaft Nr. 1, Marburg 1998, pp. 50-54.
  7. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 117–121.
  8. Kristin Wesemann: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 139 f.
  9. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 123.
  10. ^ Willy Albrecht: The Socialist German Student Union (SDS): from the party-conform student association to the representative of the new left. Dietz, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-8012-4053-3 , p. 321.
  11. Kristin Wesemann: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 149.
  12. ^ Tilman Fichter: SDS and SPD: Parteilichkeit beyond the party. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 1988, ISBN 978-3-531-11882-6 , pp. 295-302.
  13. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 142 f.
  14. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 144 f. and 157 f.
  15. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 146–149.
  16. Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex , 2008, p. 37.
  17. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 153–161.
  18. Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex , 2008, p. 52.
  19. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 162–166.
  20. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 167–177.
  21. Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex , 2008, p. 38.
  22. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 180-184.
  23. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 193 f.
  24. Katriina Lehto-Bleckert: Ulrike Meinhof 1934–1976 , 2010, p. 149 f.
  25. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 185–187.
  26. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 189–193.
  27. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 194–196; Tobias Wunschik: Baader-Meinhof's Children: The Second Generation of the RAF. Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-531-13088-9 , p. 392, fn. 2241 .
  28. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 197 f.
  29. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof . 2007, pp. 202-205.
  30. Sandra Kraft: From the lecture hall to the dock: The 68ers and the establishment in Germany and the USA. Campus, 2010, ISBN 3-593-39294-1 , p. 221 .
  31. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 206.
  32. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 210 f.
  33. Katriina Lehto-Bleckert: Ulrike Meinhof 1934–1976 , 2010, pp. 225–237.
  34. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 200 212–216.
  35. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 218–224.
  36. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 228–232.
  37. Stefan Aust: The Baader Meinhof Complex , 2008, p. 73.
  38. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 241 f.
  39. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 245–247.
  40. Katriina Lehto-Bleckert: Ulrike Meinhof , 2010, p. 452 f.
  41. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 249 f.
  42. Mario Krebs: Ulrike Meinhof , 1995, pp. 173–177.
  43. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 242–244 and 249–257.
  44. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 261 f.
  45. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 198 f., 233-235, 257-259.
  46. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 236–240.
  47. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 264–266.
  48. Marita Schölzel-Klamp, Thomas Köhler-Saretzki: The blind eye of the state. The 1969 home campaign and the demands of former home children. Julius Klinkhardt, Bad Heilbrunn 2010, p. 89 .
  49. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 246 and 262–269.
  50. ^ Bahman Nirumand: Life with the Germans: Letters to Leila. Reinbek near Hamburg 1989, pp. 119–121.
  51. Katriina Lehto-Bleckert: Ulrike Meinhof , 2010, pp. 495–501.
  52. Der Spiegel, June 15, 1970: "Of course you can shoot" ; Karin Wieland: a. In: the same, Wolfgang Kraushaar and Jan Philipp Reemtsma : Rudi Dutschke, Andreas Baader and the RAF . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2005, p. 82.
  53. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 287 f.
  54. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 270-274.
  55. ^ Sara Hakemi, Thomas Hecken: Ulrike Meinhof. Frankfurt am Main 2010, p. 47.
  56. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 285 f. and 290-292.
  57. Katriina Lehto-Bleckert: Ulrike Meinhof 1934–1976 , p. 524.
  58. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 282 f.
  59. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 307 and 314.
  60. Mario Krebs: Ulrike Meinhof , 1995, p. 228 and 232.
  61. Michael Fischer: Horst Mahler. Biographical study on anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and attempts to defend against German guilt. KIT Scientific Publishing, 2015, ISBN 3-7315-0388-3 , p. 236 .
  62. ^ Mario Krebs: Ulrike Meinhof , 1995, pp. 220–222.
  63. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 307 and 310.
  64. Mario Krebs: Ulrike Meinhof , 1995, pp. 233-235.
  65. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 316–327.
  66. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 327–331; Inge Stephan: Medea: Multimedia career of a mythological figure. Böhlau, Cologne 2006, ISBN 3-412-36805-9 , p. 152 f.
  67. Mario Krebs: Ulrike Meinhof , 1995, p. 230 f.
  68. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 313.
  69. ^ Hans Mathias Kepplinger: Journalistic conflicts and scandals. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009, ISBN 3-531-16900-9 , p. 31 f. ; Heinrich Böll ( Der Spiegel , January 10, 1972): "Will Ulrike mercy or safe conduct?"
  70. ^ Butz Peters: Deadly error. The history of the RAF. 3rd edition, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, pp. 298f. and 301.
  71. Gudrun Schwibbe: Tales of otherness: Left-wing terrorism and alterity. Waxmann, 2013, ISBN 3-8309-7892-8 , p. 104 and fn. 145 .
  72. Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann: Women, Terrorism and Justice , 2009, p. 181.
  73. Willi Winkler: The history of the RAF , Reinbek 2007, p. 214.
  74. Heinrich Hannover: The denial of legal protection (Ulrike Meinhof). In: Kritische Justiz , Volume 22.European Publishing House, 1989, p. 400.
  75. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , Berlin 2009, pp. 349 and 461, fn. 255; Der Spiegel , June 26, 1972: "If you don't defend yourself, you die".
  76. Martin Jander: Isolation. On the conditions of detention of the RAF prisoners. In: Wolfgang Kraushaar (Ed.): The RAF and left terrorism, Volume I / II. Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 3-936096-65-1 , pp. 973-993.
  77. ^ Sabine Bergstermann: Stammheim: A modern prison as a place of conflict between the RAF and the state. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2016, pp. 104–108 .
  78. Christoph Riederer: The RAF and the torture debate of the 1970s. Springer VS, 2014, ISBN 3-658-05932-X , p. 97 f.
  79. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , Berlin 2009, pp. 351–353 and 366.
  80. ^ Sabine Bergstermann: Stammheim , Berlin 2016, p. 120.
  81. Christoph Riederer: The RAF and the torture debate of the 1970s. 2014, pp. 110 and 115.
  82. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , Berlin 2009, pp. 367-370.
  83. ^ Sabine Bergstermann: Stammheim , Berlin 2016, pp. 103, 107, 110.
  84. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , Berlin 2009, p. 371 f.
  85. Christoph Riederer: The RAF and the torture debate of the 1970s. 2014, p. 132 f.
  86. Christoph Riederer: The RAF and the torture debate of the 1970s. 2014, pp. 109–111 .
  87. Christoph Riederer: The RAF and the torture debate of the 1970s. 2014, pp. 97-102 and 115 .
  88. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , Berlin 2009, pp. 367 and 372–382.
  89. Christoph Riederer: The RAF and the torture debate of the 1970s. 2014, pp. 103-105.
  90. ^ Samuel Salzborn: Global anti-Semitism. A search for traces in the abyss of modernity. Beltz Juventa, Weinheim, Basel 2018, p. 72 f.
  91. Ulrike Meinhof: Three friends of Israel. (Specifically 7/1967; foreword to Isaac Deutscher: The Israeli-Arab conflict. Schneider & Weber, 1968) In: Ulrike Meinhof: The dignity of man is touchable. Essays and Polemics. (1980) Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2008, pp. 100-102.
  92. Katya Salomon: Left anti-Zionism: An analysis of the reporting on Israel and the Jews in the magazine "Beton" between 1961 and 1972. Diplomica, 2015, ISBN 3-95934-754-5 , p. 54.
  93. ^ The "Black September" campaign in Munich. On the strategy of the anti-imperialist struggle, November 1972 . In: ID Verlag (Ed.): Red Army Fraction. Texts and materials on the history of the RAF. Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-89408-065-5 , pp. 151-177.
  94. Volker Weiß: "Volksklassenkampf". The anti-Zionist reception of the Middle East conflict in the militant left of the FRG. In: Moshe Zuckermann (Hrsg.): Tel Aviver year book for German history: Antisemitism - Antizionism - Israel criticism. Volume 33/05, Wallstein, 2005, ISBN 3-89244-872-8 , pp. 214-238, here p. 226 .
  95. ^ Veit Medick (taz): Anti-Semitism in the RAF: Radikal anti-Jewish
  96. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 363 f.
  97. Quoted in Klaus-Michael Bogdal, Klaus Holz, Matthias N. Lorenz: Literarischer Antisemitismus nach Auschwitz. Metzler, 2007, ISBN 3-476-02240-4 , p. 20.
  98. ^ Anton Pelinka: Israel: exceptional or normal state. Braumüller, 2015, p. 168 .
  99. ^ Anton Pelinka: The unholy alliance: The right and left extremists against Europe. Böhlau, Vienna 2015, ISBN 3-205-79574-1 , p. 112 .
  100. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 386–389.
  101. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 389–392.
  102. ^ Sabine Bergstermann: Stammheim , Berlin 2016, p. 126 f.
  103. ^ Pieter H. Bakker Schut: Stammheim: the trial against the Red Army faction. (1986) Pahl-Rugenstein, 2nd edition 1997, ISBN 3-89144-247-5 , pp. 117-119; Klaus Stern: Andreas Baader: the life of an enemy of the state. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007, ISBN 3-423-24584-0 , p. 200.
  104. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 392.
  105. Christoph Riederer: The RAF and the torture debate of the 1970s. 2014, p. 201 f.
  106. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 396-423.
  107. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 401.
  108. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, pp. 426-430.
  109. a b Stefan Aust: The Baader-Meinhof-Complex , 2008, pp. 385–387.
  110. ^ A b Petra Terhoeven : German Autumn in Europe. Oldenbourg, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-486-71866-9 , pp. 398-401.
  111. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 441 f.
  112. Pieter Bakker-Schut: Stammheim , Kiel 1986, pp. 394–396.
  113. Petra Terhoeven: German Autumn in Europe. Munich 2014, pp. 409 and 418.
  114. Pieter Bakker-Schut: Stammheim , Kiel 1986, pp. 398-406; The death of Ulrike Meinhof. Report of the International Commission of Inquiry. (1979) New edition: Unrast, 2001, ISBN 3-89771-952-5 .
  115. Always obvious . In: Der Spiegel . No. 35 , 1976, pp. 67-70 ( Online - Aug. 23, 1976 ).
  116. Pieter Bakker-Schut: Stammheim , Kiel 1986, p. 396; Stefan Aust: "The knife in the back of the RAF" . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1985 ( online - December 9, 1985 ).
  117. Lorenz Jäger (FAZ, August 1, 2007): RAF sound documents from Stammheim: Signals that nobody understood at the time. ( Memento of the original from July 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. ; Gisela Diewald-Kerkmann: The Red Army faction in the original tone. The tape recordings from the Stuttgart Stammheim trial. Notes, 3. A call for help from Ulrike Meinhof? In: Contemporary historical research . Volume 5, 2008, issue 2 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.faz.net
  118. Mario Krebs: Ulrike Meinhof , 1995, p. 260.
  119. Jutta Ditfurth: Ulrike Meinhof , 2007, p. 436.
  120. Irma Hildebrandt: Women set accents: defining figures of the Federal Republic. Diederichs, 2009, p. 92 .
  121. Calendar sheet : May 9, 1976. Suicide in Stammheim . someday. Contemporary stories on Spiegel Online (accessed October 1, 2012).
  122. Antje Raupach: Fresh flowers on Meinhof's grave. WeltN24 GmbH, September 7, 2007, accessed on March 19, 2015 .
  123. According to the cemetery development plan of the Senate Department for Urban Development from 2006, most of the cemetery is to be closed. The grave lies in the area to be closed. See Annex 10: Planning Tempelhof-Schöneberg (pdf; 684 kB) (PDF) Cemetery development plan of the Senate Department for Urban Development. As of December 31, 2005, p. 5, accessed on February 19, 2013.
  124. Mario Krebs: Ulrike Meinhof , Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 262.
  125. Andreas Förster: Who was Ulrike Meinhof? In: Berliner Zeitung. November 9, 2002, p. 3 , accessed October 16, 2011 .
  126. Jürgen Dahlkamp: The brain of terror. In: Spiegel Online. November 8, 2002, accessed December 5, 2012 .
  127. Ethics Commission of the Medical Faculty of the Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg
  128. ^ Jürgen Dahlkamp: Dead angle . In: Der Spiegel . No. 47 , 2002, p. 72 ( online - November 18, 2002 ).
  129. Gerd Koenen: The red decade. Our Little German Cultural Revolution, 1967–1977. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2002, ISBN 978-3-596-15573-6 , p. 336.
  130. Sarah Colvin: Witch, Amazon, or Joan of Arc? Ulrike Meinhof's Defenders, or How to Legitimize a Violent Woman. In: same and Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly (eds.): Warlike women in the German literary and cultural imagination since 1500. Camden House, Rochester, NY 2009, ISBN 1-57113-400-X ( Women and death . 2) , P. 250.
  131. "Fascinating extent of myths". Ditfurth via Meinhof. In: taz , January 17, 2008; Sarah Colvin: Ulrike Meinhof and West German terrorism. Language, violence, and identity. Camden House, Rochester, NY 2009, ISBN 978-1-57113-415-8 , pp. 5, 16 f.
  132. ^ Sarah Colvin: Ulrike Meinhof and West German terrorism. Language, violence, and identity. Camden House, Rochester, NY 2009, ISBN 978-1-57113-415-8 , p. 5.
  133. ^ Sarah Colvin: Ulrike Meinhof and West German terrorism. Language, violence, and identity. Camden House, Rochester, NY 2009, ISBN 978-1-57113-415-8 , p. 6.
  134. Sarah Colvin: Witch, Amazon, or Joan of Arc? Ulrike Meinhof's Defenders, or How to Legitimize a Violent Woman. In: same and Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly (eds.): Warlike women in the German literary and cultural imagination since 1500. Camden House, Rochester, NY 2009, ISBN 1-57113-400-X ( Women and death . 2) , P. 267.
  135. Sarah Colvin: Witch, Amazon, or Joan of Arc? Ulrike Meinhof's Defenders, or How to Legitimize a Violent Woman. In: Sarah Colvin and Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly (Eds.): Warlike women in the German literary and cultural imagination since 1500. Camden House, Rochester, NY 2009, ISBN 1-57113-400-X ( Women and death . 2 ), P. 250.
  136. ↑ For the individual references, see Colvin: Witch, Amazon, or Joan of Arc? Pp. 252-253.
  137. Helmut Gollwitzer: Obituaries. Munich 1977, p. 50.
  138. ^ Reinhard Mohr: Revolutionäres Gewäsch . In: Der Spiegel . No. 33 , 1996 ( online - Aug. 12, 1996 ).
  139. ^ Willi Winkler: The history of the RAF. Rowohlt, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-87134-510-4 , p. 10.
  140. ^ Kristin Wesemann: Ulrike Meinhof. Communist, journalist, terrorist. A political biography. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2007, ISBN 978-3-8329-2933-6 , p. 401.
  141. ^ Kristin Wesemann: Ulrike Meinhof. Communist, journalist, terrorist. A political biography. Nomos, Baden-Baden 2007, ISBN 978-3-8329-2933-6 , p. 410 f.
  142. ^ Sarah Colvin: Ulrike Meinhof and West German terrorism. Language, violence, and identity. Camden House, Rochester, NY 2009, ISBN 978-1-57113-415-8 , p. 5.
  143. Colvin, Witch, Amazon, or Joan of Arc? , Pp. 253-256.
  144. Colvin, Witch, Amazon, or Joan of Arc? , Pp. 259f.
  145. Meinhof Neues Deutschland from October 6, 1994
  146. Kai Bauer, on site 1997, pttred, pp. 27–43. Langenhagen and in the local press
  147. Exhibition catalog of the Hamburger Kunsthalle ( Memento from August 1, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  148. Crument: Ulrike on YouTube , October 30, 2010, accessed June 23, 2016
  149. I looked gorgeous. In: Der Spiegel -online interview with Marianne Faithfull.
  150. ^ Michael Crone (editor): Radio evening studio. Inventory 1948–1968. Hessischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 372.
  151. ^ Michael Crone (editor): Radio evening studio. Inventory 1948–1968. Hessischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt am Main 1988, p. 346.