Ulrike Marie Meinhof (German pronunciation: [ʊlˈʁiːkə maˈʁiː ˈmaɪnhoːf]; 7 October 1934 – 9 May 1976) was a German left-wing militant, journalist, author and founding member of the Red Army Faction (RAF) in West Germany, commonly referred to in the press as the "Baader-Meinhof gang". She is the reputed author of The Urban Guerilla Concept (1971). The manifesto acknowledges the RAF's "roots in the history of the student movement"; condemns "reformism" as "a brake on the anti-capitalist struggle"; and invokes Mao Zedong to define "armed struggle" as "the highest form of Marxism-Leninism".
Meinhof, who took part in the RAF's "May Offensive" in 1972, was arrested that June and spent the rest of her life in custody, largely isolated from outside contact. In November 1974, she was sentenced to 8 years in prison for complicity in a near-fatal shooting in what had been her first RAF operation, the successful jailbreak of Andreas Baader in 1970.
From 1975, with Baader and two other RAF leaders, Gudrun Ensslin and Jan-Carl Raspe, she stood trial on further charges of murder and attempted murder. Before the end of the trial, she was found hanged in her cell in the Stammheim Prison. The official finding of suicide sparked controversy, with her sister, Wienke Zitzlaff, stating that Meinhof had told her only days before her death: "You can stand up and fight only while you are alive. If they say I committed suicide, be sure that it was murder."
One year later, on 7 April 1977, two members of the RAF assassinated the Federal Attorney-General Siegfried Buback as revenge.
Meinhof was born in 1934 in Oldenburg. Her father Werner Meinhof, a curator of Jena Museum, died of cancer in 1940, causing her mother to take in a boarder, Renate Riemeck, to make money. In 1946, the family moved back to Oldenburg after Jena fell under Soviet occupation as a result of the Yalta agreement. Meinhof's mother, Ingeborg Meinhof, an art historian, began to work as a teacher and died from cancer in 1949. Riemeck took on the role of guardian of Meinhof and her elder sister, Wienke.
In 1952, Meinhof took her Abitur at a school in Weilburg. She then studied philosophy, sociology, education and German at Marburg, where she became involved with reform movements. In 1957, she transferred to the University of Münster, where she met the Spanish Marxist intellectual Manuel Sacristán (who later translated and edited some of her writings), joined the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), the German Socialist Student Union. She participated in protests against the Bundeswehr and the proposal of Konrad Adenauer's government to deploy nuclear weapons. Despite her involvement, Meinhof was critical of the SDS leaders' subconscious misogyny and the organisation's marginalisation of female members. Meinhof eventually became the spokeswoman of the local Anti-Atomtod-Ausschuss (Anti Atomic-Death Committee). In 1958, she spent a short time on the AStA (German: Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss, or General Committee of Students) of the university and wrote articles for various student newspapers.
Konkret and protest in the 1960s
In 1959, Meinhof joined the banned Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and later began working at the magazine konkret, a monthly which, until 1964, had clandestine financing from the East German government. Konkret was widely read by student activists and progressive intellectuals, and as its chief editor from 1962 to 1964, Meinhof was able to elicit contributions from established journalists and authors.
On 2 June 1967, Meinhof's exposure in konkret of German complicity in supporting the Pahlavi dynasty helped rally students to a demonstration in West Berlin against the visit of the Shah of Iran. When Iranian counter-demonstrators, including agents of the Shah's intelligence service, attacked the students, the police joined the affray beating the demonstrators into a side street where an officer shot and killed the student protester Benno Ohnesorg The leading Stern columnist, Sebastian Haffner whom Meinhof had befriended, took to konkret to suggest "with the [anti-] Student pogrom of 2 June 1967 fascism in West Berlin had thrown off its mask".
In February 1968, Meinhof was a participant in the International Vietnam Conference in West Berlin, which the authorities had permitted only in the face of large-scale protests. She was co-signatory, along with intellectuals including Ernst Bloch, Noam Chomsky, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernest Mandel, and Jean Paul Sartre, of the final declaration. This defined the U.S. intervention in Vietnam as "the Spain of our generation" and called for mobilisation against the "extermination" (Vernichtung) of the Vietnamese people.
In 1961, Meinhof married the co-founder and publisher of konkret, Klaus Rainer Röhl. Their marriage produced twins, Regine and Bettina, born on 21 September 1962. Meinhof and Röhl separated in 1967 and divorced a year later.
Benign brain tumor surgically removed
In 1962, Meinhof had a benign brain tumor surgically removed; the 1976 autopsy showed that remnants of the tumor and surgical scar tissue impinged on her amygdala.
Establishment of the Red Army Faction
The attempted assassination of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke on 11 April 1968 provoked Meinhof to write an article in konkret demonstrating her increasingly militant attitude and containing perhaps her best-known quote:
Later that year, her writings on arson attacks in Frankfurt as protests against the Vietnam War resulted in her developing an acquaintance with the perpetrators, most significantly Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. She stopped writing for konkret which had in her opinion evolved into a completely commercial magazine in the early part of 1969, and many other authors followed her. She stated that neither she nor her collaborators wanted to give a left-wing alibi to the magazine that sooner or later "would become part of the counter-revolution, a thing that I cannot gloss over with my co-operation, especially now that it is impossible to change its course". Later, they organised an occupation at konkret's office (along with several members of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition), to distribute proclamations to the employees, something that failed since Röhl learned about it, and moved the employees to their homes to continue their work from there. Finally, Röhl's house was vandalized by some of the protesters. Meinhof arrived in Röhl's villa at 11:30, after police and journalists had already arrived. She was accused by Röhl (and subsequently described by the media) as the organizer of the vandalism. It was difficult to prove, as she was not there when it happened.
Perhaps her last work as an individual was the writing and production of the film Bambule in 1970, which focused on a group of West Berlin girls in juvenile detention; by the time it was scheduled to be aired, she was wanted for her part in the violent escape from police custody of Baader, and its broadcast was delayed until 1994.
In May 1970, Meinhof had been approached to help in Baader's escape by his girlfriend, Gudrun Ensslin. Meinhof persuaded the left-wing publisher Klaus Wagenbach to assist in the release of what he saw as a political prisoner. He issued her with a book contract, on the basis of which she petitioned authorities to allow Baader to travel from Moabit Prison for an interview at an institute for social research in the Dahlem district of Berlin. The plan was for armed comrades to enter the building, overpower the guards, and escape with Baader. No shooting was to take place, and Meinhof was to stay behind and deny any complicity in the action.