From Peace to Violence: Ulrike Meinhof's Radicalization

1: Fighting Talk (1959–69): From the
Peace Movement to the Revolutionary

Legitimacy of Violence
der Friede ist zum bestimmenden Faktor politischen Handelns

geworden.
[peace is now the driving factor for political action.]
—Ulrike Meinhof, October 1959
Gewalt . . . [ist] ein Mittel, das wir weder kategorisch ablehnen

noch willkürlich anwenden werden, dessen Methodik und revolu-
tionärer Legitimität wir vielmehr in theoretischer Reflexion und
praktischer Anwendung erlernen und begreifen müssen.
[Violence . . . is an instrument we shall neither categorically
reject nor use arbitrarily, one whose effectiveness and revolu-
tionary legitimacy we need to learn to understand in a process
of theoretical reflection and practical use.]
—Ulrike Meinhof and the Berlin
Editors’ Collective, June 1968
A SKLAUS RAINER RÖHL TELLS IT, the magazine that would establish
Meinhof’s name began life in 1955 as a student newspaper called
Das Plädoyer (The Appeal).1 It was rechristened Studentenkurier (The
Student Courier) before acquiring its lasting name konkret (written with-
out a capital “k” in the spirit of orthographic antiauthoritarianism) in the
autumn of 1957.
Röhl may have had a less prominent role in konkret’s founding than
his own account suggests — some impetus certainly came from his friend
Klaus Hübotter, who was affiliated with East Germany’s Free German
Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend). As Röhl has long since made public,
konkret’s secret sponsor was the East German government.2
Its East German sponsors encouraged the team at konkret to con-
nect with one of the biggest oppositional movements in postwar West
Germany: the antinuclear peace movement (Anti-Atom-Bewegung), led
at Münster university by a student activist named Ulrike Meinhof.3 At
its national forefront was Professor Renate Riemeck — Meinhof’s foster
mother. Röhl’s coworker Reinhard Opitz and later Röhl himself took on
the task of persuading Meinhof to join them in Hamburg. Röhl clearly
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22 FIGHTING TALK (1959–69)
enjoys telling the story of how he won the young peacenik, for himself
and the magazine: in his version his friend Opitz falls in love with her, but
it is he and not Opitz who carries home the trophy (the “precious prey,”
Röhl calls her),4 after wooing her by waxing lyrical on the benefits of
communism and playing her love songs on the juke box.
Röhl and Meinhof met for the first time at a convention of the anti-
nuclear student committees held in Frankfurt in May 1958. Her biog-
raphers regularly retell a “hate at first sight” story (“Abneigung auf den
ersten Blick”), Röhl’s tale of a mutual dislike that gave way to courtship
and marriage; the story recalls the spirited heroine of romantic fiction,
who first loathes but then loves the hero. But one of the konkret crew
who was on that trip to Frankfurt contradicts, remembering consider-
able erotic interest, on Röhl’s side at least.5 Whatever her motivations for
joining konkret were, in October 1959 Meinhof’s first column appeared,
called “Der Friede macht Geschichte” (Peace is Making History). In it,
she described the visit of Nikita Krushchev to the United States — the
first Soviet leader to be received there — and his historic but unsuccess-
ful attempt to negotiate controlled bilateral disarmament with President
Dwight D. Eisenhower.6
By the mid 1960s she was konkret’s star columnist, writing for a left-
wing readership of more than one hundred thousand. Ironically, the mag-
azine had a right-wing politician to thank for a surge in numbers: Franz
Josef Strauß, then federal minister for defense and leader of the conser-
vative Christian Social Union (CSU), had tried to have it banned. The
reasons he cited were vulgarity and crass immorality — accusations that
immediately swelled the paper’s sales.7 Tense relations between Strauß
and konkret were nothing new: in 1961 he had sued Meinhof for an arti-
cle called “Hitler in euch” (Hitler Within You), which took as its starting
point the trial of the prominent Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. She
had predicted that her own generation would one day be questioned by
their children about Strauß in the same way they questioned their own
parents about Hitler.8 The parallel was clearly and unashamedly provoca-
tive. Her defense lawyer, Gustav Heinemann (who from 1969–74 would
be West Germany’s president), argued that despite the provocation Strauß
had no case — Meinhof had not actually compared him with Hitler. The
Hamburg courts threw the case out.
Strauß put a dent in his own reputation with the notorious Spiegel
affair of 1962. In October, the left-leaning current affairs magazine pub-
lished a detailed report on the federal army, the Bundeswehr. A fortnight
later, in a secret overnight operation, Defense Minister Strauß had the
magazine’s offices in Hamburg occupied by police, the editors’ homes
searched, and the editors themselves arrested. He had not informed the
federal minister for justice, nor the home office, nor the chancellor of
his intentions, however, and the operation cost him his cabinet post.
FIGHTING TALK (1959–69) 23
Three years later, and no longer minister for defense, he sued Meinhof
again — this time because she had dubbed him Germany’s most despi-
cable politician (“den infamsten deutschen Politiker”).9 Her lawyer was
Hans-Heinz Heldmann (later one of the Red Army Faction’s lawyers and
the author of a book querying the odd circumstances of its leaders’ deaths
in Stammheim prison),10 and on this occasion she was ordered to pay
a fine, and konkret to print a withdrawal of her claims; but her reputa-
tion was growing, and with it her confidence — in May 1966 she wrote
a column titled “Franz Strauß,” in which she cheekily referred both to
the disastrous Spiegel episode, and to his campaigns against her and her
magazine.11
From 1964 a photograph of Meinhof appeared next to her column on
the magazine’s opening page. That created a visual link between konkret
and its heavyweight competitor Stern, whose columnist “Frau Sibylle”
(the journalist Anneliese Friedmann) was presented in just that way,12 but
it also reflected her increased prominence, and her selling power. Meinhof
was part of an Extraparliamentary Opposition (Außerparlamentarische
Opposition, or APO) that refused to credit any mainstream party in the
postwar period with political integrity, and insistently scrutinized West
German politics for traces of the fascist endeavor. In practical terms she
was selling the magazine; in political terms she was “selling,” ever more
overtly, an idea of the Federal Republic that ran counter to its official
self-representation as a denazified, democratic state. Both her daughter,
Bettina Röhl, and East German academic Kristin Wesemann have attrib-
uted that project to the “pull” of the socialist East.13 One must also ask
about the “push” factor, however: what real or imagined circumstances
impelled Meinhof to launch a journalistic attack on the democracy that
had succeeded the Hitler regime, and how did she move from champion-
ing peace to advocating what she came to call “emancipatory violence”?
The Riemeck Affair

In August 1960, both issues of konkret (which was now successful enough
to appear fortnightly rather than monthly) engaged with events surround-
ing the sudden early retirement from university teaching of Meinhof’s
foster mother, Renate Riemeck. Riemeck had adopted both the fourteen-
year-old Ulrike and her elder sister Wienke after their mother’s death in
1949. At that time Riemeck herself was only twenty-nine; at thirty-two
she became the youngest woman professor in Germany, when the Minis-
try for Culture in Hanover offered her a professorship without requiring
that she complete the normal professorial qualification (the Habilitation).
But in the summer of 1960 North Rhine-Westphalia’s minister for culture,
Werner Schütz of the Christian Democrats, required her to stand down
as an examiner for history and politics at the Pädagogische Akademie in
Wuppertal — she was effectively relieved of her duties. His explanation

was that measures were necessary to protect her from public attack, on
account of her political connections with the East.14
Schütz’s reasoning had a context. Riemeck was at the forefront of the
left-wing peace movement, and where left-wingers saw remilitarization as
a step back in the direction of imperialism and therefore as tendentially
fascist, the right argued that opponents of nuclear armament were in the
pockets of the communist East, looking to leave the Republic defense-
less against communist expansion. On 5 April 1957, West Germany’s
first postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (CDU), had declared that the
Bundeswehr would be equipped with the most up-to-date weapons — in-
cluding nuclear weapons. Riemeck responded by formulating a petition,
signed by forty-four West German professors, calling on the trades unions
to oppose nuclear armament.15 The implicit threat to the federal govern-
ment was that most powerful of civic protests: a general strike.
Her foster daughter Meinhof responded to Schütz’s action against
Riemeck using the vocabulary of Nazi oppression. In “Geschichten von
Herrn Schütz” (Tales of Herr Schütz), her commentary on the scandal,
she made the spectacular assertion that — for the first time in the his-
tory of the Federal Republic — an academic had been removed from
post not for any concrete offense or suspected criminal activity, but
for ideological reasons (“Erstmalig in der Bundesrepublik wurde am
14. Juli 1960 ein Professor nicht wegen einer etwaigen Verletzung des
Grundgesetzes, auch ohne den Verdacht einer straffälligen Tat, nur um
seiner oppositionellen Anschauungen gegenüber der Regierungspoli-
tik willen faktisch seines Lehramtes entkleidet”).16 It is not quite true
that Riemeck, a leading figure on the West German left after the war,
was removed from post: rather than face disciplinary proceedings, she
resigned her professorship, as Meinhof very well knew. What Meinhof
did not know was that her foster mother had reason to avoid a public
inquiry; it has emerged only recently that Riemeck had been a mem-
ber both of the Nazi party and of the Association of National Socialist
Women Students (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Nationalsozialistischer Studen-
tinnen).17 Meinhof ’s article implies that the government was revealing
its totalitarian (Nazi) tendencies by refusing to tolerate political oppo-
sition: “if the minister for culture’s campaign is not halted,” she con-
cludes dramatically, “there is no saying where his cleansing of German
universities will end” (“Wenn dem Durchbruch des Kultusministers
nicht Einhalt geboten wird, ist nicht abzusehen, wo die begonnene Säu-
berungsaktion deutscher Hochschulen enden wird”).18
According to Jürgen Seifert, a friend of Münster university days,
Meinhof’s political identity at this time in her life was heavily influenced
by Riemeck,19 but the impassioned rhetoric of this article seems to reflect
not only a political but a personal response to events (it is also one of the
longest columns Meinhof ever wrote). Her dismay at the character assassi-
nation of her foster mother finds expression in an oddly familiar formula:
Am 26. November 1959 war ein Artikel . . . in der “Deutschen Zei-

tung” erschienen unter der Überschrift “Professor Riemeck prüft
Marx.” . . . Das Geschichtsbild von 900 Millionen Menchen, die auf
unserer Erde leben, hat den deutschen Wissenschaftler und Lehrer
nicht zu interessieren — nach Meinung der “Deutschen Zeitung.”
Im März 1960 erschien das Rotbuch des Komitees “Rettet die Frei-
heit,” in dem Hunderte von Professoren — darunter auch Renate
Riemeck — der “Ostanfälligkeit” und des Handlangerdienstes für
den Kommunismus verdächtigt wurden.
Gegnerschaft gegen atomare Aufrüstung ist Handreichung für den
Kommunismus — nach Meinung des Rotbuches. . . .
Die Politik der Bundesregierung darf nur kritisieren, wer zuvor die
DDR verurteilt — nach Meinung der Anonymen in der “West-
deutschen Rundschau.” . . .
Die Öffentlichkeit der Bundesrepublik rekrutiert sich aus
“Deutscher Zeitung,” Rotbuch und zwei anonymen Lesern — nach
Meinung des Kultusministers.
[On 26 November 1959 an article . . . appeared in the “Deutsche

Zeitung” with the title “Professor Riemeck teaches Marx.” . . . Ger-
man academics and teachers are not supposed to show an interest in
a [Marxist] view of history shared by 900 million people living on
this earth — according to the “Deutsche Zeitung.”
In March 1960 the Committee for Freedom produced its Red
Book,20 in which hundreds of professors — including Renate Riem-
eck — were accused of “susceptibility to the East” and of being in
bed with Communism.
Opposition to nuclear armament is being in bed with Commu-
nism — according to the Red Book. . . .
Only those who have already damned the GDR outright may go on to
criticize the politics of the West German government — according to
the anonymous contributors to the “Westdeutsche Rundschau” . . .
The West German public is made up of the “Deutsche Zeitung,”
the Red Book and two anonymous readers — according to the
Minister for Culture.21]
The repetition of “according to” eventually provokes puzzlement in the

reader, and then doubt; the need asserted by Schütz to protect Riem-
eck from public attack suddenly seems based on opinion and interpreta-
tion (the world according to a nationalist newspaper, an anticommunist
pamphlet, and some anonymous letter-writers), and not on hard facts.
It recalls the famous speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, where, by
repeating that “Brutus is an honorable man,” Mark Antony calls into
question the veracity of those words. Meinhof throws doubt on the integ-
rity of those she imagines have assassinated the character of Riemeck, cast
as Caesar to her own Mark Antony. She herself stands, like Mark Antony,
indignant, pained, and profoundly disappointed by the machinations of a
state that ought to be just.
Emergency?
A month later she was engaging with government plans for emergency
laws (Notstandsgesetze). Until the Federal Republic passed special legis-
lation for a national emergency, the Western allies (France, Britain, and
the United States) would have the right to intervene in a national cri-
sis; in this sense the plans were a move towards sovereignty. Opponents,
however, were troubled by historical precedents: the Weimar Republic’s
Article 48 had once given the head of state powers that arguably assisted
Hitler’s rise to dictatorship.
Meinhof’s column “Notstand? Notstand!” (Emergency? Emer-
gency!) opens with the assertion that one in three West Germans believes
the situation in 1960 comparable with 1933. The reason, says Meinhof,
is that professors are losing their jobs and status now as they did then
(“Deutschland 1960 — jeder Dritte vergleicht es mit dem Deutschland
von 1933 . . . Professoren fliegen ‘wie damals’ aus Amt und Würden”).22
“Professors” should be singular, not plural: there was at the time no other
case in point except Riemeck (the Radikalenerlaß, a law excluding politi-
cal radicals from public service professions, was not passed until 1972).
1933, the year Hitler made himself dictator, was also a time when many
Germans had not yet noticed, or did not want to notice, the implications
of domestic events. Meinhof is cautioning her contemporaries that Ger-
many may yet repeat the trajectory of the Hitler regime after 1933 — if
Germans are again prepared to put their heads in the sand and let it.
She waves the red rag of Article 48: “we don’t want to start asking,”
she continues (although she clearly does want people to ask), “whether
Hitler was able to institutionalize twelve years of German Fascism because
or in spite of that article” (“wir wollen nicht in den Streit . . . einstei-
gen, ob Hitler vermittels oder trotz dieses Artikels zwölf Jahre deutschen
Faschismus institutionalisieren konnte”). Now as then, she tells us, trade
unionists are being designated enemies of the people (Volksfeinde), and
strikes could again be classed as national emergencies and violently put
down by the police and army. In a mental leap she takes her readers from
the emergency laws to Auschwitz: words like Volksfeind, we are reminded,
are the language of 1933, and that ended in the concentration camps
(“Gewerkschaftler als Volksfeinde, Streiks als Aufruhr, Lohnkämpfe als
Notstand — das ist die Sprache von Sozialistengesetz und März 33, das
gipfelte in Festungshaft und KZ”).23
In fact, Volksfeind is an implied rather than actual quotation. It serves

Meinhof’s useful fiction:24 namely, that West Germany in 1960 could
be best understood by analogy with German fascism. She highlights two
salient features in the Federal Republic’s postwar constitution that, for
her and many others, had seemed the guarantors that the historical mis-
takes that enabled Nazism could not be repeated: military disarmament
and the constitutional enshrinement of civil liberties. By 1960, however,
disarmament had been abandoned: West Germany became a member of
NATO in 1955, and membership brought with it the requirement to
have a national army. Rearmament began with the introduction of the
Wehrartikel (arms article), a new clause that provided for the creation of
the Bundeswehr as a national defense army, and military service was rein-
troduced in July 1956. With the principle of disarmament already aban-
doned, argues Meinhof, the other founding principle of the nation — civil
liberty — is now under siege. She conjures a vision of civilian protests
literally under fire: in future, she warns, the new laws will permit mass
uprisings to be shot down (“oppositionelle Massen können in Zukunft
zusammengeschossen werden”).25
Images of brutally repressed civil protests deliberately evoke the Nazi
era. Hitler is mentioned by name, side-by-side with a reference to the Ger-
man passion for orderliness — ”der deutsche Sinn für Ordnung” — which,
she asserts, was behind the deaths of six million Jews in the gas chambers.
The planned emergency laws are mentioned in the same sentence, directly
next to a reference to murdered Jews. Emergency laws are not Auschwitz,
but the historical parallel suggests forcefully to Meinhof’s readers that
they might be.
Hindsight says the Federal Republic was a stable enough democ-
racy, and it is difficult to empathize with the mindset that leads a writer
to functionalize the Shoah for rhetorical effect. From the historical per-
spective of 1960 we might read it as a desperate measure in what she
believed were desperate times, arising out of a genuine fear that the Ger-
man past was about to repeat itself. For Meinhof personally, that fear was
intimately connected with the Riemeck affair, which clearly still informed
the “Emergency!” article as well as her “Tales of Herr Schütz.” The two
pieces together mark a significant development in a narrative by which
Nazi history was already in the process of repeating itself.
Nazis, “New Fascism,” and the “New Jews”

From the Riemeck affair on, the rhetoric of Nazis and Jews, oppressors
and oppressed, takes hold in Meinhof’s journalism. She is not alone in
that: to describe anything or anyone as fascist or Hitleresque in the post-
war period is to make possibly the most powerful and damaging meta-
phorical connection available.26 Nazism and the Jewish experience were
the rhetorical cudgels of the left and the right throughout the later 1960s.
Meinhof used the comparison to lambaste postcolonial conditions across
the world; in an (unreprinted) article for konkret in July 1960, titled
“Fortsetztung des Nazismus in der globalen Politik” (Ongoing Nazism in
Global Politics), she wrote of “concentration camps” in French-occupied
Algeria.27 But the specter of National Socialism also lurks in her reports
on political conditions at home in the Federal Republic.
Meinhof was working in a context of a young investigative journal-
ism that was understandably allergic to the recent past. In January 1960,
konkret had published an article on antisemitism in the Republic. Its
author, Dieter Großherr, counted at least three hundred attacks on Jewish
cemeteries and synagogues in Germany since the official end of Nazism in
1945. He also cited a survey — taken seven years earlier in 1953 — which
found that well over half (59 percent) of West Germans were still funda-
mentally antisemitic.28 The cover of the issue listed the names of ex-Nazis
active in the new federal democracy — in the criminal justice system, in
politics, and in the military (in 1956 the German government had been
forced to admit that thirty-one of thirty-eight generals in the newly
created Bundeswehr had also belonged to Hitler’s Wehrmacht).29 Par-
liament itself was not immune to the problems of reconstituting a post-
fascist state: in 1961 (after Spiegel had given critical coverage of the case
in March, and the GDR’s weekly television program Schwarzer Kanal in
April), konkret published a piece tracking the career of Dr. Hans Globke,
secretary of state to Adenauer.30 Globke, who was consistently supported
by Adenauer, had been senior adviser (Oberregierungsrat) to the Hitler
government, and coauthor of a commentary justifying the Nuremberg
Laws of 1933 — laws that, among other things, forbade marriage and
sexual intercourse between Jews and non-Jewish Germans. Because he
had never actually become a member of the Nazi party, Globke was able
to duck postwar denazification and continue his political career. Another
scandal blew up when it emerged that West Germany’s president, Hein-
rich Lübke, had drawn up plans for concentration camps in the office in
which he worked as an architect during the war.31
These were real issues facing the Federal Republic in the postwar
period, issues that were being addressed by investigative journalists, not
only on the team at konkret. That makes it disappointing when one finds
Meinhof concentrating less on the genuine problems faced by a society in
the aftermath of dictatorship, and more on creating dramatic rhetorical
connections between Nazism and those who oppose the things she sup-
ports — such as disarmament and demilitarization — or support what she
opposes. In an article of May 1960 called “Neue deutsche Ghetto-Schau”
(The New German Ghetto), she mobilizes the connotations of the ghet-
tos — where the Nazis robbed and starved entire Jewish populations prior
to deportation or murder — to garner sympathy for contemporary anti-
nuclear campaigners. The new ghetto, says Meinhof, is no longer for Jews
or the Polish intelligentsia but for those who oppose nuclear armament
in West Germany (“Die Eingezäunten sind diesmal nicht Angehörige der
polnischen Intelligenz, auch nicht Juden und halbe und nur zum Teil
Kommunisten; umgattert finden sich vielmehr die engagierten Skeptiker
im Raum bundesrepublikanischer Atompolitik”).32 Extending the meta-
phor, that makes peace activists (like Meinhof herself) the new Jews to
the federal government’s oppressive Hitler. The comparison is profoundly
disrespectful of those who suffered in the real ghettos.
The “Hitler Within You” column, with its notorious reference to
Strauß, appeared in konkret in May 1961. Even without its reference to a
contemporary right-wing politician the article is provocative — not least
because Meinhof appears to include her readers (the “you” of the title)
but not herself in the ranks of those within whom the spirit of Hitler
lives on. At the time of writing the Eichmann trial was in progress; it is
mentioned in a cursory manner. But the focus is on developing her meta-
phor: namely, that those (like herself) who oppose current mainstream
politics are Germany’s new Jews: in the contemporary context, she tells
us, anyone who criticizes antisemitism must “speak up for freedom wher-
ever it is currently under threat” (“wer den Antisemitismus geißelt, muß
der Freiheit, wo sie heute bedroht ist, das Wort reden”). Fair enough, we
might think, but the specific value of critiquing antisemitism is quickly
undermined: replacing antisemitism with prosemitism, Meinhof argues,
is not an answer; what is needed is that we “reject every kind of politi-
cal terror that is practiced in the form of administrative measures against
those who think, believe, and feel differently” (“Eine Revision des Anti-
semitismus . . . ist als Prosemitismus nur eine halbe Antwort, erfordert
vielmehr die Absage an jeden politischen Terror vermittelst administrati-
ver Maßnahmen gegen Andersdenkende, Andersglaubende und Anders-
fühlende”).33 Thinking hard about the real-life effects of antisemitism
under Hitler is not, in Meinhof’s view, what is really needed — the reali-
ties of the Shoah seem to take a back seat to “administrative measures”
against her foster mother Riemeck.
In her “Emergency!” column she had deliberately used an item of
Nazi vocabulary to characterize political practice in West Germany: the
verb gleichschalten, which described Hitler’s policy of forcing institu-
tions and individuals to toe the political line. The word returns as a
noun in her column of August 1966, “Joachim Fest oder die Gleich-
schaltung” (Joachim Fest or Gleichschaltung). In 1960 Meinhof rode
into battle for Riemeck, and now she was back on her rhetorical charger
for West German television’s Panorama presenter Fest, who had criti-
cized the emergency laws — still, in 1966, in the planning stages — on
his show in early June. He was subsequently relieved of his duties by the
state television channel ARD. The government is silencing its critics,
observes Meinhof, and that proves that the much-cited Rechtsstaat (the
just or constitutional state of Federal West Germany) is neither demo-
cratic nor just, but a sham.34 There is a clear echo of her “Emergency!”
article: “Soldiers against workers — soldiers deployed to enforce domes-
tic order — soldiers against civilians — is that something new in Ger-
many?” she asked then, only to answer her own rhetorical question:
“No — the only new thing is that such methods of interaction between
the power of the state and its people are being called democracy” (“Sol-
daten gegen Arbeiter — Soldaten im Einsatz zum Schutz der inneren
Ordnung — Soldaten gegen Zivilisten — ist das neu in Deutschland?
Nein — neu ist nur eins: Solche Methoden des Umgangs zwischen
Staatsmacht und Volk Demokratie zu nennen”).35
Meinhof eventually coins a term for that state of affairs, in the col-
umn “Demokratie spielen” (Playing at Democracy) of 1968: “new fas-
cism.” The article addresses the case of Federal President Lübke. Unlike
the chancellor, the president is not the political so much as the moral
figurehead of the Federal Republic, but Lübke’s history as an architect
of the concentration camps had become an open secret. There was no
mileage to be had from exposing him; instead, Meinhof represents him as
a straw man, his story a handy alibi for those who do not wish investiga-
tions into their own political history. Whether Lübke stays or goes, she
asserts, is irrelevant, because “it is irrelevant for the new fascism whether
its figurehead built concentration camps or not” (“ob Lübke bleibt oder
geht, ist belanglos für die demokratische Zukunft der Bundesrepublik,
wie es auch belanglos ist für den neuen Faschismus, ob an seiner Spitze
einer steht, der KZ’s gebaut hat oder keine”).36 “New fascism” would
become a familiar rhetorical formula in the writings of the mainstream
left;37 here Meinhof was either coining the term or writing down an idea
in spoken circulation. She does not explain its causes or workings (we are
not told what “new fascism” is); but its existence is asserted, and while
there is an implication, via the historical-political link to fascism, that she
is basing her assertion on evidence or argument, no arguments are actu-
ally made, and no evidence given.
This kind of implied reasoning would characterize the texts of the
RAF. Critics have noted that organization’s failure properly to define or
historically analyze its notion of fascism,38 but Meinhof in her journal-
ism was already failing in exactly the same way. The result is an infla-
tionary use of the term to mean all things negative.39 That inevitably
slides towards opportunism, and thus devalues language: the specific
historical and political meaning of the word gets lost in a bid for effect.
Particularly after the Riemeck affair, “fascism” acquired momentum as
a metaphor in Meinhof ’s writing. Her assumption that a “new fascism”
defined the West German state stabilized her own position in opposi-
tion to it — she comes to occupy a position that is based on a metaphor
she herself created. That position identified her, and those who were
“with” her in the Extraparliamentary Opposition, both in contradistinc-
tion to the German fascists of the past, and among fascism’s victims in
the present: metaphorically, she and her fellow travelers were now the
new Jews.
Terrorists and Resistance Fighters

Like fascism, terrorism (often just called Terror in German) is a powerful
item of vocabulary. It first gained currency during the French Revolution
of 1789, and has historically been used to stigmatize those seen as revo-
lutionary: communists, anarchists, and social democrats, among others.
It was mobilized by the National Socialists under Hitler to devalue their
political opponents, and then, after 1945, to describe the activities of the
Nazis.40 In the 1960s the word re-emerged in the context of the student
movement, used to describe both the rebellious students and those who
opposed them.
In 1967, in a television documentary about the death of student pro-
tester Benno Ohnesorg, Meinhof referred not only to a “police state” but
to “police and press terrorism.”41 Like “fascist,” “terrorist” is a word used
to damn the other side. That means that its application to one’s own side
has to be resisted, and early in 1968 Meinhof answered an attack on the
students in Die Zeit that both characterized their verbal interventions dur-
ing lectures as “terrorism,” and evoked fascism: back in 1933, the author
claims, the young felt similarly superior to the old (“Damals (1933) wie
heute wurde ein mystisch-biologischer Wert ‘jung’ einem mystisch-biolo-
gischen Unwert ‘alt’ entgegengestellt”).42 The implied context is Nazi
eugenics, but Meinhof immediately counters that: this kind of rhetoric
is demonization, she argues, and fans the flames of conflict (“So verhär-
tet man antidemokratisches und antisozialistisches Ressentiment, . . . so
verteufelt man die Studenten”).43 As one journalist reading another, she
identifies the rhetorical intention (which is, indeed, to demonize the stu-
dents by making Nazis or “new fascists” of them), and moves in immedi-
ately to unmask it. (That does not appear to have any impact on her own
practice — rhetoric, it seems, is irresponsible only when it is used by the
other side.)
The title she gave her defense of the students was “Gegen-Gewalt”
(Counter-Violence; Meinhof did not invent that descriptor: student
leader Rudi Dutschke was using counter-violence as a term of self-defense
as early as 1967).44 “Tales of Herr Schütz” and her “Emergency!” article
had constructed the context of a violent, oppressive state, and that con-
text now provided the basis for a legitimization of resistance. Meinhof
tells the story of a protest during the matriculation ceremony at Hamburg
University in the winter of 1967:
Als . . . ein paar SDS-Studenten die Feier störten und diese Störver-
suche während des wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Vortrags des neuen
Rektors allmählich heftiger wurden und allmählich unüberhörbar
und für den Vortrag des neuen Rektors unerträglich, der Schillers
Wirtschaftspolitik rechtfertigte und antigewerkschaftliche Thesen
vortrug, wie z. B. die These von der Lohn-Preis-Spirale und über
Entwicklungshilfe redete, als gäbe es keine Ausbeutung der Dritten
Welt, als das allmählich einer Mehrheit der Studenten im Auditorium
maximum zuviel wurde und sie eben diesen reaktionären Vortrag
nicht länger unwidersprochen hinnehmen wollte, nicht schweigen
wollte wo die Arbeiterschaft beleidigt und der deutsche Imperialis-
mus gerechtfertigt wurde, da gab es einen Punkt, wo die Stimmung
endgültig gegen Rektor und Professoren und Feierlichkeit und
Immatrikulationsbrimborium umzuschlagen drohte und keiner sein
eigenes Wort mehr verstand und kein Mikrophon dagegen ankam
und die Feier zu platzen drohte.45
[When . . . a couple of students from the Socialist Students’ Union

disturbed the ceremony during the lecture on economics delivered
by the new rector, and their attempts to create a disturbance grew
gradually more extreme and gradually impossible to ignore, and
rendered untenable the lecture being given by the new rector, who
was justifying Trade and Industry Minister Schiller’s economic poli-
cies and expounding theories critical of the trades unions such as the
theory of the wage/price spiral and talking about development aid
as if exploitation in the third world did not exist, when that gradually
got too much for the majority of students in the great hall and they
no longer wanted to swallow his reactionary lecture without pro-
test or stand silent while the working classes were insulted and Ger-
man imperialism justified, the moment came when the mood finally
threatened to turn against rector and professors and ceremony and
all the paraphernalia of matriculation and no one could hear them-
selves speak any more and no microphone could change that and the
ceremony threatened to collapse.]
The exhaustingly long sentence is deliberate. Meinhof is using language

to make her readers feel what she is trying to communicate. Relentless
repetition (“and” is repeated thirteen times!) and the overly long sen-
tence force the reader to experience vicariously the unstoppable and seem-
ingly endless speech given by the rector, to make us feel the linguistic
“violence” done to the listening students. Her subject, however, is resis-
tance — “counter-violence” — and there is a turning point in the narra-
tive and in the syntax. The moment comes, she tells us, when the students
started to get the upper hand. Now the conjunction “and” becomes a
sign of the students’ triumph: no longer signaling violence but counter-
violence, the repeated “and” marks their successful resistance in the face
of (linguistic) oppression. Syntactically the students are shown to be a

match for institutional or university authority.
Both the story and its syntax are designed to persuade us that “coun-
ter-violence” is justified, justifiable, and above all an effective response
to violence. What Die Zeit called “terrorism” is being redefined as resis-
tance — in postwar Germany by implication antifascist. Meinhof was
beginning to create an idea that would become a key part of her think-
ing: the figure of the warrior-revolutionary who smashes (verbally, for the
moment) the structures of institutionalized violence. That implicit notion
would become explicit in the columns of 1968, the year in which she
moved, in her own words, “from protest to resistance.”
1968
During the 1960s Ulrike Meinhof (who was also known by her married
name, Ulrike Röhl) was a successful journalist and by all accounts a pop-
ular party guest in Hamburg high society. The writer Peter Rühmkorf,
a family friend, has described her as an exotic addition to such circles,
a kind of mascot of the liberal establishment.46 She later characterized
herself disparagingly during this period as a “jester for the revolution”
(“Revolutionskasperle”).47
In February 1968, very soon after she wrote her column on the Ham-
burg students’ “counter-violence,” Meinhof left the detached villa she
shared with Röhl in Hamburg and moved to Berlin with her twin daughters
Regine und Bettina. The separation was final — Röhl was seeing another
woman, not for the first time — and she applied immediately for divorce
via her solicitor Kurt Groenewold (later a defense lawyer for the Red Army
Faction). For the time being she continued to write for konkret, which had
by now acquired a readership of around one hundred forty thousand.48
1968 has become synonymous with the student movement. In the
course of that year the political situation in West Germany and West Ber-
lin grew explosive. In February the International Vietnam Congress drew
students from home and abroad, and concluded with a protest march
involving more than twelve thousand antiwar demonstrators. On 11 April
1968, twenty-three-year-old Josef Bachmann identified and shot Rudi
Dutschke on West Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm. In Bachmann’s pocket was
an article cut from the right-wing Nationalzeitung with the title “Stoppt
Dutscke jetzt” (Stop Dutschke now). Dutschke survived, but the attack
was followed by demonstrations directed against the publishing house of
Axel Springer, whose widely read Bild-Zeitung had fanned the flames of
public feeling against Dutschke and the students (Bachmann, however,
claimed at his trial that he was not a reader of Springer’s newspapers).49
During the demonstrations — at which Meinhof, who now lived in Berlin,
was present — home-made explosives were thrown; a short film shown at
the Technical University had demonstrated what its title promised: The
Making of a Molotov Cocktail.50 It was the work of Holger Meins, a film
student who would later be a core member of the Red Army Faction.51
Meinhof’s columns of 1968 document a critical year not only in West
Germany and West Berlin, but in the development of her own politics.
Soon after the anti-Springer protests she wrote a piece called “Vom Pro-
test zum Widerstand” (From Protest to Resistance).52 Using the slogan
of the American student movement, it built on the notion of fighting
back — counter-violence — raised in her account of the Hamburg pro-
test. There the key term “resistance” (Widerstand) was never actually
used; in her defense of the radical students’ (verbal) attacks on university
staff, she had recourse to the more legalistic notion of self-defense (Not-
wehr). Now, in tracking a development from “protest to resistance,” she
found a name for the activism of the warrior-revolutionary that distin-
guished it from the violence of the state and its institutions: the heroic
term Widerstand. Where “terrorism” is negatively laden, “resistance” has
powerfully positive connotations.53 It is the polar opposite of the Nazi
metaphor — it connotes not only difference from fascism, but the cour-
age to fight it. On the streets of Berlin (and elsewhere), the rioters of
1968 had attacked and damaged the publishing premises of Springer, and
Meinhof draws on the positive connotations of Widerstand to render that
a heroic act. The protesters are not vandals or terrorists, but resistance
fighters: warrior-revolutionaries.
The distinction she makes between “protest” and “resistance” is that
the former is verbal (and toothless), the latter physical (and effective) vio-
lence. The move from words to physical acts of violence crosses a bound-
ary, she tells us, in bouncy syntax that communicates excitement rather
than dismay:
Die Grenze zwischen verbalem Protest und physischem Widerstand

ist bei den Protesten in den Osterfeiertagen erstmalig massenhaft,
von vielen, nicht nur einzelnen, über Tage hin, nicht nur einma-
lig, vielerorts, nicht nur in Berlin, tatsächlich, nicht nur symbo-
lisch — überschritten worden.54
[During the protests over the Easter holiday period the boundary
between verbal protest and physical resistance was crossed for the
first time en masse, not by the few but by the many, and not just
once but over a period of days, and not just in Berlin but across Ger-
many, and not just symbolically, but for real.]
The defense of verbal “counter-violence” has developed into a justifica-

tion of violent action against private property and objects.
On 30 May 1968 the emergency laws were finally passed despite

massive peaceful protest. A “star march” (Sternmarsch) on 11 June 1968
brought around sixty thousand demonstrators marching in a star forma-
tion (that is, radiating in from different locations) to Bonn, the center of
government — and was ignored by that government. The article in which
Meinhof responds to this failure to influence policy: “Notstand — Klas-
senkampf” (Emergency — Class War) expressed a doubt that had much
wider implications: the doubt whether political battles fought peacefully,
and in words, have any currency at all.
She describes the ten-year struggle against the passing of the laws,
but even as she writes she is also reflecting on the effectiveness — or oth-
erwise — of language. As a writer, she dismisses the notion that words
genuinely contribute to the struggle for political change. Can one even
call it a struggle, she asks, given that so far it has been conducted “only
in writing, harmless speechifying and verbal shows of strength?” (“was
heißt hier schon Kampf, wo er doch bisher nur mit Schriftsätzen, harm-
losen Veranstaltungen, verbalen Kraftakten geführt wurde”).55 She does
not, on this occasion, say what beyond verbal shows of strength might
qualify as genuine resistance. Instead, for now, she stays with language,
transforming the word Kampf (“struggle” or “battle”) into the related
phrase “Klassenkampf” (“class war”). The decision to oppose the emer-
gency laws by the democratic method of peaceful demonstration was not
just unsuccessful, she argues; it was a wrong decision. Given that a capital-
ist democracy is a contradiction in terms, peaceful protest within the capi-
talist system is a naïve waste of time; capitalism, according to Meinhof,
requires dominators and dominated if it is to function, and is therefore
of its nature antidemocratic. Oppositional energy needs to focus more
radically on the business of overturning the system — on class war in the
Marxist sense:
Wir haben die politische Demokratie verteidigt, anstatt die gesell-

schaftlichen Mächte, die Unternehmerverbände samt ihren Depen-
dancen in Staat und Gesellschaft selbst anzugreifen. . . . Wir haben
gegen die Notstandsgesetze argumentiert, anstatt gegen die Macht
der Konzerne zu kämpfen . . . es [ist] uns nicht gelungen . . . , Klas-
senkampf zu machen. (143)
[We have defended political democracy instead of attacking the insti-

tutions of power — the associations of employers and their fiefdoms
in state and society . . . We have argued against the emergency laws
instead of doing battle with the power of big business . . . we have
not managed to engage in class war.]
In her article on the Hamburg “counter-violence,” the syntax conveyed

the relentless force of the rector’s address; here it evokes the growth of
capitalism, communicating the unstoppability of a process:
So konnte gleichzeitig mit der Bewegung gegen die Notstandsge-

setze der Springerkonzern wachsen, und die Herren an der Ruhr
konnten ihre Subventionen einstreichen und die Haus- und Grund-
besitzer sich einen Lücke-Plan machen lassen, kurz: gleichzeitig und
von der Bewegung gegen die Notstandsgesetze ganz unbehindert
wuchs auch die Macht der Gesellschaftsinhaber und nicht mal nur
ihre wirtschaftliche Macht, auch ihre politische Macht. (143)
[While we protested against the emergency laws Springer’s publish-

ing business was able to grow, and the powerful industrialists in the
Ruhr were able to benefit from subsidies, and the house- and land-
owners were able to make their own Lücke plan [a ruling passed in
1960 to reduce controls on landlords and rents], in short: simulta-
neous with the movement against the emergency laws, and entirely
unhindered by it, the power of those who own our society was grow-
ing, and not only their economic power, but their political power.]
The familiar repetition of “and” (five times in one sentence) commu-

nicates unstoppability, and adds to the sense of capitalism’s bulldozing
force. Despite her expressed doubt that language is a valid form of resis-
tance, Meinhof was still using it to persuade her readers.
Violence
In the same issue of konkret a long article appeared, attributed to the
“Berlin Editors’ Collective” (Berliner Redaktionskollektiv). Since Mein-
hof’s departure, tensions had arisen between konkret’s Hamburg team
and contributors to the magazine around Meinhof in Berlin, who now
formed an alternative “Editors’ Collective”: a group of high-profile left-
wingers including student leader Dutschke, Iranian political exile and
author Bahman Nirumand, and the writers Hans Magnus Enzensberger,
Gaston Salvatore, and Peter Schneider.56 As individuals they were all
highly desirable contributors to the magazine (which by 1968 was losing
its political credentials, as Röhl — after losing his East German support
in 1964 because he would not toe the party line — included more sex to
make more money), but the condition they imposed for their continued
input was that their articles should be collectively written, and published
without editorial interference in Hamburg, exactly as delivered.
Their contribution in June 1968 has the simple title “Gewalt” (Vio-
lence). It is a long, inflammatory piece, rarely discussed because it has
never been reprinted. Röhl, its original publisher, describes it with some
justification as a piece of writing that prepared the ground for the later
theories of the Red Army Faction.57 It picks up where Meinhof’s column
on class war (at the front of the same the issue) leaves off.
After demonstrators attacked Springer premises in Berlin in response
to the shooting of Dutschke, the unrest spread across cities in West Ger-
many. Demonstrations ended in street battles. What that means, the Berlin
Editors’ Collective explains to a konkret readership, is that violent protest
is no longer the exception that proves the (nonviolent) rule. Now the
“revolutionary legitimacy” of violence is being put to the test; violence
is “an instrument we shall neither categorically reject nor use arbitrarily,
one whose effectiveness and revolutionary legitimacy we need to learn to
understand in a process of theoretical reflection and practical use” (“ein
Mittel, das wir weder kategorisch ablehnen noch willkürlich anwenden
werden, dessen Methodik und revolutionärer Legitimität wir vielmehr in
theoretischer Reflexion und praktischer Anwendung erlernen und beg-
reifen müssen”).58 Like Meinhof herself so often, the collective writes in
the “we” form, implying that these are not the opinions of the one, but
the many. “We” refers both to the collective and to those who are now at
last uniting to protest against the system. It creates an in-group that the
reader is encouraged, even manipulated, to feel part of.
The article directly develops ideas rehearsed by Meinhof in her pieces
on counter-violence and class war. Nonviolent action, the collective main-
tains, is useless to the point of being counterrevolutionary. Words are
toothless. Violence is the only language the system understands because
capitalism relies on violent oppression for its continued existence; vio-
lence is the language of capitalism (“die Sprache des Systems”). In that
context, any violence “we” engage in is a justified response. Not only
that: because force or violence is the only language the system under-
stands, counter-violence is actually virtuous in that it instigates communi-
cation: “only since we have started using violence ourselves has a realistic
dialogue begun to develop, as the system is having to pull back its veil and
speak” (“Erst seitdem wir beginnen, selbst Gewalt anzuwenden, entsteht
ein realistischer Dialog, den das System mit unverhülltem Gesicht spre-
chen muß”; 24). The system — as the RAF will later insist — is a wolf in
sheep’s clothing, a mask-wearing fascist monster that must be provoked
into revealing its true face.
But a delicate process of differentiation is necessary if “oppressive
violence,” as the veiled but true essence of capitalism, is to be distin-
guished from “counter-violence”: the ingenuous resistance practiced by
opponents of the system. There is clearly something counterintuitive in
the argument that violence is not the same as violence. On this point the
collective proceeds both defensively and with a (verbal) offensive. Neces-
sary discussions about left-wing violence are being held back, it argues, by
bourgeois humanism, bourgeois morality, and pacifism (reading between
the lines: not everyone on the left they have spoken to on the subject of
violence agrees with them). The student movement and those associated
with it distinguished between violence against things — buildings, cars,
and so forth, called Gewalt gegen Sachen — and violence against other
people, Gewalt gegen Personen — which it rejected. To take things for-
ward the collective feels that certain “differentiations” need to be made
(24).59 The article’s first section is spent constructing these differentia-
tions or distinctions.
It is a process of self-justification clearly intended to legitimize bru-
tal action, something the collective, in a frightening turn of phrase, calls
“enlightening violence” (aufklärerische Gewalt). The first differentiation
is between hidden or latent and open or manifest violence: “zwischen
mittelbarer (latenter) und unmittelbarer (manifester) Gewalt.” Latent
violence, we have already been told, is the essence of capitalism: “the class
system created by organized capitalism,” says the collective, “is per se a
single gigantic act of violence” (“die Klassengesellschaft des organisierten
Kapitalismus ist an sich selbst ein einziger gigantischer Akt der Gewalt”).
The second differentiation is between “repressive” and “emancipatory”
violence (“unterdrückender (repressiver) und befreiender (emanzipieren-
der) Gewalt”), where the latter is to be understood as the solution to
the former — the violently oppressed subject emancipates him- or herself
via an act of reciprocal violence, or counter-violence (24–26, emphasis in
original). It is crucial to the argument that this is the only possible solu-
tion: only violence, the argument runs, can overthrow violence. That vio-
lence against persons is meant is suggested by the implicit appeal to the
theories of postcolonialist writer Frantz Fanon, widely read on the West
German left. Fanon had worked as a psychiatric doctor in a hospital in
Algeria, and his book Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth,
1961) drew on his experience of the Algerian uprising against the French.
It appeared in German in 1966 with a translation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s
original foreword, summarizing Fanon’s argument: “No gentleness
can efface the marks of violence; only violence itself can destroy them,”
declared Sartre; successful resistance to colonialism means violence to the
point of killing: “in the first days of the revolt you must kill.”60
The Berlin collective’s article is remarkable for its decisive move
away from the students’ taboo that forbade violence against other human
beings. The attacks on Springer’s publishing house were conceived as vio-
lence against things: buildings, not people. In the course of the protests,
however, two fatal accidents had occurred: one in which a press photogra-
pher was hit and killed by a stone, another when a student was killed by a
block of wood; both objects were thrown by persons unknown. The Ber-
lin authors declare the photographer and the student, along with Benno
Ohnesorg and Rudi Dutschke, victims of state violence. Ohnesorg and
Dutschke were in fact shot in very different circumstances — Ohnesorg
by a policeman during a demonstration, Dutschke when going about his

daily business (buying nose-drops for his baby son, the story goes). But
the collective takes all four casualties as proof that the state has already
committed violence against persons — and that makes counter-violence
against persons an appropriate response. The authors return to the legal
notion of self-defense we met in Meinhof’s piece on counter-violence: “as
long as Axel Springer is allowed to go on with his murderous campaign
against us, which has already resulted in two cases of murderous attack
[Dutschke and Ohnesorg], and as long as the political parties are behind
Springer,” they argue, “we are acting in self-defense” (“Solange Springer
seine Mordhetze, die schon zwei Mordanschläge zur Folge hatte, weit-
erverbreiten darf, solange die Parteien sich hinter Springer stellen, han-
deln wir in Notwehr”; 25, emphasis in original).
In the liberal and democratic West Germany of 1968 the Berlin
authors seem to know they are walking on thin ice, and they look to bol-
ster their position rhetorically. The method they choose is familiar from
Meinhof’s columns: implied reasoning, or argument by association. They
legitimize their right to violence by associating themselves and their situa-
tion with other situations and other societies. That begins with an emotive
link to the developing world, where “the violent plundering of the colo-
nies gave the capitalists their first riches (“Durch die gewaltsame Ausplün-
derung der Kolonialländer haben die Kapitalisten ihre ersten Reichtümer
angehäuft”). Not only did the empire-builders use violence to ensure the
continuing ascendancy of capital, but “bombs, napalm, and machine guns
maintain imperial dominance today in the face of the liberation move-
ments: in Vietnam, in Latin America, in Africa” (“Mit Gewalt wurde
die Verlängerung der Herrschaft des Kapitals durch den Imperialismus
durchgesetzt, und mit Bomben, Napalm und Maschinengewehren wird
sie heute gegen die Befreiungsbewegungen aufrechterhalten: in Vietnam,
in Lateinamerika, in Afrika”; 26).
What links the developing world with West Germany is capitalism.
Many things differentiate the Federal Republic from the developing
world, of course, but the collective ignores that, instead mobilizing the
simple and specious formula, “because A equals C, and B equals C, A
must also equal B” (“because my dog likes carrots and rabbits like carrots,
my dog must be a rabbit”). Because the system in West Germany is capi-
talist and capitalism is colonial, those who resist the German system are
equated with colonized peoples in countries now engaged in a struggle for
self-government. That legitimizes the implicit identification with Fanon.
But Fanon’s argument rests on a set of case studies he encountered in the
hospital where he worked. He outlines the psychological response of a
local man whose wife was raped by French soldiers, and of another who
survived the massacre of his entire village by the French army. He lists
mental disorders caused by torture, alongside descriptions of the various
forms of physical abuse and brainwashing used by the French police in

Algeria — descriptions provided by the sufferers he treated — as well as
the distressing medium- and long-term effects in the victims. Intention-
ally or not, Fanon’s case studies explain the anger that led him to support
an armed response. “The native,” he observed, “knows that he is not an
animal; and it is precisely at the moment he realizes his humanity that he
begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure its victory.”61 It
is more difficult to understand the insistence of the Berlin collective that
violence against human beings is now a necessary thing for the emancipa-
tion of West Germany. (The connection they make between the Federal
Republic and the third world, like Meinhof’s between the Federal Repub-
lic and the Third Reich, would nonetheless inform the thought processes
of the Red Army Faction.)
Identification with history’s victims — Vietnamese civilians were
appearing in newspaper pictures and on television screens in a real-life
horror show that for many German viewers recalled postwar footage of
the concentration camps — may well have provided a level of relief for
a people impelled, after both world wars, to identify as perpetrators. It
is used by Meinhof and her collective to justify the most extreme forms
of “resistance.” In March 1968 Meinhof cited rumors that the United
States was about to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam. She juxtaposed
these with rumors of more local relevance: namely, that the regional
government in Berlin was planning to get tougher on anti–Vietnam War
and anti-Springer protesters. Her implication: American foreign policy
mirrors Berlin’s local government, and if that is the case then the situa-
tion of the North Vietnamese must mirror that of the German students.
American imperialism will destroy the world that it dominates before it
will allow itself to be defeated, she asserts, and Berlin’s bureaucrats and
administrators — in a constructed parallel — will destroy democracy
rather than give up their positions.62 Protesters in Germany, it seems,
are no longer the new Jews — now they have become the new Vietnam-
ese. Meinhof supports and justifies the student’s own protest slogan,
“Berlin is Vietnam!”63
The Berlin collective would tell us three months later in its piece on
violence that the whole process of recognizing the capitalist system for
the inherently violent thing it is began with Vietnam.64 In the spirit of
nineteenth-century orientalism (whereby the self is recognized the more
clearly in the mirror of the exotic other), the idea is that the true face
of capitalism is revealed in the third world. Recognizing it there — in a
place external to the West — enables a clearer view of the wolf beneath
the sheep’s clothing at home. The latent brutality of Western govern-
ments can only be unmasked if it is provoked; in its response to the dem-
onstrators of ’68, capitalism is showing its true face. That was initially
revealed only to the countries of the third world — but “now we too are
feeling the pressure of beatings and shootings” (“der Kapitalismus zeigt
sein wahres Gesicht, das er vorerst nur die Länder der dritten Welt hat
sehen lassen: es wird gehetzt, geschlagen und geschossen”; 27). There is
self-dramatization here: a heroic pose, as well as a choice to identify with
those (like Fanon’s Algerians) who were genuinely involved in a life-or-
death struggle. But to compare the conflict of the German state and the
student movement with the brutal postcolonial crisis in Algeria is radically
inaccurate rather than radical politics.
The next mental shift is from the West German struggle to the Black
Power movement. The U.S. civil rights campaigner and black activist
Stokely Carmichael is cited (Carmichael first opposed, but later supported
the use of violence). Here the collective has the grace to recognize that
its own situation is not identical with the situation of those still struggling
for basic civil rights: “We are reaching the objective limits of our use of
the term counter-violence,” it concedes; “we are not living in the slums
of Detroit or New York . . . We are white. We can’t claim to be exploited,
because we belong to the privileged classes” (“Gleichzeitig stoßen wir
hier auf die objektiven Grenzen unserer Anwendung von Gegengewalt.
Wir leben nicht in den Slums von Detroit und New York. . . . Wir sind
selber weiß. Wir können auch nicht behaupten, daß wir ausgebeutet wer-
den, denn wir gehören zu den Privilegierten”; 28).
There are nonetheless, in the Berlin authors’ final analysis, two things
that justify the use of violence. The first is the (reiterated) notion that
their kind of violence is, in fact, counter-violence. It does not originate
with them. Because property and profit must needs be defended, violence
is an inevitable part of capitalism: violence, says the collective, belongs to
capitalism as the policeman belongs to private property, and as long as
capitalism exists violence will not disappear (“Gewalt gehört zum Kapi-
talismus wie der Polizist zum Privateigentum, und solange es den Kap-
italismus gibt, wird die Gewalt nicht verschwinden”). If capitalism can
only function when it is enforced, there can never be a capitalist system
that is not violent; that makes it appropriate to overthrow the violent sys-
tem violently: “we can do without violence,” say the Berlin authors (even
though they clearly do not intend to); “capitalism can’t. We can abolish
violence — but only after we have done away with the violent system”
(“Wir können auf die Gewalt verzichten. Der Kapitalismus nicht. Wir
können die Gewalt abschaffen, aber erst, wenn wir das System der Gewalt
beseitigt haben”; 25, 27). There is, they claim, a need to demonstrate
to those who do not belong to the privileged classes (and therefore lack
access to the revolutionary polemics published in journals like konkret)
that the system is brutal. To that end it is their moral duty to provoke the
system, through acts of violence, into showing its true face to the masses.
The Frankfurt Arsonists

Vietnam was the trigger and justification for the best-known incident
of “violence against things” of Germany’s 1968. In October, Meinhof
went to Frankfurt to interview four young anti–Vietnam War protest-
ers accused of committing arson in the city’s department stores. Two of
them, Gudrun Ensslin and her boyfriend Andreas Baader, would later be
core members of the Red Army Faction. Alongside Thorwald Proll (b.
1941) and Horst Söhnlein (b. 1942) they were charged with planting
flammable devices in two city center stores during the night of 2 April
1968. In court, the foursome explained that it had been their intention
to focus public attention on the situation in Vietnam, which was also in
flames; the only difference was that in Vietnam it was people rather than
consumer goods that were burning.65
The column Meinhof wrote after her visit to Frankfurt is one of her
best known and most frequently cited. She titled it straightforwardly
“Warenhausbrandstiftung” (Setting Fire to Department Stores).66 In the
context of her two previous articles on counter-violence and violence,
what we find in this column is disturbing, but should not come as a sur-
prise. It is the next step in a train of thought that would later inform the
self-justification of the RAF: that violence not only can but must be met
with violence, and that the value of violence may well be symbolic.
In her article, Meinhof censures the Frankfurt fire bombs because
insurance companies will pay for the damage and capitalism is therefore bol-
stered, not hindered; this, she argues, renders arson tendentially supportive
of the system, and therefore counterrevolutionary (“eher systemerhaltend,
konterrevolutionär”).67 But at the same time she praises a revolutionary ele-
ment in the act of breaking the law that protects department stores because
it is, she maintains, a false law that shields property rather than people; the
disadvantage of arson is that the insurance company pays (so store owners
may even profit), but the advantage of arson is that it breaks the oppressive
law that protects property. Violence against property, Meinhof argues, is a
justified attack on a system that privileges ownership and profit while per-
mitting exploitation in the workplace and the violation of human dignity.
Her analysis has been taken to signal a shift away from the “playful”
ambiguity of revolutionary rhetoric, where demands can be read as pro-
vocative word play, toward a serious call to violent action. It is possible
to ascribe a violent agency to the language that makes it practically an
act of violence in itself.68 But Meinhof does not herself ascribe agency to
language. In her conclusion she admires a clever linguistic formulation,
citing with approval a quip by Fritz Teufel (a member of Berlin’s famous
commune, the Kommune 1), that it is better to set fire to a department
store than to run one;69 she clearly sees this kind of play with words as
distinct from the revolutionary action of lawbreaking.
Röhl has refused to read his ex-wife’s column on arson as an incite-

ment to violence against persons because, he argues, her essay condones
the breaking not of all laws, but of laws relating specifically to the protec-
tion of property. She is therefore still upholding the binary of violence
against things as opposed to human beings.70 But Röhl is conveniently
choosing to forget the June issue of his magazine, just four months ear-
lier, which included two contributions on the subject of violence, one of
them authored and one coauthored by Meinhof (with the Berlin collec-
tive). The arson column repeats the argumentative structures developed
there: it is justified, she reiterates, to break the laws of an unjust system
because that is counter-violence. Lawbreaking is paradoxically made
legitimate; within a system that has been identified as corrupt, resistance
becomes criminal activity.
With the end of 1968, one column marks the beginning of the end of
Meinhof’s career as a journalist. “Kolumnismus” (Columnism) appeared
just before Christmas,71 and sets out arguments against her own primary
activity. Her essay attacks the role and function of columnists like herself:
they are, she says, little better than court jesters — they entertain readers
with political polemic, conjuring the illusion that the paper they write for
is radical and free. On 26 April 1969 she would publicly end her work
for konkret with a statement in the Frankfurter Rundschau newspaper to
the effect that the magazine was becoming an instrument of the coun-
terrevolution, and she did not wish her contribution to disguise that.72
Her developing sense of herself as a revolutionary figure is tangible — the
mere presence of a column by Ulrike Meinhof, her statement suggests,
would act as a (deceptive) guarantor for konkret’s radical credentials.
One possible alternative to leaving konkret, of course, would have
been to use her influence as former editor to take the magazine over and
reshape it as an organ of the revolution. Röhl’s version is that on 7 May
a group from Berlin, organized by Meinhof and including the father of
Ensslin’s child, Bernward Vesper, attacked konkret’s Hamburg premises
with the intention of occupying the offices — a hostile takeover in a lit-
eral sense. Röhl had been warned and the office was empty. The frustrated
group moved on to break into his private home in Blankenese, a wealthy
suburb of the city (the home he had previously shared with Meinhof),
and vandalized the property. Meinhof was widely criticized for her part
in events. Biographer Jutta Ditfurth suggests that Röhl’s version of the
story deliberately exaggerates both the drama of events and the damage
done, and that Meinhof herself arrived on the scene too late to have been
actively involved.73
Perhaps because of her origins in the peace movement, Meinhof is remem-

bered by many as a Sophie Scholl figure: she is the “conscience” of the post-
war German left, the ethical element in the RAF, a nonviolent individual.74
But the later pieces for konkret — most particularly the Berlin collective’s
article on violence — clearly demonstrate how far both she and a high-
profile group of left-wing thinkers had come by the end of the 1960s
in their will to justify violent action. Meinhof was a key player in a proj-
ect to create a language that justified violence to the point of killing,
and to define those who engaged violently with current events as war-
rior-revolutionaries and heroes of the resistance. Incidents such as the
police killing of student protester Ohnesorg and the random assassina-
tion of Dutschke may well have widened her audience, but in postwar
West Germany — not, in fact, a police state — it was only really possible
to make the arguments she wished to make by means of metaphor. The
Federal Republic “is” a fascist state, it “is” Nazi Germany, it “is” Vietnam
or Algeria. These are useful fictions with a rhetorical impetus: metaphors
that justify counter-violence.
But in the game of smoke and mirrors that metaphor plays, it is pos-
sible for the writer as well as her reader to lose track of what is real. Parallels
between German radicals and suffering Vietnamese and Algerians conceal
rather than examine the crucial differences between life in the Federal Repub-
lic and life in the third world. We are left facing the question whether Meinhof
still remembered that this was a rhetorical technique rather than a representa-
tion of reality, whether the writer or the language was really in control.
Recently there has been severe criticism of her “obsessive” use of
holocaust symbols, and of her ruthless functionalization of the Jewish
experience.75 We face the question why a serious journalist felt that such
drastic use of language, leading toward the justification of extreme vio-
lence, was necessary or excusable. Her columns suggest that the dramatic
end of Riemeck’s professorial career affected her profoundly, coinciding
as it did with parliamentary discussion of the emergency laws as a further
attack — in Meinhof’s perception — on political freedom and civil liber-
ties. When the laws were passed in the face of massive peaceful protest,
she clearly felt she had failed politically; not even her expert use of lan-
guage had been enough to influence the course of events. That coincided
with the activities of the Frankfurt arsonists, who seemed to demonstate
the high-profile effects of action over words. There is developing notion,
over ten years of column-writing, that journalistic intervention in pol-
itics — verbal protest — is simply not enough. It does not deserve the
heroic term Widerstand (resistance). From here it is a small step to the
idea that language is politically toothless, that action trumps words.
In her earlier journalism she had functionalized Auschwitz to demon-
ize a postwar government, and her Berlin Editors’ Collective used the
notion that “new fascism” already existed to propose the use of violence
in West Germany and West Berlin. Violence against persons was justi-
fied via identification with groups perceived to be exposed to unjustifi-
able violence: later no longer the Jews, but the peoples of Vietnam and
the third world, Black Power activists, and the German proletariat. Mein-
hof metaphorically associated victimhood under fascism with whomever
she currently identified with: in her earlier career with West Germany’s
peace activists, later with anti–Vietnam War protesters, finally with the
Red Army Faction.
As she sought to demonstrate with her Berlin Editors’ Collective
and argued in “Columnism,” group activity trumps individual effort.
Columnism, insisted Meinhof, is a cult of the individual (Personenkult),
and for that reason always already opposed to the socialist ideal, but it is
also politically ineffective because the columnist is isolated: “the left-wing
position . . . is reduced in columnism to the position of isolated individu-
als” (“Die linke Position . . . wird im Kolumnismus wieder zur Position
Einzelner, Vereinzelter”). What is needed is solidarity in the group. The
twin notions of action over words and group solidarity were at the heart
of her last journalistic project: her script for a television drama, called
Bambule (Riot).
Notes
The citations for the two epigraphs in this chapter are as follows: Meinhof, “Der
Friede macht Geschichte,” in konkret 19–20 (1959), reprinted in Meinhof, Die
Würde des Menschen ist antastbar: Aufsätze und Polemiken (Berlin: Wagenbach,
1995 [1980]), 7–13; and Berliner Redaktionskollektiv, “Gewalt,” in konkret 6
(1968): 24–28 and 35; here 24.
1 Former owner-editor Röhl tells his version of its story in his autobiography Fünf
Finger sind keine Faust: Eine Abrechnung, 3rd edn. (Munich: Universitas, 1998
[1974]); here 59.
2 See Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof: Die Biografie (Berlin: Ullstein, 2007), 129–30;
K. Röhl, Fünf Finger, 59–85. It was Hübotter who bought the title back when
konkret went bankrupt under Röhl in 1973.
3K. Röhl, Fünf Finger, 206. Bettina Röhl confirms this: B. Röhl, So macht Kom-
munismus Spaß! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte konkret (Ham-
burg: EVA, 2006).
4 K. Röhl, Fünf Finger, 101; “kostbare Beute” is the term Röhl uses.
5 Jürgen Manthey, cited in B. Röhl, So macht Kommunismus Spaß!, 216.
6 Meinhof, “Der Friede macht Geschichte.”
7 “sittengefährdend,” “krasses Beispiel der Abwertung christlicher Moralbe-
griffe,” cited in K. Röhl, Fünf Finger, 159.
8 “Wie wir unsere Eltern nach Hitler fragen, so werden wir eines Tages nach
Herrn Strauß gefragt werden.” Meinhof, “Hitler in euch,” in konkret 10 (1961),
reprinted in Meinhof, Deutschland Deutschland unter anderm: Aufsätze und Pole-
miken (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1995), 38–42. Translated as “Hitler Within You,” in
Meinhof, Everybody Talks about the Weather . . . We Don’t: The Writings of Ulrike
Meinhof, ed. Karin Bauer (New York: Seven Stories, 2008), 138–43.
9 Meinhof, “Koalitionskrise,” in konkret 10 (1964): 3.

10 Heldmann, Selbstmord oder Mord (Kiel: Neuer Malik Verlag, 1988).
11 “Strauß [müsste] nur aufhören, Augstein einsperren zu lassen und ein paar
Prozesse halbwegs gewinnen, um wieder ganz salonfähig zu werden.” Meinhof,
“Franz Strauß,” in konkret 10 (1966), reprinted in Meinhof, Die Würde, 84–87;
here 84.
12 See B. Röhl, So macht Kommunismus Spaß, 423.
13 B. Röhl, So macht Kommunismus Spaß, 31–32 and passim; Kristin Wesemann,
Ulrike Meinhof: Kommunistin, Journalistin, Terroristin — eine politische Biogra-
phie (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2008).
14 See B. Röhl, So macht Kommunismus Spaß, 357.
15 The petition was titled “Appell an die Gewerkschaften gegen die atomare Auf-
rüstung der Bundeswehr.”
16Meinhof, “Geschichten von Herrn Schütz,” in konkret 15 (1960), reprinted in
Meinhof, Deutschland Deutschland, 22–30; here 22.
17 See Jürgen Seifert, “Ulrike Meinhof,” in Die RAF und der linke Terrorismus,
ed. Wolfgang Kraushaar, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition 2006), 1:350–
71; here 360; Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof, 37–40.
18 Meinhof, “Geschichten von Herrn Schütz,” 29.
19 Seifert, “Ulrike Meinhof.”
20 The real title of the so-called Rotbuch was Verschwörung gegen die Freiheit. Die
kommunistische Untergrundarbeit in der Bundesrepublik (The Conspiracy Against
Liberty: Communist Underground Activity in the Federal Republic.) The infor-
mation was collected by the Munich-based Arbeitsgruppe Kommunistische Infil-
tration und Machtkampftechnik (Working Group on Communist Infiltration and
Takeover Techniques), one branch of the publicly funded committee Rettet die
Freiheit (Save our Liberty). It was a response to the Braunbuch (Brown Book),
produced in the GDR, which listed prominent ex-Nazis. See, e.g., the commen-
tary by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in konkret 18 (1960): 5.
21 Meinhof, “Geschichten von Herrn Schütz,” 22–23.
22Meinhof, “Notstand? Notstand!” in konkret 18 (1960), reprinted in Meinhof,
Die Würde, 14–19; here 14.
23 Meinhof, “Notstand? Notstand!” 14–15. Emphasis in original.
24 See Julian Baggini and Peter S. Fosl, The Philosopher’s Toolkit: A Compendium
of Philosophical Concepts and Methods (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 64. See also my
Introduction.
25 Meinhof, “Notstand? Notstand!” 14.
26 See Georg Stötzel, “Der Nazi-Komplex,” in Kontroverse Begriffe: Geschichte
des öffentlichen Sprachgebrauchs in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1994), 355–82, esp. 370–71.
27 Meinhof, “Fortsetzung des Nazismus in der globalen Politik,” in konkret 13
(1960): 3.
28 Dieter Großherr, “ . . . und höret nimmer auf? Der Antisemitismus in der Bun-
desrepublik seit 1945,” in konkret 2 (1960): 2–5.
29 Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof, 96.
30 V. H. [sic], “Glatt glätter Globke,” in konkret 14 (1961), reprinted in 30 Jahre
KONKRET, ed. Hermann L. Gremliza (Hamburg: konkret, 1987), 47–48. See
also Moritz Pfeil, “Globke und andere Deutsche,” Spiegel 13 (1961): 18; Der
schwarze Kanal (10 April 1961); transcript at http://sk.dra.de/kanal_pdf/E065–
02–04_0001054.pdf.
31 See, e.g., Meinhof, “Demokratie spielen,” in Meinhof, Die Würde, 134–37.
32Meinhof, “Neue deutsche Ghettoschau,” in konkret 10 (1960), reprinted in
Meinhof, Deutschland Deutschland, 14–21; here 14. Translated as “New German
Ghetto Show,” in Meinhof, Everybody Talks, 110–20.
33 Meinhof, “Hitler in Euch,” 41.
34 Meinhof, “Joachim Fest oder die Gleichschaltung,” in konkret 8 (1966): 2–3;
here 2.
35 Meinhof, “Notstand? Notstand!” 17.
36 Meinhof, “Demokratie spielen,” 134.
37Bernhard Gierds attributes the “handy formula” (“griffige Formel”) to André
Glucksmann in Glucksmann et al., Neuer Faschismus, Neue Demokratie: Über die
Legalität des Faschismus im Rechtsstaat (1972); see Gierds, “Das ‘Konzept Stadt-
guerilla’: Meinhof, Mahler und ihre strategischen Differenzen,” in Die RAF, ed.
Kraushaar, 1:248–61; here 252. In fact, as we see, Meinhof was using the idea
some years earlier.
38 See, e.g., Gierds, “Das ‘Konzept Stadtguerilla,’” 251–52; Iring Fetscher,
Herfried Münkler, and Hannelore Ludwig, “Ideologien der Terroristen in der
Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” in Fetscher und Günter Rohrmoser, Ideologien
und Strategien (Analysen zum Terrorismus, ed. Bundesministerium des Innern,
vol. 1) (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981), 165–66 and 187–88.
39“inflationärer Gebrauch” is Gierds’s term; see Gierds, “Das ‘Konzept Stadt-
guerilla,’” 252.
40 Andreas Musolff has described the use of the word “terrorism” in Germany
since the nineteenth century. See Musolff, Krieg gegen die Öffentlichkeit: Terroris-
mus und politischer Sprachgebrauch (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), 143.
41 “Die Proteste gegen einen Polizeistaatschef entlarvten unseren Staat selbst als
Polizeistaat. Polizei- und Presseterror erreichten am 2. Juni in Berlin ihren Höhe-
punkt.” Meinhof, Kommentar zum Schah-Besuch in Berlin, Stiftung Deutsches
Rundfunkarchiv Wiesbaden, Potsdam-Babelsberg (SFB), 1967; cited in B. Röhl,
So macht Kommunismus Spaß, 560.
42 “Wenn aber dreihundert einen einzelnen ‘fertigmachen’ — das ist, zu welchen
erhabenen Zwecken es auch immer dienen mag, Terror.” R. W. Leonhardt, cited in
Meinhof, “Gegen-Gewalt,” in konkret 2 (1968), reprinted in Meinhof, Deutschland
Deutschland, 126–29; here 126. Translated as “Counter-Violence,” in Meinhof,
Everybody Talks, 234–39. Leonhardt was writing in Die Zeit (29 December 1967).
43 Meinhof, “Gegen-Gewalt,” 129.

44 Dutschke, cited in Jutta Ditfurth, Rudi und Ulrike: Geschichte einer Freund-
schaft (Munich: Droemer, 2008), 88.
45 Meinhof, “Gegen-Gewalt,” 126–29.
46 “[ein] gern herumgereichtes Exotikum, als Überbaukrönung eines pluralisti-
schen Establishments.” Rühmkorf, Die Jahre, die ihr kennt: Anfälle und Erinne-
rungen (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1972), 225.
47 K. Röhl, Fünf Finger, 177.
48 From September 1968 Röhl published fortnightly during periods when the
readership permitted it. See K. Röhl, Fünf Finger, 225.
49 Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Kleinkrieg gegen einen Großverleger: Von der Anti-
Springer-Kampagne der APO zu den Brand- und Bombenanschlägen der RAF,”
in Die RAF, ed. Kraushaar, 2:1075–1116; here 1094.
50 Herstellung eines Molotow-Cocktails. Compare Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War
Home: The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Vio-
lence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley: U of California P, 2004), 39–40.
51 Some of the Molotovs that flew at the Springer buildings seem to have been
provided by the government agent Peter Urbach, who would also later infiltrate
the RAF. Compare, e.g., Mario Krebs, Ulrike Meinhof: Ein Leben im Widerspruch
(Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988), 162.
52Meinhof, “Vom Protest zum Widerstand,” in konkret 5 (1968), reprinted in
Meinhof, Die Würde, 138–41. Translated as “From Protest to Resistance,” in
Meinhof, Everybody Talks, 239–43.
53“ein Hochwertwort des politischen Sprachgebrauchs nach 1945, das die
Gegenwehr gegen eine illegitime Herrschaft kennzeichnete.” Musolff, Krieg,
151.
54 Meinhof, “Vom Protest zum Widerstand,” 138.
55Meinhof, “Notstand — Klassenkampf,” in konkret 6 (1968), reprinted in Mein-
hof, Die Würde, 142–45; here 142. Further references appear in the text.
56 This is the list of authors as remembered by Klaus Röhl; see Fünf Finger, 241.
The list of names on the article includes additionally Michael Schneider, Jürgen
Horlemann, and Eckhard Siepmann, but does not mention Meinhof.
57 Klaus Röhl, Fünf Finger, 244. Dutschke is unlikely to have actively contributed
to this piece, given that he had been badly hurt by the shooting in April 1968.
58 Berliner Redaktionskollektiv, “Gewalt,” in konkret 6 (1968): 24–28 and 35;
here 25. Further references appear in text.
59 “Um die Diskussion über Möglichkeit und Notwendigkeit der Anwendung
von Gewalt aus dem Dunstkreis von bürgerlichem Humanismus, moralischen
Vorurteilen und einem besinnungslosen Pazifismus herauszuholen, müssen wir
einige grundsätzliche Differenzierungen im Begriff der Gewalt machen.”
60 Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth,
trans. Constance Farrington (London: Penguin 2001 [1965; first French edition
1961]), 18–19. The German edition has the title Die Verdammten dieser Erde.
61 Fanon, The Wretched, 33.

62 “Aber die Völker der dritten Welt, die sich auf ein zweites und drittes Viet-
nam vorbereiten, wissen schon jetzt, mit wem sie es zu tun haben. Und die Stu-
denten . . . wissen es auch: daß der amerikanische Imperialismus entschlossen ist,
die Welt, die er beherrscht, zu vernichten, bevor er selbst abtreten muß. Daß die
Berliner Bürokratie und Administration . . . bereit sind, die Demokratie zu zer-
stören, bevor sie ihre Positionen aufgeben müssen.” Meinhof, “Der Kampf in den
Metropolen,” in konkret 3 (1968): 3.
63 “Berlin ist Vietnam!” See Peter Brückner, Ulrike Marie Meinhof und die
deutschen Verhältnisse (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1995 [1976]), 141.
64“Wir haben erst durch den offenen Ausbruch dieser Gewalt in Vietnam dieses
Wesensmerkmal des Kapitalismus wiederentdeckt.” Berliner Redaktionskollektiv,
“Gewalt,” 26.
65 Stefan Aust, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe,
2008 [1985]), 108.

66Translated as “Setting Fire to Department Stores,” in Meinhof, Everybody
Talks, 244–48.
67Meinhof, “Warenhausbrandstiftung,” in konkret 14 (1968), reprinted in Mein-
hof, Die Würde, 155–56; here 154.
68 Musolff, for example, argues that in Meinhof’s analysis of department store
arson (verbal) ambiguity is resolved and a dynamic of ever more brutal actions
replaces rhetorical radicalism: “In Meinhofs Kaufhausbrand-Analyse wurde diese
Mehrdeutigkeit aufgehoben und an die Stelle rhetorischer Radikalität eine Dyna-
mik immer brutalerer Aktionen gesetzt.” Musolff, Krieg, 155.
69 “es ist immer noch besser, ein Warenhaus anzuzünden, als ein Warenhaus zu
betreiben.” Teufel, cited in Meinhof, “Warenhausbrandstiftung,” 156.
70 K. Röhl, Fünf Finger, 258.
71Meinhof, “Kolumnismus,” in konkret 21 (1968), reprinted in Meinhof, Die
Würde, 153–56. Translated as “Columnism,” in Meinhof, Everybody Talks, 249–
55.
72 “Instrument der Konterrevolution,” cited in K. Röhl, Fünf Finger, 271.
73 Ditfurth, Ulrike Meinhof, 254–55.
74 E.g., by Röhl, Fünf Finger, 223–24; Alois Prinz, Lieber wütend als traurig: Die
Lebensgeschichte der Ulrike Marie Meinhof (Weinheim: Beltz, 2003), 221.
75See, e.g., Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Antizionismus als Trojanisches Pferd: Zur anti-
semitischen Dimension in den Kooperationen von Tupamaros West-Berlin, RAF
und RZ mit den Palästinensern,” in Die RAF, ed. Kraushaar, 1:676–95; here
690–92.

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1: Fighting Talk (1959–69): From the

Peace Movement to the Revolutionary

der Friede ist zum bestimmenden Faktor politischen Handelns

Gewalt . . . [ist] ein Mittel, das wir weder kategorisch ablehnen

The Riemeck Affair

Wuppertal — she was effectively relieved of her duties. His explanation

Am 26. November 1959 war ein Artikel . . . in der “Deutschen Zei-

[On 26 November 1959 an article . . . appeared in the “Deutsche

The repetition of “according to” eventually provokes puzzlement in the

In fact, Volksfeind is an implied rather than actual quotation. It serves

Nazis, “New Fascism,” and the “New Jews”

Terrorists and Resistance Fighters

[When . . . a couple of students from the Socialist Students’ Union

The exhaustingly long sentence is deliberate. Meinhof is using language

of (linguistic) oppression. Syntactically the students are shown to be a

Die Grenze zwischen verbalem Protest und physischem Widerstand

The defense of verbal “counter-violence” has developed into a justifica-

On 30 May 1968 the emergency laws were finally passed despite

Wir haben die politische Demokratie verteidigt, anstatt die gesell-

[We have defended political democracy instead of attacking the insti-

In her article on the Hamburg “counter-violence,” the syntax conveyed

So konnte gleichzeitig mit der Bewegung gegen die Notstandsge-

[While we protested against the emergency laws Springer’s publish-

The familiar repetition of “and” (five times in one sentence) commu-

by a policeman during a demonstration, Dutschke when going about his

forms of physical abuse and brainwashing used by the French police in

The Frankfurt Arsonists

Röhl has refused to read his ex-wife’s column on arson as an incite-

Perhaps because of her origins in the peace movement, Meinhof is remem-

9 Meinhof, “Koalitionskrise,” in konkret 10 (1964): 3.

43 Meinhof, “Gegen-Gewalt,” 129.

61 Fanon, The Wretched, 33.

2008 [1985]), 108.

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