Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET (2006) is a combination of family memoir and original historical research that reads something like a spy novel.
The name of her mother, Ulrike Marie Meinhof (1934-1976), is familiar to many as one of the leaders of the "Baader-Meinhof Gang", the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF), a deadly group of domestic terrorists that shook the politics of the 1970s in Germany. I reviewed the current movie about the RAF in a post last year, in which I also described some of the group's terrorist activities. That film, Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex, is nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.
She co-authored a famous cover article with Carola Niezborala in 1995 for Der Spiegel, Unsere Mutter - "Staatsfeind Nr. 1" 29/1995 vom 17.07.1995 about her notorious mother. (PDF Version) I was impressed with the writing in that article, which made me curious to read this new book, which clocks in at 641 pages.
Her mother Ulrike became one of the most famous terrorists in Europe. Her father Klaus started a political-literary magazine financed for years by Communist East Germany, which eventually became a leading leftwing journal in 1960s West Germany. For decades now, Klaus has been what in Germany is called a "national-liberal", which in the American political vocabulary would translate to "conservative nationalist". And you think your family has issues!
I'm going to talk about the book in four separate posts: this one and the next on Ulrike Meinhof, the second on Bettina's analysis of political events in the book, and the third about Klaus. Since they were all three named Röhl, I'm going to use their first names for clarity.
Loving your monsters
In a review of a Robert Caro biography of Lyndon Johnson, Gary Wills once explained that Caro was so focused on Johnson's ugly characteristics that he failed to capture his strong points. Wills described the problems by a counter-example, noting that "it took a Shakespeare to write about Richard III, and an Olivier to play him. They both loved their monster." (Monstre Désacré New York Review of Books 04/96/1990)
The strength of Bettina's book is that she literally loved her "monsters". And it gives the relentlessly fact-based book the dramatic tension of a novel, as she insists on being not only unsparing but fair, but also realistic and fair. There's also more than a hint of tragedy in her chronological account. Because pretty much anyone who's actually reading the book will know that Ulrike became a terrorist and the leader of a murderous group, dying relatively young by her own hand in prison.
Bettina's task seems to be more difficult in the case of her mother. Ulrike not only abandoned her and her twin sister, the story she relates in her 1995 Spiegel article as well as in the book. It was actually worse than that. Ulrike hid the two children in Sicily when she went underground in 1970 without letting Klaus know where they were. And she intended to send them to a Palestinian orphans' camp in Jordan where she was told she would never be able to see them again, requesting that they be raised as revolutionary fighters. A family friend, journalist Stephan Aust, managed to find them and take them back to Germany.
After Klaus had the kids safely back home, the Ulrike and RAF still planned to kidnap the two girls and send them to a camp. Bettina writes matter-of-factly near the end of the book, "Das von Meinhof und Proll ausgesuchte Waisenlager in Jordanien wurde wenige Wochen nach der geplanten Verbringung der Kinder vollständig zerbombt, kein Kind überlebte." (The orphans' camp in Jordan that [Ulrike] Meinhof and [Astrid] Proll had found was thoroughly bombed a few weeks after it had been planned to bring the girls there. No child survived.)
In the following YouTube clip in German, Bettina explains that this experience gave her a strong sense that, even though the RAF and their admirers may have seen them as idealistic revolutionaries who only attacked individuals they believed were enemies of the people, in fact they were willing to hurt innocents, as well.
Ulrike Marie Meinhof
Ulrike's biography can be quickly summarized as follows. She was born in 1934 in what later became East Germany. Her father Werner Meinhof - who joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) on May 1, 1933, died in 1938 at age 38. Her mother Ingeborg Guthardt Meinhof entered the University of Jena and took up residence together with a fellow student, Renate Riemeck, ten years younger than she and 15 years older than Ulrike. The two women left Jena as the bombings grew more intense and the Russian Army advanced, and took the children to western Germany. When Ingeborg died in 1949 from the flu after a cancer operation, Renate became the guardian of Ulrike and her older sister Wienke, and raised Ulrike to adulthood.
Ulrike entered the University of Wuppertal and later the "Hochshule" (College) at Münster. As a university student in the late 1950s, she became active in the movement against stationing nuclear weapons in Germany. Through her anti-nuclear-armament activism and writing, she became acquained in 1958 with Klaus Rainer Röhl, editor of a small leftwing magazine published in Hamburg called Konkret, which was secretly financed from its inception in 1955 until 1964 by the East German Communists.
Ulrike began working at Konkret as a writer and editor in 1960 and fell in love with Klaus, who left his first wife for Ulrike. They married on December 27, 1961, the same date Ulrike's parents had married. They had twin girls on Spetember 21, 1962, Regine and Bettina ("Gina" and "Tina"). Ulrike became a well-known journalist in Germany and began filmmaking. She split with Klaus in February 1968, when he fell in love with another woman. Ulrike was deeply involved in the radical activist movement around Berlin in 1968-70 and became acquainted - and deeply impressed with two radicals who had firebombed a department store in Frankfurt, Andreas Baader (1943-1977) and Gudrun Ennslin (-1977), . She went underground in May 1970 with Baader, Ennslin and others and formed the RAF. Ulrike was one of the four main leaders of the group in its early years along with Baader, Ennslin and Horst Mahler. She was their chief theorist, i.e., she wrote their manifestos.
After a short period training with Palestinian guerilla fighters in Jordan, the RAF began a series of terorist actions. Arrested in June 1972 along with Andreas Baader (1943-1977) and Gudrun Ennslin (-1977), Ulrike spent the remainder of her life in prison and in court, mounting a protracted defense along with Baader, Ennslin and Jan-Carl Raspe. She committed suicide in her cell on May 9, 1976.
Renate Riemeck und "die Freunde Ulbrichts"
The most fascinating part of the book to me is Bettina's description of the world of intrigue in which Ulrike and Klaus moved in the 1950s and 1960s as members of the illegal KPD, the West German Communist Party, which was actually directed by the ruling party of Communist East Germany. In these posts, I'm going to refer to the East Germany Communist Party as the SED, or Socialist Unity Party, which technically was a fusion of the East German Communist and Social Democratic Parties, though in reality it was a loyal Soviet-line party, with a particularly strong traditional Communist bent, or "Stalinist" in the context. And I'll refer to East Germany as the DDR, the German initials for the German Democratic Republic (typically abbreviated in English as the GDR).
Renate Riemeck (1920-2003) is an important part of this aspect of Ulrike's life.
Renate Riemeck on the cover of Der Spiegel 23.08.1961Bettina is somewhat oddly circumspect about Renate Riemeck's sexuality, though I would think any reader would draw the conclusion that she was a lesbian. She quotes Klaus referring in passing to Renate's "lesbian" style. And she relates what must be one of those favorite family stories, about how as a little girl she would not be convinced that Renate was actually a woman, because of her characteristically masculine was of dressing. Renate made a point of wearing a dress once to convinced "Tina" that she was female, an event which apparently made a comical impression on all involved. And, not surprisingly, failed to convince the young Bettina anyway.
She also describes that Ingeborg's family was very skeptical of Renate when she and Ingeborg moved in together. They said that something "wasn't quite right" ("nicht stimmte") about Renate, in particular noticing her masculine appearance ("die so aussah wien ein Mann" - "she looked like a man") and seemed to be a "father" to Ulrike and Wienke. And Renate later moved in with another women with whom she lived for six decades. She kept house while Renate worked, mostly at home as a writer.
The reason I mention this in particular is that I wonder to what extent the need to be discrete about Renate's lesbianism made Ulrike accustomed to having a "clandestine" life. Because certainly in her work with Klaus and Konkret as a secret member of the illegal KPD surreptitiosly meeting with East German agents who provide illegal funds for the magazine, she lived a kind of double life. And then, obviously, again in the underground RAF.
It's notable in this connection that Bettina quotes a letter from Ulrike to Klaus, in which she alludes to having had sexual experiences with women. Though Bettina gives no indication that Ulrike's love interests during her life with Klaus and afterwards were anything other than heterosexual.
But Renate had others secrets as well. As Bettina describes, Renate had her own clandestine Communist connections. In fact, Renate achieved political fame (and notoriety) of her own as the lead candidate of the Deutsche Friedensunion (DFU) in the parliamentary elections of 1961. Renate even rated a cover story in Der Spiegel, the country's most influential "quality" news magazine. The DFU was generally regarded as a Communist front party, which Bettina's account leaves no doubt that it was. It was mocked by critics, who joked that its initials DFU stood for "die Freunde Ulbrichts" (the friends of Ulbricht), referring to Walter Ulbricht, then the head of the SED and chief ruler of the DDR.
The Spiegel article, Rot und Rosa 35/1961 (23.08.1961), pretty much describes the DFU as a Communist front group. That term comes from the Communist strategy of the "united front", and does not imply that everyone involved is a Communist either politically or organizationally. According to Bettina, Renate denied having been a secret KPD member or even aware that the DFU was a front group, though Bettina doesn't find the latter claim credible.
That 1961 Spiegel article mentions Ulrike:
Zwischendurch war sie Mutter zweier Pflegekinder geworden, von denen sie eines, namens Ulrike Marie Meinhof, dermaßen päppelte, daß die Kleine heute als Chefredakteurin der ultralinken Hamburger Studentenzeitung "konkret" amtiert, deren Finanzquellen ebenso unklar sind wie die von [Gerhard] Gleißbergs "Anderer Zeitung".Gleissberg was described in the article as being instrumental in working with the DDR to found the DFU.
[In the meantime, she [Renate] became the mother of two foster children, of which one by the name of Ulrike Marie Meinhof, ... in the same way, that the little one [Ulrike] serves as the chief editor of the ultraleft Hamburg student newspaper "konket", whose financial source are just as unclear as those of [Gerhard] Gleissberg's "Anderer Zeitung".]
The article even featured a picture of Ulrike with the caption, "Pflegekind Marie Meinhof ... fand Zuflucht bei der Junggesellin" (Foster child Marie Meinhof ... found refuge with the bachelorette [Renate]".
The DFU never gained much influence. In the summer of 1961, it looked to make a strong enough showing in the polls to possibly enter Parliament. But when the Berlin Wall went up, the DFU's popularity plummetted and never recovered.
The four posts on this book:
Die Familie Röhl (1), an unusual family memoir - Ulrike Meinhof
Die Familie Röhl (2): Ulrike Meinhof
Die Familie Röhl (3): Radical failings
Die Familie Röhl (4): Klaus Rainer Röhl
bettina röhl, klaus rainer röhl, raf, renate riemeck, rote armee fraktion, so macht kommunismus spass, ulrike meinhof
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