Die Familie Röhl (2): Ulrike Meinhof

Ulrike Meinhof, 1964, around the time of her break with the underground Communist Party in West Germany (Source: Wikimedia Commons

This is the second of four posts on Bettina Röhl's book, So macht Kommunismus Spass! Ulrike Meinhof, Klaus Rainer Röhl und die Akte KONKRET (2006). The book is a combination of family memoir and original historical research that reads something like a spy novel. The previous post can be found here.

This post deals with the adult career of Ulrike Meinhof, mainly known as one of the leaders of the German terrorist group, the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF).

The Wikimedia Commons photo above is sourced, "Private picture, supplied by Ulrike Meinhofs daughter, Bettina Röhl". And the copyright information states, "The copyright holder of this work allows anyone to use it for any purpose including unrestricted redistribution, commercial use, and modification", with the emphasis in the original. This suggests that Bettina sees this photo as a particularly appropriate representation of her mother.

Ulrike as successful journalist and secret Communist

Klaus Röhl became a member of the KPD (German Communist Party) on the day in 1956 when it was outlawed in the Federal Republic (West Germany). Ulrike later joined his as a Party member.

Not only were they members of an illegal party. The SED (ruling party of Communist East Germany) was funding their magazine, Konkret. Bettina gives a long account of their dealings with their Party handlers from the DDR and their trips to the DDR to meet with them over issues with the magazine. She did extensive research in the DDR archives that provides contemporary documentation on events described to her by her father and others she interviewed.

An American edition of this book would probably require some special introduction to describe the contorted relationships among the two German states in the 1950s, especially. The Soviets and the DDR (East Germany) continued to hold out the theoretical prospect of national unification on the basis of a neutral Germany along the lines of Austria's neutral status. There were extensive personal and political contacts between East and West Germany. And the border was not sealed until the Berlin Wall went up in late 1961.

But accepting funding from the DDR for their newspaper could have gotten the Röhls charged with high treason. Bettina's description of their dealings at this time reads something like a spy novel. They seemed to have enjoyed the intrigue at some level. But it also had to be nerve-wracking at times. Not only did they have to worry about discovery by West German intelligence. But they could also have been blackmailed by the DDR over their illegal operations.

Ulrike was more a "true believer" than Klaus, who seemed to have little interest in Communist theories, though at the time he supported their politics. There was constant tension with their handlers over their need to write articles critical of the DDR to maintain credibility with their western readers. Eventually, the tensions came to a head in 1964. Klaus and Ulrike resigned from the Party and the SED cut off funds to Konkret, probably expecting they would soon return and agree to the SED's demands. But instead, they sexed the magazine up, i.e., they ran more stories about sex though it remained primarily a political magazine. And they were able to make it work financially through advertising and financial support from well-wishers.

Bettina says that the SED/KPD was happy to accept Klaus' resignation. But they never removed Ulrike's name from the Party rolls, even after she became an RAF terrorist.

During this time, Ulrike built a strong reputation for herself as a journalist and political commentator. As the alternative movements of the 1960s developed - the sexual revolution, the "extra-parliamentary opposition" (APO in the German initials), the hippie movement and so on - konkret became the magazine for the movement.

Bettina doesn't give intensive treatment to Ulrike's articles, many of which are still in print in book form. But she does say that part of her reason for writing the book is to evaluate the pre-RAF aspects of her life including her career as a journalist, which she thinks historical accounts have given insufficient attention.

Bettina describes her parents' activities at the time matter-of-factly. She quotes a letter from Ulrike written in 1959 accusing a rival faction in the Anti-Atomic-Weapons movement of being a group that "zahlenmässig relativ klein ist, aber durch ihr Geld die Macht hat", (relatively small in numbers but has power through their money) referring to the rival faction's support from the SPD. Bettina writes:

Dass sie selber inzwischen zu einer kleinen Gruppe gehört, die Macht und auch Geld hat, verschweigt sie. Es muss als Propaganda gewertet werden, dass ausgerechnet diese subversiv für eine Diktatur arbeitenden illegalen Mitglieder der KPD von Anfang an die Legende vom "Verleumdet- und Verfolgt-sein" nährten und ihr Image pflegten, zu Unrecht verdächtigt zu werden. (S. 284)

[That she herself at the same time belonged to a small group, that had power and also money, she was silent about. It must be regarded as propaganda that precisely this member of the KPD, who worked subversively for a dictatorship, from the beginning on noursihed herself on the legends of "being smeared and persecuted" and worked on her image of being unjustly held in suspicion.]

One article in particular, which Ulrike wrote in late 1958 for an antiwar publication called argument called "Entspannung - trotz Berlin?" (Detente - despite Berlin) and which Bettina reproduces in full, provides an early example of what Bettina's sees as Ulrike's strengths and weaknesses as a journalist. This is the time when the Soviet Union was threatening again to cut off Western access to West Berlin. This was a protracted crisis which really only ended when Moscow changed their approach and ordered the DDR to build the Berlin Wall.

In the article, Ulrike takes a clearly friendly stance toward the official Soviet position on the Berlin crisis of the time. But at the same time, she makes some sensible, pragmatic arguments on the possibilities for reducing tensions between the two Germanys, arguments that foreshadowed the later Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt.

Bettina analyzes another article that Ulrike wrote for Konkret at the time her marriage to Klaus was coming to an end, from the January 1968 issue. The article was about a young man named Jürgen Bartsch, who sexually molested and murdered four boys and almost murdered a fifth, and was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Her article is an extended argument that various social failings of West German society had made him into the murdered that he became, such as the poor quality of the foster care system. As Bettina puts it, the article holds the murderer himself innocent of any personal responsibility for his crimes.

There's certainly nothing wrong about looking at social factors that increase the liklihood that individuals will become criminals. But what's striking about Ulrike's treatment of the case is her seeming indifference - even extreme indifference - to the suffering of the children who were innocent victims of the killer.

Bettina believes that the article reflects her mother's own attempts to grapple with the personal problems that were besetting her at the time. And also the it is a "key document in this break in the life of Ulrike Meinhof". Bettina observes that the article is still often seen as an example of cool, analytical work that examined the facts without regard to the moral judgments her analysis might produce. But, she writes, the factual basis of the article was thin; she didn't research the trial records themselves. Ulrike did interview the killer himself - who ironically was housed in the same jail where she herself would later be imprisoned.

Instead, she portrayed the convicted murderer as the victim in disregard to his own very real victims. "The four boys who were gruesomely abused and then murdered, were not discussed by her with a single feeling or thought, not a single word," writes Bettina. Her suggestion that this article reflects how the death of innocents was becoming an abstraction in Ulrike's mind. And an abstraction not worth worrying about.

Ulrike became deeply involved with the leftwing activist movement in Berlin, where she now lived, and elsewhere in Germany. She became good friends with Bahman Nirumand, one of the leading figures of the movement. She retained full custody of the twins and experienced the stresses of being a single mother with a professional career.

This video clip in German with English text translations shows her in (apparently) 1969 (even though the label on the clip says 1970), the year before she went underground, evidently depressed and talking wearily about the strains of raising children and pursuing a career.



Ulrike in the RAF

This is the best-known part of Ulrike's life and career, and has been described in great detail in a variety of places. The RAF's beginning is normally dated to May 14, 1970, when Ulrike and several others sprang Andreas Baader from police custody. The went into hiding for formed a formal organization. In the fall of 1970, they trained in an Al Fatah camp in Jordan. Before she was arrested in June 1972, she participated in a number of illegal and violent RAF actions: bank robberies, burglaries of passport offices, and six bombings, [including attacks on American military bases]. According to Bettina's account, five people were killed in those attacks and many wounded.

Ulrike Meinhof's image from wanted poster

She writes, "Ulrike Meinhof was concretely resposible involved in the organization of the Springer attack [a bombing of the Springer publishing offices] in Hamburg, where 34 people were wounded, some of them seriously, by two bombs." She also became the official spokesperson for the group. The German authorities considered her to be the chief author of several RAF manifestoes, with names like "Stadtguerrilla und Klasskampf" (Urban Guerrillas and Class Struggle).

The RAF was supported to some degree at various times by the DDR, though promoting that brand of terrorism was not the main thrust of East German intelligence and subversive activity. The DDR offered sanctuary to some RAF members, a situation memorably dramatized in the film Die Stille nach dem Schuß (2000), English title The Legend of Rita. But while the RAF might not have been able to operate exactly as they did with East German help, they were very much a homegrown West German terrorist group.

As I mentioned before, Bettina relates that the East Germans never formally kicked her out of the Communist Party, for reasons that are not entirely clear from her account. She relates that some of Ulrike's friends tried while she was underground to arrange for her to received sanctuary in the DDR, but she was arrested before such a plan could be pulled off.

Having become all-too-familiar with torture practices committed by Americans under the Cheney-Bush torture program, I would have to say that the extreme isolation in which Ulrike was kept for a large part of her confinement sure sounds like torture to me. At the very least, it must have contributed to the mental state which eventually led to her suicide.

Bettina and Regine were able to visit Ulrike three times during 1973. She writes that Ulrike permanently broke off her contacts to the twins at the start of 1974, even returning their letters to her unopened. Bettina relates the break to the arrival of Gudrun Ennslin in the Köln-Ossendorf prison. The RAF members were able to meet together to discuss their joint defense strategy and Ulrike became more fanatically committed to the group. Although Ulrike herself was a leader of the group, this is one indication that she was powerfully influenced psychologically by Ennslin, and probably also by Baader, who seemed to have exercised strong charisma on the group members.

Ulrike did send a request to Klaus through her attorney in 1976 to bring the kids to see her once more on the following weekend at the Stuttgart-Stammheim prison where she and her fellow RAF defendents were being held during their trial. The twins declined that particular invitation, intending to visit her sometime within the following weeks. But Ulrike committed suicide in her cell days later, on May 9, 1976. She left no suicide note.

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

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