.ltThe fatal flaw of Ulrike Meinhof

The Times,
10 May 1976: obituary

The story of Ulrike Meinhof qualifies as a tragedy in the strictest classical sense, and can be seen as such without disrespect for the sufferings of the victims and their relatives in the desperate campaign of nihilistic terrorism she led.
  
Five murders, 54 attempted murders, a series of political bombings directed against the United States Army in Germany, the police and the rightwing press, many bank robberies (to finance the terror campaign), car thefts (to elude the police), firearms offences and forgeries of documents were laid at the door of Frau Meinhof and her alleged associates by the authorities, with overwhelming evidence to support the charges.
  
Ulrike Meinhof was born in Oldenburg, Lower Saxony, on October 7, 1934. Both her parents were art historians, and an unrebellious youth would undoubtedly have brought her all the rewards that the life of the upper middle-class in this highly prosperous country has to offer.
  
She was orphaned while still young, and adopted by the historian, Professor Renate Riemeck, only 14 years older than herself. The young Ulrike was soon imbued with the socialist and pacifist ideas for which this remarkable woman academic is still famous here.
  
Her education took her to university, where she studied philosophy, education, sociology and German, played the violin, smoked a pipe and recited the works of modern poets from memory.
  
It was in her late twenties, at the end of the 1950s and the start of the sixties, that - as Professor Riemeck says - "she put aside her Proust and her Kafka and entered the political arena".
  
She edited a radical left-wing magazine called Konkret from 1960 to 1964. In 1961 she married its owner, Herr Klaus Rainer Rohl. They were divorced in 1968 and Herr Rohl was given custody of their twin daughters.
  
Frau Meinhof soon acquired a reputation as a polemical journalist of the first rank, even while she was still admired as one of the most brilliant and physically attractive ornaments of the intellectual and social scene in Hamburg and West Berlin.
  
A series of first-class television films dealing with some burning West German social problems followed in the later 1960s. It is to this point in her life that her transformation from extreme radical social critic to active anarchist, and later terrorist, can most plausibly be traced.
  
Frau Meinhof's greatness - an indispensable precondition for tragedy - is not disputed by reasonable people here. Her fatal monumental flaw - that other essential prerequisite for tragedy - was extremism, and this brought her down. She possessed in full measure that capacity for pursuing things to their logical conclusion, without regard for the emotional implications, shown by the adoptive German Adolf Hitler, and in a positive sense by Goethe.
  
Casual association with anarchistically-inclined young people of similar social backgrounds developed into serious political commitment against the establishment in the student trouble in West Berlin and elsewhere in 1968. Unlike most who took part in those heady and violent days, she and a few friends deliberately chose to go on to the bitter end in a terrorist war against the society they hated.
  
After freeing Herr Andreas Baader from prison in 1970 - which prompted the press to name the gang the Baader-Meinhof group, though it called itself the Red Army Faction - she went underground. With her associates she received guerrilla training with the Palestinians and apparently committed a series of terrorist atrocities, even vainly plotting to kidnap Herr Willy Brandt while he was Chancellor.
  
It took the police two years to track down the hard core of the group in the largest, longest and most sustained manhunt in German criminal history.
  
Frau Meinhof was arrested in a tumbledown flat on the outskirts of Hanover on June 16, 1972. The rest of her life was spent in prison or in court, most recently emaciated by a hunger strike and with no regard for her appearance.
  
In the light of public reaction to her acts of terrorism - producing far-reaching and illiberal changes in the law and ensuring that the court case became a political show trial - today's suicide is perhaps no surprise. It is an appropriate moment to recall that West Germany is not only the country founded by Konrad Adenauer and brought to maturity by Herr Willy Brandt; it is also the Germany of Ulrike Meinhof.

.lcGerman political activist Ulrike Meinhof was a leader of the notorious Baader-Meinhof Gang. Responsible for a number of bank robberies, bombings and assassinations, Meinhof was arrested in 1972. She committed suicide in prison in 1976.
.llPower: Revolution
War and Peace: Deadlier than the male
.ll
.lsWR10:WR10_03S
WR08:WR08_05S
.ls