Ulrike Meinhof

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Meinhof was born in 1934 in Oldenburg. Her father Werner Meinhof, a curator of Jena Museum, died of cancer in 1940, causing her mother to take in a boarder, Renate Riemeck, to make money. In 1946, the family moved back to Oldenburg after Jena fell under Soviet occupation. Meinhof's mother, Ingeborg Meinhof, an art historian, died from cancer in 1949. Riemeck became guardian of Meinhof and her elder sister, Wienke. In 1952, Meinhof took her Abitur at a school in Weilburg. She studied philosophy, sociology, education and German at Marburg, where she became involved with reform movements. In 1957, she transferred to the University of Münster, joined the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (SDS), and participated in protests against the Bundeswehr and the proposal to deploy nuclear weapons. She was critical of the SDS leaders' subconscious misogyny and the organisation's marginalisation of female members. She became spokeswoman of the local Anti-Atomtod-Ausschuss. In 1958, she spent time on the AStA and wrote articles for student newspapers. In 1959, Meinhof joined the banned Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and began working at the magazine *konkret*, which until 1964 had clandestine financing from the East German government. As chief editor from 1962 to 1964, she elicited contributions from established journalists and authors. On 2 June 1967, her exposure of German complicity in supporting the Pahlavi dynasty helped rally students to a demonstration in West Berlin against the Shah's visit. When Iranian counter-demonstrators attacked students, police joined the affray and an officer shot and killed student protester Benno Ohnesorg. In February 1968, Meinhof participated in the International Vietnam Conference in West Berlin and co-signed the final declaration, which defined U.S. intervention in Vietnam as "the Spain of our generation" and called for mobilisation against the "extermination" of the Vietnamese people. In 1961, she married *konkret* co-founder Klaus Rainer Röhl; their twins, Regine and Bettina, were born on 21 September 1962. They separated in 1967 and divorced a year later. In 1962, Meinhof had a benign brain tumor surgically removed; the 1976 autopsy showed that remnants of the tumor and surgical scar tissue impinged on her amygdala.

Reader's Guide

Meinhof's significance lies in her transition from a prominent left-wing journalist to a militant co-founder of the Red Army Faction. The attempted assassination of SDS leader Rudi Dutschke on 11 April 1968 provoked her to write an article in *konkret* demonstrating her increasingly militant attitude and containing perhaps her best-known quote. Later that year, her writings on arson attacks in Frankfurt as protests against the Vietnam War led to an acquaintance with Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin. She stopped writing for *konkret* in early 1969, stating that neither she nor her collaborators wanted to give a left-wing alibi to a magazine that would become part of the counter-revolution. In May 1970, Meinhof helped in Baader's escape from police custody. She persuaded publisher Klaus Wagenbach to assist, and he issued a book contract so she could petition authorities to allow Baader to travel from Moabit Prison for an interview. The plan was for armed comrades to overpower the guards and escape with Baader; no shooting was to take place, and Meinhof was to stay behind and deny complicity. However, a man hired for the action shot the elderly librarian Georg Linke, severely wounding him in his liver. Following the shooting, Meinhof jumped out of the institute's window. Within days, wanted posters appeared throughout Berlin offering a 10,000 DM reward for her capture for attempted murder. In the next two years, she participated in bank robberies and bombings perpetrated by the group. She and other RAF members attempted to kidnap her children to send them to a camp for Palestinian orphans, but the twins were intercepted in Sicily and returned to their father. During this period, Meinhof wrote or recorded many RAF manifestos, including *The Concept of the Urban Guerrilla*, which first used the name Rote Armee Fraktion and the RAF insignia. She also wrote an essay defending the Munich massacre as part of a Palestinian strategy of resistance against Israeli land theft and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. On 14 June 1972, in Langenhagen, Fritz Rodewald, a teacher who had been providing accommodation to deserters from the U.S. Armed Forces, was involved in events leading to her arrest. Meinhof's death in custody—officially ruled suicide but disputed by her sister, who claimed Meinhof had told her days earlier that if they said she committed suicide, it was murder—became a symbol of the state's conflict with left-wing extremism. The controversy surrounding her death and the subsequent assassination of Federal Attorney-General Siegfried Buback by RAF members in 1977 deepened the polarization in West German society.

Did You Know?

• Meinhof's father died of cancer in 1940, and her mother died of cancer in 1949, after which Renate Riemeck became her guardian.
• In 1962, Meinhof had a benign brain tumor surgically removed; the 1976 autopsy showed remnants of the tumor and surgical scar tissue impinged on her amygdala.
• Meinhof joined the banned Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1959.
• The magazine *konkret*, where Meinhof was chief editor from 1962 to 1964, had clandestine financing from the East German government until 1964.
• Meinhof's sister Wienke Zitzlaff stated that Meinhof told her only days before her death: 'If they say I committed suicide, be sure that it was murder.'